Before emigrating to America, Darvas studied economics at the University of Budapest. Arriving in the US in 1951, Darvas trained with his half-sister, Julia, to be a ballroom dancer, becoming extremely succesful and touring the world by 1956. He discovered investing in 1952, when a Toronto nightclub, unable to pay him in cash, instead paid him with shares. It was on a two-year tour of the world that he initially developed his 'Darvas Box' method of screening stocks - a method of picking stocks based on the stock's price and volume - and later went on to refine this to remove any human element