 Dennis profited, as he bought successively new weekly and monthly highs in the trending inflationary markets of the 1970s, an era of repeated crop failures and the "Great Russian Grain Robbery" of 1972, when agents of the Soviet Union secretly purchased 30% of the U.S. wheat crop in the space of a few weeks.This set the stage for solid, sustained price trends in both directions for the next several years, a period in which "anyone with a simple trend-following method and a dart board could make a million dollars".In contrast to the vast majority of floor traders, who quickly scalped trades throughout a trading day, Dennis held positions for longer periods—riding out short-term fluctuations and holding over the intermediate term.