Mark D. Cook

The 1992 U.S. Investing Championship winner traded from a farmhouse built in the 1870s in East Sparta, Ohio, with no floor, no bank of monitors and no team. Mark D. Cook, born 1954, had finished second in the 1989 USIC and spent the years between losing money on a couple of approaches before settling on an options-heavy method centred on the S&P 500. The 1992 result — an audited 563.8% return, the highest percentage across every USIC investment category that year — was the proof of concept. He came back in 1993 and won again at 322%. Jack Schwager wrote him up as the featured S&P trader in Stock Market Wizards, the chapter titled "Harvesting S&P Profits."

The Cook Cumulative Tick is the artefact most carried his name beyond the championship. He waits for extreme readings — usually beyond plus or minus 1,400 — then fades the prevailing intraday move in S&P 500 futures, and only when two confirming indicators line up: a three-day cycle oscillator and a five-day moving-average channel. He scales in by thirds so he can ratchet his stop, and he often sells out-of-the-money options to finance the position while the futures leg works. It is mechanical, contrarian, and entirely his own. The Forbes feature in January 1994 and the eventual Active Trader Magazine cover ran while he was still doing the same thing from the same farmhouse.

Cook has spent the years since the championship running an advisory service out of markdcook.com under the heading "Pathway to Trading," teaching the indicator and the discipline through articles, seminars and a small mentee programme. The biography reads strangely compressed because the trader has not moved — same house, same instrument family, same indicator. That stationary quality is the part of his story most worth understanding.

Mark D. Cook died on October 27, 2021, at 67, at home in East Sparta, survived by his wife Terri, four children and a granddaughter. His son Ryan continues the Pathway to Trading education business from the same farm. The 1992 record stands exactly where he left it.