Martin "Buzzy" Schwartz

Buzzy Schwartz spent the first decade of his career as an EF Hutton equity analyst, then bought an AMEX seat in the early 1980s and turned himself into one of the most-known S&P futures day-traders of the decade. The 1984 US Investing Championship — run by Norm Zadeh, the contest that Robbins Trading absorbed and continued as the World Cup — was his canonical title; he came back in 1992 and won a Robbins-era Futures Championship as well. By 1989 Jack Schwager had him as a chapter in Market Wizards, the book that taught a generation of retail traders that the discipline could be done by named individuals.

His own book Pit Bull: Lessons from Wall Street's Champion Day Trader (1998) is the long-form version of the same arc — Amherst undergrad, Columbia MBA, ten years on the analyst side hating his job, the AMEX seat that turned the work into trading and the trading into a championship. The line that re-quotes most often, from both the book and the Schwager chapter, is the discipline that runs through the entire career: the most important thing in making money is not letting your losses get out of hand.

He has stayed mostly off socials in the modern era; the bio for this site is a foundational-figure profile, not a contemporary outreach target. Younger traders looking for the Schwartz playbook still go to the book and the Schwager interview, both of which remain in print.