Trading the Day Before Christmas Eve May Be Slow, But You Can Still Do This to Up Your Investing Skills

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Spending a lot of time traveling, I see all manner of ways in which people try to pass the time at airports.

Playing Angry Birds on a phone or tablet.

Doing a crossword.

Flipping through a magazine.

But one activity that hasn’t gone out of style is reading a book.


I know that reading more is a New Year’s resolution for many, so with the holiday travel season in full swing and plenty of downtime to fill, I thought it was only timely to share one book that I keep thinking about that Editor Jason Bodner told me about earlier in the year.

Jason is the creator and intellectual firepower behind one of our newest investing services, Quantum Edge Pro.

I’ve always been driven to understand what makes things work, and that natural curiosity extends to the people I meet and the influences that propelled them to success.

With Jason, one of those important influences was a specific investment book that he believes every investor should read.

The book is “How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market,” and it was written by a man who has an interesting story of his own: Nicolas Darvas.

Darvas fled from Hungary in 1943 when he was just 23 and formed a dancing team with his half sister that performed across Europe and the United States. During his off-hours – when he wasn’t dancing – Darvas spent as much as eight hours at a time reading about investing and how to make money from the stock market.

He would go on to develop a trading system – one that’s now known as the Darvas Box – that made him more than $2 million in 18 months.

I don’t want to give too much away, but Darvas believed that his method revealed signs of legal insider trading before a company publicly released favorable (and stock-price-igniting) news.

Knowing Jason and the system he has set up to spot unusual investing activity – especially when “Big Money” is flowing in and out of stocks – I instantly understood how this book helped shape his market beliefs and helped make him the investing success he’s become today.

The book is widely available with a quick Google search, and you can find it on Amazon’s Kindle for less than $1.


So, if you’re looking to pass the time over the next two days or want something to add to your 2023 reading list, I would put this at the top. It has been one of the biggest influences on one of the smartest guys in finance. After all, in spite of a sticker price as low as 95 cents, it’s clear the real value of this book is incalculable.

I hope that wherever you may be and whoever you may be with, you have a safe, relaxing, and enjoyable time this weekend.

I’ll be back on Monday with a 2023 forecast series that I can’t wait to share.