The lessons that survived every market
All trading wisdom — newest first
Bernard Baruch: the man who did not sell the top
Baruch is remembered as the man who sold out before the 1929 crash. His biographer says he didn't, and his own rule 4 says nobody can. What the maths says.
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Benjamin Graham: the man who wrote the rules lost 70% breaking them
Graham met the 1929 crash with $4.5m of unhedged stock against $2.5m of capital. Four years later 30 cents of each dollar was left. The arithmetic of that decision.
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Jim Simons: the best record in history was never for sale
Medallion returned about 39% a year net for three decades. The Renaissance fund outsiders could actually buy returned 8.05% - less than an index fund. What that gap teaches.
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Trading quotes that are actually documented
22 trading quotes with the evidence behind each one graded — 13 verbatim from a named book or interview, 7 widely attributed, 2 with no traceable source at all.
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Michael Steinhardt: 28 years, one bad year, and the leverage behind it
Steinhardt returned 24.5% a year for 28 years, then lost 31% in 1994. Fortune's own figures imply 6.5x leverage - a bond move of about 5% took a third of the fund.
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William O’Neil: The 8% Rule, and the Fund That Had to Live By It
O'Neil's rule: never let a loss exceed 7-8%. Eight straight 8% losses compound to -48.68%. The position cap it implies, and how his New USA fund really did.
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Ray Dalio: Right About 1982, and Nearly Finished By It
In 1982 Ray Dalio publicly predicted a debt-driven depression. The debt crisis arrived on 12 August 1982 - the exact day the S&P 500 bottomed at 102.42. He lost his money and his…
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Nicolas Darvas: the trader whose edge was being unable to watch
Nicolas Darvas traded from dance tours by weekly cable and turned a stated $36,000 into a claimed $2,000,000. The New York Attorney General could verify $216,000. Both numbers, and…
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W.D. Gann: what the record actually shows
The 1909 record says 264 wins in 286 trades. It never says what the 22 losses cost. What W.D. Gann's documented history teaches about reading anyone's track record.
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Mark Douglas and Trading in the Zone: why a winning system feels broken
Mark Douglas taught traders to think in probabilities. We ran the numbers: a system with a real edge shows no profit 40.9% of the time after 20 trades, and needs 269 to be reliable.
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Richard Dennis and the Turtles: what happened when a trading system was given away
Richard Dennis taught 23 novices a complete futures system in two weeks in 1983. The rules are public. Every unit risked 2%, and the system cut itself after losses.
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George Soros: the trade that broke the Bank of England
How Soros' Quantum Fund shorted the pound in 1992. The risk was capped at 6.19% by a published ERM band - the reward-to-risk was only about 1 to 2.4.
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Ed Seykota: bet size matters more than your entry
Ed Seykota built one of the first computerised trend-following systems. His research says bet size beats entry timing, and drawdown grows with its square.
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Paul Tudor Jones: the loss that came before the legend
Paul Tudor Jones is remembered for Black Monday 1987. He lost most of an account on one cotton trade in 1979 first - that is where his rules began.
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10 trading books actually worth your screen time
The trading bookshelf ranked honestly: which classics still earn their pages, who each book is actually for, and which famous titles you can skip.
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Stanley Druckenmiller: thirty years without a losing year
Druckenmiller ran Duquesne for three decades without a down year, then lost $3 billion in six weeks buying a top he had called. The sizing lessons.
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Jesse Livermore: the greatest trader who died broke
Jesse Livermore made $100 million shorting the 1929 crash and still died broke. Four fortunes, four bankruptcies, and the risk lessons still relearned.
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Charts change, coins change, leverage changes. The people who mastered — and were destroyed by — markets keep teaching the same lessons. We study them through the only lens that matters: how they managed risk, and what it cost them when they didn't.
Profiles in the pipeline
One new profile lands regularly — each mapped to the stage of the Primer Path it teaches best.