Mark Minervini
A Conversation With
But then I noticed this one sentence and just really, really briefly, it said, “ That doesn’t mean that you can’t improve your trading and enjoy the benefits of investing even as a part-time investor. ” But then you got right back to talking about the intensity and the unbalanced lifestyle, but it really struck me that you mentioned even as a part-time investor amidst all of this discussion of total all-in commitment. Is that a conflict? Mark Minervini: It depends. If you want to be the best in the world, I don’t care what it is, if you want to be the best in the world at something, whether it’s the best basketball player, the best bowler, the best lawyer... You’re probably going to have to be unbalanced. You’re probably going to have to have a disproportionate amount of time into that craft or that career, and there’s going to have to be sacrifices. That’s what I was talking about. It’s like, for instance, in the Olympics, there was a poll done and asked Olympic hopefuls that if they could take a pill that would guarantee they would win a gold medal, but they would die in five years, would they do that? About 50% of them said “yes.” When you’re going for the very top and you’re going to be the best in the world and the best in the business, that’s the kind of competition you’re up against. That’s the kind of unbalanced all- in competition. So, that’s what I’m talking about, but that doesn’t mean you can’t read my book, learn about what I did, learn my methods, and improve your results dramatically even if you’re a part-time investor. Dan Ferris: So, in your interviewwith
Schwager, you said something that I loved. You said chart patterns were “not what’s important to trading successfully. For someone to be successful, they have to develop their own trading methodology. I developed my method for myself. It wouldn’t necessarily be a good fit for anyone else.” If that’s the case, Mark, you wrote two whole books where you spell out in quite a bit of detail what your methods are, and I wonder how appropriate those methods are for the people reading the books. Mark Minervini: Well, I don’t think they need to develop their own trading methodology, certainly not in the beginning. In the beginning, no matter what we do, we mimic. If you were to start off as a basketball
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March 2020
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