MARK MINERVINI

Minervini grew up in New York and did not finish high school — he left to pursue music and then trading. His early years in markets were financially ruinous.

He has described losing virtually everything multiple times before he got serious about understanding why his trades were failing. He spent years studying every technical analysis and growth stock book he could find, eventually synthesizing his research into what he calls SEPA — Specific Entry Point Analysis.

By the mid-1990s his trading had turned a corner. He compounded his personal account at an average of over 220% per year from 1994 to 2000, turning $100,000 into more than $30 million, according to his own account.

He entered the US Investing Championship in 1997 — a real-money trading competition — and won with a 155% return. He then went quiet for years, managing his own money privately, before returning to teach and write.

Minervini does not run a public fund. He manages his own capital and runs Minervini Private Access — a subscription community and mentorship program for active traders who want to learn SEPA.

He also holds the Minervini Master Trader Program, a live intensive workshop, and has appeared as a featured trader in Jack Schwager's "Stock Market Wizards." He won the US Investing Championship again in 2021 with a 334.8% return, competing in the same year as many other well-known traders.

Minervini's SEPA methodology is a rules-based growth momentum strategy. He buys stocks that are: in a stage 2 uptrend (above their 200-day moving average), showing strong fundamental growth in earnings and sales, breaking out of a consolidation pattern on above-average volume, with low volatility in the base before the breakout.

The entry timing is precise — he waits for the pivot point — and the exit is rule-driven. He cuts losses at 10% or less without exception.

He lets winners run using a trailing stop.

The strategy blends technical analysis with fundamental screening. It is not pure chart-reading — he wants earnings growth, revenue growth, and institutional sponsorship.

But the entry trigger is always technical: the breakout from the base on volume.

The 1997 US Investing Championship win is the defining credential: 155% return in a verified, real-money competition against other serious traders. But the longer track record from 1994 to 2000 is the fuller picture — an average of over 220% per year across six years.

His 2021 US Investing Championship win with a 334.8% return confirmed the methodology was not a one-era fluke. Both wins were achieved using the same SEPA framework.

The consistency across two very different market environments — the late 1990s growth boom and the post-COVID momentum market — is what gives the strategy credibility.

Minervini's early years before SEPA are the honest mistake section. Before developing his framework, he traded without discipline, chased stocks, held losers too long, and blew up his account multiple times.

He has talked about this freely in interviews and in his books. The lesson he draws from that period is simple: most traders fail not because they lack intelligence but because they lack rules.

He had intelligence and no rules. The rules came later.

Minervini believes markets are not random but they are also not predictable — they are probabilistic. The job of a trader is to find setups where the historical probability of a significant gain is high relative to the defined risk, then execute consistently and let statistics do the work.

He is deeply skeptical of buy-and-hold as the only valid approach and argues that active, disciplined trading can produce superior results if the methodology is sound and the practitioner is honest about losses. He does not argue everyone can do it — he argues that those who do the work and follow the rules rigorously can.

Minervini is private about his personal life. He is married and has family in the New York area.

He is a drummer — music was his first career path before trading — and has spoken about the discipline of music practice as a useful frame for trading practice: showing up every day, repeating the fundamentals, and not expecting shortcuts. He teaches primarily through his books and private access community rather than through wide public media appearances.

No formal degree — he left high school. He is one of the rare examples in finance of self-education producing verifiably extraordinary results.

He has read extensively across technical analysis, fundamental investing, and market psychology, and is better versed in the academic literature on momentum investing than many credentialed professionals. He credits his lack of formal training as freeing him from dogma.

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