Dan Zanger

Personal history

Dan Zanger claims to hold a world record for his trading one-year stock market portfolio appreciation, gaining over 29,000%. In under two years, he turned $10,775 into $18 million. Fortune magazine, wrote an extensive article on Zanger, covering his trading results after reviewing his IRS tax returns and trading records.

Zanger grew up in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. His father was a physician & his mother was a psychologist. He started college but dropped out to snow ski for a few years in Colorado and Idaho. He had a few odd jobs, such as bell hop, cab driver and prep cook to support himself during his early twenties.

Eventually, he moved back to LA with a high school education and no professional trade. He started working for a landscape company and eventually got his California contractor's license. He ventured into pool building in Beverly Hills as an independent contractor where he made a modest living from then on.

His mother Elaine loved the stock market and Dan would often watch the Business Channel with her. One day in 1978 Dan saw a stock explode across the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen hitting $1. He made his first purchase and sold the stock a few weeks later at over $3. From that sale on, he was hooked on the action of the market tape, usually carrying a quotetrek with him on his contracting jobs to stay up on stock prices.

The Internet bubble

As technology and internet stocks took center stage in the stock market in 1997, Dan began to see powerful moves underway. He sold his Porsche for approximately 11,000 dollars to have the necessary capital to jump fully into the market. Over the next year, he parlayed the 11,000 dollars into 18 million with the knowledge acquired over two decades playing the market and re-reading the works of William O'Neil. With this success, Dan was able to become a full-time trader and leave contracting behind.

The Zanger Report and Chartpattern.com

In 1996 Dan produced a faxed newsletter called The Zanger Report which went out each night to several hundred beginning traders. He evolved this faxed letter into a new educational website called chartpattern.com in 1998 where daily stock charts highlight interesting patterns that traders could study and trade. This website now serves thousands of traders around the world providing services to industry market makers, hedge funds and private traders alike.