How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market: Now Revised & Updated for the 21st Century

This updated edition pairs Nicolas Darvas's original 1960 memoir-meets-trading-manual with new "Insights by Steve Burns" commentary chapters inserted after each of Darvas's original chapters, aiming to test whether a trading system developed by a professional ballroom dancer with no financial training, using paper tape and international cables in the 1950s, still holds up in modern markets shaped by algorithmic trading, instant information, and vastly different market structure. The original narrative remains the spine of the book: Darvas recounts how a single stock payment for a dance performance ($3,000 worth of shares that unexpectedly returned $8,000) pulled him into the market with no prior knowledge, and how he spent the following years teaching himself to trade while touring internationally as a professional dancer, with no office, no financial background, and often no more information than a hotel room newspaper and telegraphed stock quotes.

The book's narrative arc follows Darvas's own trial-and-error evolution as a trader across four distinct phases, which structure the book's original chapters: first as a naive "gambler" trading on tips and rumors with no system at all and losing money; then as a "fundamentalist" trying to pick stocks based on company fundamentals and industry reports, with limited success; then as a "technician" after he begins tracking price and volume behavior directly rather than company fundamentals, leading to his development of what became known as the Box Theory; and finally as a "techno-fundamentalist," combining technical price-action signals with a baseline fundamental screen (strong recent and projected earnings) as a final filter before trading.

The heart of Darvas's system, the Box Theory, treats a stock's price action as moving within a series of defined price "boxes" — ranges the stock trades within before either breaking out to a new, higher box (a buy signal) or falling back through the bottom of its current box (a sell signal, triggering an automatic stop-loss). Darvas combined this box-based entry and exit discipline with strict risk management via automatic stop-loss orders (essential given that he was often traveling and unable to watch the market in real time), a focus on stocks making new highs on strong volume rather than "cheap" or beaten-down stocks, and a disciplined refusal to average down into losing positions.

Steve Burns's added commentary chapters work through each of Darvas's original chapters, translating Darvas's mid-20th-century tools (paper ticker tape, telegraphed cables, print newspaper quotes) into their modern equivalents (real-time charting software, stock screeners, online brokerages), while arguing that the underlying principles — trading with the trend, cutting losses quickly and automatically, letting winners run, requiring both technical strength and fundamental quality before entering a position — remain sound regardless of the specific tools available. The book closes, as the original did, with Darvas's account of surviving two major personal financial crises during his trading career (steep losing streaks that tested and ultimately reinforced his stop-loss discipline) before crossing the two-million-dollar mark, along with the original's appendix covering his Time magazine interview.