--- title: "The story of Nicolas Darvas: the dancer who made his own glasses" slug: "nicolas-darvas-story" kind: "ACADEMY" category: "personal-trading-strategy" locale: "en" canonical: "https://app.forecastcity.com/academy/personal-trading-strategy/nicolas-darvas-story" published: "2026-10-13T00:10:16.247Z" updated: "2026-10-13T00:10:16.247Z" description: "Nicolas Darvas lost money on tips, then built his own box method around a life of travel. Four lessons from his story for choosing your own strategy." --- # The story of Nicolas Darvas: the dancer who made his own glasses Nicolas Darvas lost money for years on other people's advice. Then he built a method that fitted his own life. His story shows what changes when you stop wearing borrowed glasses. Nicolas Darvas was a Hungarian dancer. In the 1950s he danced with his half-sister Julia in theatres and clubs across Europe and America. He had no experience of the stock market. In 1952, a show promoter in Toronto offered to pay him with 6000 shares of a small Canadian mining company instead of cash. The show did not take place, but Darvas bought the shares for about $3000 to keep his good name. Soon the price of each share rose from 50 cents to $1.90. Darvas sold and made more than $8000 in profit. That lucky profit pulled him into the market, but the years that followed were years of losses. ## The years of borrowed glasses At first Darvas listened to the advice of wealthy people he met at his shows. Then he subscribed to investment advisory newsletters. He even took the names of "hot stocks" from bartenders and waiters. The tips contradicted each other. By the time a tip reached him, the people giving it were usually selling already. He lost about half of his early profit. Then he moved to New York to be closer to Wall Street. He listened to his broker, to the newsletters and to market rumours. He also read company accounts and bought on fundamental analysis, but again he lost about $9000. The chapters of his book trace the same path: "Canadian Period", "Entering Wall Street", then "My First Crisis". Until then, Darvas looked at the market through other people's glasses. ## A method that fitted his own life Instead of listening to others, Darvas studied how prices behave. He read about 200 books on the market and on speculators, and he sometimes studied for up to eight hours a day. He saw that strong stocks moved inside a price range for a while, then broke out of it on heavy volume. He called these ranges "boxes". His rule was simple. When the price broke out of a box upwards, he bought. At the same moment he placed a stop loss just below his buying price. When the price rose further, he raised the stop loss too. Later he added the companies' fundamentals to his method. He bought only shares that were strong on the chart and whose company had good earnings prospects. **The most important thing about this method was that it fitted his life.** Darvas was always travelling and could not sit in front of the stock exchange board. So he built a method that did not need that. He received prices by telegram and sent his orders to his broker in New York by telegram too. Barron's magazine usually reached him a week late. That distance kept him away from the daily noise of the market. With this method he reached about half a million dollars in profit on his travels. One chapter of his book is even called "Cables Round the World". ## The second crisis: back to other people's glasses After this success, Darvas returned to New York. He had become overconfident. Once again he followed the crowd and listened to rumours. The result was another heavy loss. He made decisions on emotion, and his method fell apart. For a while he left New York. Then he set himself two new rules. Rule one: never again meet a broker in person. Rule two: look at prices only when the market is closed. ## The result Darvas wrote that in about 18 months, in the late 1950s, he made more than two million dollars. Time magazine published his story in May 1959. By December 1960 his book had sold about 120 thousand copies. For us, the value of this story lies in his path. A dancer who lost money on other people's advice made money with his own method. ## Four lessons from the Darvas story 1. Tips are other people's glasses. As long as Darvas traded on what others said, he lost money. 2. A limit in your life can become the base of your method. Darvas could not sit in front of the board, so he built a method that did not need him to. 3. Your environment is part of your strategy. Being close to the noise of the market pulled Darvas back to his old habits. 4. Do not copy Darvas's method unchanged either. It was built for American shares in the 1950s and for the life of a dancer who was always travelling. What you should take from him is his path: **knowing yourself, writing down your rules and sticking to them**.