Martin Schwartz – a lone trader
More and more often, one can come across the thesis in various stock market journals that day traders never achieve consistent success, and that a series of profitable trades will sooner or later be offset by a series of losing ones.
However, this myth and prejudice are shattered by the success story of Martin Schwartz, who demonstrated by his example that day trading can yield astonishing profits.
Martin Schwartz exemplifies the most disciplined trader who achieved success through hard work. However, Schwartz, like everyone else, did not rise to the top overnight, and his life's journey offers an interesting lesson for all technical traders.
Martin Schwartz was born into a very poor family, and his difficult life inspired him to be industrious. From childhood, Schwartz worked various jobs, including mowing neighbors' lawns and shoveling snow for just $10. From a young age, Schwartz prioritized education, and he was a straight-A student in school.
After high school, he successfully completed college and then graduated with honors from Columbia University. After graduating, Martin joined the army and served in the U.S. Navy.
First job. A rough patch
Upon returning from the army, Martin Schwartz found a job as a financial consultant at Kuhn Loeb, where he successfully worked for two years and saved his first savings of $20,000. Because Martin was quite good at forecasting, he began actively trading stocks and futures, but quickly lost his entire deposit.
Schwartz, working as a consultant, constantly switched firms and earned quite a lot of money, but for ten years he lost money on the stock market. Thus, Schwartz's good salary quickly disappeared, and he, in turn, lived in poverty.
Independent swimming
A ten-year string of fluctuating successes forced Schwartz to rethink his trading strategy, his rules, and his behavior in the market. After correcting his mistakes and accumulating a small amount of capital, Schwartz decided to strike out on his own and become an independent trader. However, before becoming an independent player, Schwartz invented his own indicators, which, based on probability theory and statistics, produced excellent results.
Thus, in his first year of independent trading, Schwartz managed to earn $160,000 in options trading from $5,000. His wife, witnessing her husband's phenomenal success, persuaded him to quit his job completely and enter the stock market to conquer new heights.
A series of successes
After Schwartz decided to buy a seat on the American exchange, he had to pay a hefty price for the seat and taxes, leaving him with no more than $70,000 in his deposit. Schwartz looked like a small fish compared to sharks with billions in deposits, but in his first four months, he managed to make $100,000 trading options.
The following year, Schwartz earned $600,000 trading futures, and his earnings never dropped below seven figures. While earning money on the stock exchange, Schwartz actively acquired real estate, intending to start a business in case of a bad outcome. For many years, his trading served as a role model for those around him until Martin decided to retire from the stock market.
Martin Schwartz and competitions
Even as a professional and independent trader, Schwartz was a great fan of trading competitions, so he regularly participated in various contests, covering both short and long timeframes. Schwartz's average return during competitions over four months could reach 200 percent.
So, by participating in one of the major competitions, Schwartz earned more money than all the participants combined, and this statistic has almost always been the case. What can we say if Schwartz traded $40,000 worth of futures market over 20 million dollars.
In an interview, Schwartz said that it was the realization of his own mistakes and the reining in of his ambitions that allowed him to transform from a ten-year-old loser into a successful trader. Incidentally, Schwartz never lost more than three percent of his capital in a month.
