How to Make $350 Million in 14 Days and Disappear?
Alexander Lubnevsky
Mar 4, 2025In 2003, a sensation erupted in the news: a certain Andrew Carlssin, starting with $800 on the stock market, turned it into $350 million in less than two weeks, making 126 successful trades in a row. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) quickly became interested in such supernatural luck and handed the case over to the FBI.
And then the story took a sharp turn: during interrogation, Carlssin claimed he came from the year 2256 and simply used historical stock quotes, which were already known facts to him. He even offered to reveal the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and the formula for a cure for AIDS — in exchange for 'lenient treatment' and the opportunity to return to his time. But shortly after his arrest, an unknown guarantor posted a $1 million bail for him, and then Carlssin mysteriously disappeared. No one has seen him since, and finding any truthful facts about Andrew Carlssin's life before this story is also not possible.
The 'sensation' quickly spread through the media, including Yahoo! News. However, it had one flaw: it was completely fabricated. It was first published by the tabloid Weekly World News, which specialized in articles like 'Elvis is alive!' or 'Aliens kidnapped the queen.' But, as it happens, the news made its way to Yahoo! News, from there to other media — and off it went. In an official denial, FBI representative Bill Carter stated: 'I highly doubt the truthfulness of this story. I am not aware of anyone who made $350 million on the stock market starting with $800.'
How to replicate Andrew Carlssin's success?
Suppose someone really traveled back in time and decided to get rich on the stock market or, say, cryptocurrency. Could they pull off the same trick?
- To make 126 successful trades in a row, years of experience, a carefully crafted and tested strategy with a calculated level of risk are necessary. Moreover, research results show a very limited ability of traders to predict the direction of price movements even if they learn financial news before most market participants.
- To turn $800 into $350 million in 14 days, one needs to increase capital by 346% daily on average. For comparison: the legendary flagship fund Medallion, founded by Jim Simons, 'the man who broke the markets,' demonstrated an average annual return of about 66% before fees (and almost 40% after fees) from 1988 to 2018. Andrey Movchan talked in detail about the history and results of the company.
But can successful traders earn such returns on the best deals?
And who actually received cosmic returns?
Nicholas Darvas, a Hungarian dancer and investor, turned $36,000 into $2 million over 18 months from 1957 to 1959. His story was told by Movchan’s Group senior partner Elena Chirkova in the book 'Financial Propaganda, or the Naked Investor.'
Nicholas Darvas tracked stocks of growing companies from promising industries, such as electronics, aviation, and aerospace in the 1950s, and focused only on price and volume, ignoring news and rumors. His strategy, known as the 'box theory,' involved buying stocks after their price updated the previous high following consolidation in a relatively narrow range and on increased volume.
However, before achieving such an outstanding result, Nicholas Darvas went through a five-year period of unsuccessful trading. Moreover, there are several factors to consider when analyzing this story. 1) Darvas's speculations coincided with the bull market peak of 1957–1958, which was, of course, a coincidence. Nicholas Darvas did not try to analyze macroeconomic trends but rather aimed to know as little as possible about what was happening in the market, communicating with his broker mainly through short telegrams.
2) For purchases, Darvas used the maximum possible leverage after brokers' margin requirements had just been significantly relaxed.
3) During the winning streak, Nicholas Darvas made 8 very successful trades. Among them, he was fortunate to buy shares of Bruce, a company with a truly unique situation. Short sellers of this stock were at some point forced to buy back shares at an incredibly high price to exit the market and cover their losses (short squeeze).
We can also recall the story of Larry Williams. His most famous success was winning the 1987 futures trading championship, during which he grew his account from $1,000 to $1.1 million in a year, achieving a return of 11,376%. Interestingly, during this championship, Williams's account balance at one point exceeded $2 million, but the final trades were unsuccessful, and the trader lost almost half of the earned money.
Larry Williams did not become a successful trader immediately. He started trading back in 1966 and also suffered losses for a long time. Years later, Williams learned to make a profit, and he began to show stable results after 7 years. Like Nicholas Darvas, after his dizzying success, Larry Williams did not show such outstanding results. After the 1987 championship, his career became less transparent, and he focused on his books and teaching other traders. No huge drawdowns were publicly reported, but he also did not demonstrate new records of profitability.
Why know this
Andrew Carlssin is a great example of how people are willing to believe a beautiful story about easy money if it sounds plausible enough. The story became a meme and a pop culture myth, but real analogs in the investment world are hard to find, and the true stories of even the most outstanding traders contain a huge number of nuances.
Moreover, it is known that intraday trading brings losses to most: in one study, the share of such traders was 97%. In another it was stated, that only 1% of traders could show returns above the market average. Therefore, the more something is talked about, the less often it actually happens.
