When I personally started on my trading journey, David Ryan was one of the first ‘big’ names I came across, alongside Mark Minervini.
In fact, among the three trading books I started out with, two of them were Minervini’s Wizard and Champion books (and yes, I’m incredibly grateful for being set on the right path from a very early stage in my trading journey).
That got me to look Minervini up on YouTube, where I also very quickly came across David Ryan through two webinars they delivered together: 8 Keys to Superperformance and Super Trader Tactics.
Through those webinars, and other videos with David I looked up after them, this three-time champion became an early trading inspiration to me in ways that Minervini didn’t, despite the fact that I really valued his books — especially the Champion one — and learned a great deal about trading mechanics and risk management from them. Lessons that served me well in those early days and today.
This was probably more instinctive than anything else, but I think it was David’s personality that set him apart to me. In particular, his willingness to patiently teach, and his humility.
Today, I’m focusing on that humility, and the general importance of it, if you’re to reach the top in any field.
The need for humility
Considering David’s achievements, his obvious humility seemed remarkable to me (bear in mind that I was 24 then). That humility really stuck with me.
I’ve also seen obvious humility in almost every other trader I’ve studied since then, leading me to believe that this is a vital quality to have if you want to sustain any success you may achieve in the markets.
In fact, I don’t just study traders, but top performers in other fields, too. And every single time, I’m struck by how it seemed that the more humble someone is, the greater their success. (By ‘success’, I mean the kind that I consider ethical. Something I may elaborate on another time.)
“it seemed that the more humble someone is, the greater their success”
This is also perfectly logical:
If you’re genuinely humble, you’ll easily recognise that no matter how much you achieve, there’s always more to learn.
The more you lack humility, thus attributing your success to you, as opposed to your hard work and discipline in following your proven processes, the more likely you’ll break those processes — which, sooner or later, you’ll pay for.
So, the lesson is a very simple but important one, regardless of what field you’re looking to achieve success in:
Always remain humble.
Something greater than yourself
How does David remain humble? How can anyone remain humble, no matter what?
I think a big part of it is recognising that there’s always something bigger than yourself. For every single trader out there, that should include the market, for starters!
But it doesn’t have to end there. It can be your family. It can be your business. It can be God.
In David’s case, his Christian faith clearly plays a huge role in both his life and his trading. He’s talked about it in public on many occasions, but let’s settle on some segments from his TraderLion interview from October 2021:
David said:
“My biggest investing influence is actually — and this would be a shock, because no one ever talks about this — is the Bible. God’s word. There’s more investment advice in there than any book ever written.
“In terms of just controlling your emotions — fear and greed and discipline — and probably one thing that I base all my investment criteria on is a passage found in Ecclesiastes […] 1:9. It talks about there’s nothing new under the sun. […] You think things are new, but it’s already existed before.
“And so when you talk about, well, how were things back in the 80s and these [US] Investing Championships — I’m buying the exact same stocks, the same characteristics, now as I did then.”
Here’s another interesting snippet in David’s own words:
“I find everybody’s looking for truth these days [—] what is true? Well, God’s word to me is true, and it’s been true for 2,000 years.
“And I say the same thing about what O’Neil laid down: I think what he’s laid down, and the characteristics he originally found, is really the truth of […] how the market works.
“So, there’s so many parallels between what [O’Neil’s] discovered and what God laid down[:] this is how stocks operate. If a company has […] a great product, they’re going to have great earnings, people are going to want to own that company, and the stock price is going to go up.
“I don’t know how that’s going to change, unless there are [taxes] that clamp down on entrepreneurship, and we don’t have any new products, and nothing new is made.”
Basically, David finds truth in the Bible in terms of how the market works, as well as how you should live your life. (I delve into those market mechanics, according to David and O’Neil, here.)
If you believe in God, this may be something that resonates with you. Or if you don’t, it may not. I’m not here to judge, and neither is David — he’s simply laying out his own truth, and what helps guide him through the markets.
Purely for the purposes of writing this stack, I find this an interesting segment to include because it’s such a unique perspective (at least among the high-profile traders that I’m aware of — do let me know if I’ve missed someone in the comments below).
Coming back to this stack’s main topic, from my observations, I feel like his strong faith plays a big role in maintaining his humility. To him, both God and the markets are bigger than himself.
Whether or not you are a theist, recognise that there is always something greater than you — the markets, if nothing else.
Stick to your processes
David also likes to make a point about how you have to “throw your ego in the bin”.
He says that you have to have the discipline of leaving your ego, and your emotions in general, out of the market. You must simply look at the information, let your discipline tell you what to do, and then act on it.
When emotions like fear and greed come in, that’s when you start doing poorly in the market. David gave himself as an example. When he entered the US Investing Championship for the fourth consecutive time (1988), he started to move away from what he was doing well. As he put it:
“I was more focused on the results and not enacting the strategy the way it should be, and so I[‘d] be taking too big of a position, and so I would have too much in any one stock, I wouldn’t give it enough room. [So] the fourth year I was flat, and then the fifth year [1989] I actually came in second. […]
“You can get so focused on the results that you don’t do what you should be doing.”
The more I study great traders, the more I realise that even the best in this business can still suffer events like this. You can figure things out, have great returns for multiple years (like David, who won three US Investing Championships in a row with a compounded return of 1,379%), then lose discipline in some way.
In David’s case, that just meant a flat year, but other big names suffered major drawdowns due to putting on too much size/leverage in the wrong environment, including Qullamaggie and Dan Zanger.
I feel that this is a testimony to how tough trading is, even if you have a track record of achieving great returns. The market has a way of slapping you down hard if you fail to follow your rules.
If you want to succeed long term, you have to stick to your processes. (I gave a simple tip to help with that in this stack.) This requires humility. Attribute your successes to your processes, rather than your personality.
Be humble.
About this stack
Towards the end of last year, I’d promised a David Ryan series, but was struggling to find the time to do it to the standard that I wanted, having just started a demanding new job.
Then 2024 rolled along, and I had a dreadful start to the new year due to a personal event. I may tell you more about that in a different stack, in context of what I’ve learned from it. Right now, things are still too up in the air for me to want to talk about it publicly just yet.
The bottom line is that I’ve really needed my weekends to recharge, and neglected Substack. I apologise for that.
But truth is, I’ve missed writing here.
So, I had to find a compromise. Continue to write, to a standard that I’m happy with, but in a manageable way. Cutting up my partially finished David Ryan notes into multiple smaller stacks, with a bit more of a personal touch (which takes less effort than jam-packing my notes with screenshots and quotes), seemed like a good choice.
I hope you agree! Please do let me know in the comments below, or email me at kayklingson@yahoo.com.
So, unless I get a flood of messages telling me to do something else, that’s the foreseeable plan. A series of smaller David Ryan stacks.
If that sounds good to you, please do subscribe, so you’ll get those new posts straight to your inbox. It’s free!
Update: The next part to this David Ryan series is now available:
Great content
Thank you