Dan Zanger holds the most-cited verified personal stock-trading record in modern markets — turning $10,775 into $18 million between June 1998 and December 1999, a roughly 29,000% return over eighteen months independently audited and reported in Fortune magazine. The defining trade was a January 1999 CMGI position that returned 210% in four trading days. A former pool contractor, Zanger built the result on classical technical chart patterns — cup-and-handle, flag, ascending triangle — applied with aggressive position sizing during the dot-com bull market. He has run The Zanger Report, a chart-pattern-focused trading newsletter, since the early 2000s. His record is not from a tournament but from a verified live retail account, which is why it is treated as the canonical "best public retail return" in trading reference works.