player or a football player, you’re going to probably watch your favorite sports star and you’re going to mimic them and you’re going to learn from a coach and you’re going to learn through trial and error, so you’re not going to develop a trading methodology and be making lots of money in the stock market in any kind of short period of time. Really, it’s matching your personality to the method. And then once you get that method down, maybe you’re able to do the type of things that I suggest and you’re getting some traction and you could start maybe adding in your experience, and that’s what I’ve done. I mimicked the best and then over the years, a lot of years, I started developing some of my own techniques and it just becomes a passing of the torch. It’s not like everything I do is unique. But the main thing is you have to match your personality. If you’re someone who doesn’t want to sit in front of the screen all day and doesn’t want to do a lot of work and a lot of trading and making a lot of fast decisions, well, then day- trading is probably not for you. But then again, you might have a different personality. You really have to match the style and find something that makes sense to you because the main key is that you have confidence in it. If you don’t have confidence in the underlying strategy, it’s not going to work. It could be the best strategy in the world, but a strategy takes an operator, and takes discipline to follow it, so that’s really the lynchpin to following any strategy. Dan Ferris: Recently, it surprised me to see you on TV commenting about things like the Federal Reserve and
various economic kind of macro type data. I have your book Trade Like a Champion on Kindle. I real quick went and did a search on the terms “Federal Reserve” and “interest rates” just to see if it was anywhere in the book, and I got zero hits. It blewme away to hear you talking about the Fed because you’re so focused on the technical and the fundamentals that make up your trading strategy.
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But after almost 40 years doing this, I have a pretty good feel and understanding of the economy and the stock market.
Mark Minervini: I’m very versed in economics. I started off as a quant. I started off as a top-down. Early on I studied the market and the economy, and then would form an opinion about the market, and then find the best groups, and then from there look for the best stocks. What I found out was that I was constantly missing the leading stocks, the best stocks, and I had to completely flip it around and reverse the whole process. Now it’s stocks, group, and market. But after almost 40 years doing this, I have a pretty good feel and understanding of the economy and the stock market. I don’t do TV hardly ever anymore, but in the ‘90s I did lots of TV shows. I was on probably 150, maybe 200 shows a year. I’d be down at “the Exchange on CNBC, then at Fox and at CNN. Sometimes I’d do five, six shows in
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