Excess Returns · Thursday, July 16, 2026
Jack Schwager outlines two primary ways traders qualify for his "Market Wizards" series: achieving astronomical growth from a small starting capital, citing one trader who grew $40,000 to half a billion, or exhibiting extremely high Sharpe ratios, with some traders achieving ratios of 10 or more.
“One, somebody takes a small amount of money and turns it into a lot.”
“Uh, a good example. One of the traders in this book, went from $40,000. Uh, $40,000 account to, uh, half a billion.”
“And then you have people who have kind of crazy return risk numbers.”
“You know, off, I'm not talking about and people thinking, I don't use the sharp, I'm biased against for number of reasons, but people know the sharp. So we're not talking here sharps of one or two. You know, we're talking like, well, in some cases, not even calculable because one of the traders in the book never had a losing month.”