At thirteen, Lukas Fröhlich shorted the German DAX at 100 to one, lost 200% of his account overnight and sold his bicycle to pay the broker. Years later, Jack Schwager and George Coyle had his 2020 record independently checked for Market Wizards: The Next Generation. The auditors found his public figure was too low: 1,132,045%.

In this episode:

– The two loss limits that ended four or five teenage blow-ups

– How he shorted small caps gapping up ahead of dilution, and the three-strikes rule

– The pyramiding rule George Coyle says he had never heard before

– Why he quit mid-cap breakouts in 2021 while they still worked

– The 40% drawdown of 2022, and six failed Alibaba probes before a 20-fold payoff

– Why both authors say: don't copy him

Everything comes from chapter four of Market Wizards: The Next Generation. Our own arithmetic is labelled as ours. This is education, not financial advice.

Full written profile and free research sheet

Greatest Companies · EP16 · Nokia

Nokia once sold more phones than anyone on earth. Then, in a few years, it was gone from the market it owned. We examine how total dominance turned into total collapse, and what it teaches about moats that depend on a technology cycle.

Read the full story in The Greatest Companies: How the World's Best Businesses Were Built:https://completetradersedge.com/greatest-companies-book/

For a generation, GE was the most admired company in the world. Then the same things that made it great made it fragile. A cautionary study in how a moat can quietly turn into a trap, and why the most dangerous risks hide inside your greatest strengths.

Read the full story in The Greatest Companies: How the World's Best Businesses Were Built:https://completetradersedge.com/greatest-companies-book/

Nike built one of the strongest brand moats in history, and nearly drowned in its own growth more than once. We follow how a shoe distributor became a symbol, and what the near-death moments reveal about the gap between a brand and a business.

Read the full story in The Greatest Companies: How the World's Best Businesses Were Built:https://completetradersedge.com/greatest-companies-book/

He founded Millennium Management in 1989 and built it into one of the largest and most consistent multi-strategy hedge funds in the world. His pod-based model spreads capital across hundreds of teams under strict risk limits, a structure much of the industry now imitates. Rarely seen in public, he let the machine he built do the talking. This is the story of Israel Englander.

No verified net worth figure for Lance Breitstein exists anywhere. What does exist is better: over roughly ten years at the proprietary firm Trillium he generated $46 million in net trading profits, and after leaving he made $71 million in five years trading his ownaccount. Those are not the same kind of money, and adding them together is the first mistake almost every write-up about him makes.

This is Lance Breitstein, known online as The One Lance B, and chapter two of Market Wizards:The Next Generation by Jack Schwager and George Coyle.In this episode:· The money, broken down by whose it actually was, and what the record genuinely supports· Our own arithmetic: 63% of his entire Trillium decade was earned in a fourteen-month window· Turning down $100,000 for $26,000, and the Princeton seat nobody else wanted· Eleven consecutive losing months, and the trade that changed what he thought was possible· The Sunday tapes: ten years of reviewing his own screen recordings at half speed· The four patterns as the chapter defines them, including a proper definition of the exhaustion gap· Why he virtually never used a market order, and what his hotkeys encoded in advance· Risk: predetermined stops on 90% of trades, and why the budget moves to size when there is no stop·

The $20 million target that produced a $2 million loss in under an hour· One percent as active, three times the money, and the question "are you playing the right game?"· The sleep study, and what it found· Is day trading dead? The one number from inside a prop firm that answers it

Full written profile, the money broken down by source, the back-loaded-record arithmetic, and a free 6-page research sheet with a printable seven-question pre-trade check: https://completetradersedge.com/lance-breitstein-prop-trader/

Our review of the book:https://completetradersedge.com/market-wizards-the-next-generation-book-review-2026/

A former computer science professor, he founded D.E. Shaw in 1988 to apply serious computation to markets, long before quant was fashionable. The firm became one of the most sophisticated and secretive trading operations in the world, and an unlikely training ground for future founders, including Jeff Bezos. Shaw himself eventually turned to computational biochemistry. This is the story of David Shaw.🌐 Website: https://completetradersedge.com