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Ride the Bucking Bronco: The Nature of the Trend Following Profit Beast

Some trading 101 from Trend Commandments:

One of the most useful criticisms that you can use to further your understanding centers on prediction. Trend followers… do not predict a market’s timing or distinction. Trend followers react to market movements. It is a critical distinction best seen in the words of trend follower Bill Dunn, “We don’t make market predictions. We just ride the bucking bronco.”

For more information on books and other resources to further your trend following education go here.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

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Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Where Should Beginning Trend Followers Start?

Feedback in:

Hello, I am currently a college student, and am very interested in learning about stock trading. I just listened to your interview on the Tropical MBA podcast, and it was great! As someone who is new to stock trading, with little experience, where should I start? Any advice from you would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you,
Adam D.

Three places:

1. Resources here: trendfollowing.com/resources
2. Training here: trendfollowing.com/products
3. Podcast here: trendfollowing.com/podcasts

That should get you started. Plus, books.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Look Before You Leap Is Mission Critical

An excerpt from my first book, “Trend Following”:

Trend following, like any entrepreneurial endeavor, demands you to be responsible for yourself. Charles Faulkner emphasized the point: “Trend trading and even trading in general isn’t for everyone. As too few people check out what the day-to-day life of a trader is like, and trend trading specifically, I strongly recommend they find out before making a life changing commitment.”

What does “life changing commitment” involve? You commit to not wanting to be right all of the time. Most people, let’s face it, must be right. They live to have other people know they’re right. They don’t even want the success. They don’t want to win. They don’t want money. They just want to be right. The winners, on the other hand, just want to win.

If you don’t want to win–on something in life–go jump now.

Note: Charles has been one of my most popular podcast guests. He will be on soon again.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Aim for the Highest & Watch the Dark Horse

Andrew Carnegie:

There is one sure mark of the coming partner, the future millionaire; his revenues always exceed his expenditures. He begins to save early, almost as soon as he begins to earn. No matter how little it may be possible to save, save that little. Invest it securely, not necessarily in bonds, but in anything which you have good reason to believe will be profitable, but no gambling with it, remember. A rare chance will soon present itself for investment. The little you have saved will prove the basis for an amount of credit utterly surprising to you. Capitalists trust the saving young man. For every hundred dollars you can produce as the result of hard-won savings, Midas, in search of a partner, will lend or credit a thousand; for every thousand, fifty thousand. It is not capital that your seniors require, it is the man who has proved that he has the business habits which create capital, and to create it in the best of all possible ways, as far as self-discipline is concerned, is, by adjusting his habits to his means. Gentlemen, it is the first hundred dollars saved which tells. Begin at once to lay up something. The bee predominates in the future millionaire…To summarize what I have said: Aim for the highest; never enter a bar-room; do not touch liquor, or if at all only at meals; never speculate; never indorse beyond your surplus cash fund; make the firm’s interest yours; break orders always to save owners; concentrate; put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket; expenditure always within revenue; lastly, be not impatient, for, as Emerson says, “no one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourselves.” I congratulate poor young men upon being born to that ancient and honorable degree which renders it necessary that they should devote themselves to hard work. A basketful of bonds is the heaviest basket a young man ever had to carry. He generally gets to staggering under it. We have in this city creditable instances of such young men, who have pressed to the front rank of our best and most useful citizens. These deserve great credit. But the vast majority of the sons of rich men are unable to resist the temptations to which wealth subjects them, and sink to unworthy lives. I would almost as soon leave a young man a curse, as burden him with the almighty dollar. It is not from this class you have rivalry to fear. The partner’s sons will not trouble you much, but look out that some boys poorer, much poorer than yourselves, whose parents cannot afford to give them the advantages of a course in this institute, advantages which should give you a decided lead in the race–look out that such boys do not challenge you at the post and pass you at the grand stand. Look out for the boy who has to plunge into work direct from the common school and who begins by sweeping out the office. He is the probable dark horse that you had better watch.

Nice. From late 1800s. Timeless. Shout to TropicalMBA.com for the find.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
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Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Rational Logic Means Nothing in the Markets

Greenspan speaks to how irrational markets can be:

Michael, Thanks for making all of your podcasts available to the public. Please keep up the good work. I thought you might find the quote below from Alan Greenspan of interest. It’s from a 10/26/13 interview with the FT entitled “Crash Course”:

“…He [Greenspan] admits that he first saw how irrational finance could become as long ago as the 1950s and 1960s when he briefly tried, as a young New York economist, to trade commodity markets. Back then he thought he could predict cotton values ‘from the outside, looking at supply-demand forces’. But when he actually ‘bought a seat in the market and did a lot of trading’, he discovered that rational logic did not always rule. ‘There were a couple of guys in the exchange who couldn’t tell a hide from copper sheeting but they made a lot of money. Why? They weren’t trading a commodity but human nature…and there is something about human nature which is not rational‘…”

Best,
L.W.

Trend following foundational point #1,232,980.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Ep. 180: Porter Erisman Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Porter Erisman
Porter Erisman

My guest today is Porter Erisman, a former Vice-President at Alibaba Group (2000-08), China’s internet giant. He witnessed it grow from humble beginnings into the world’s largest e-commerce company.

The topic is his documentary Crocodile in the Yangtze.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • What it was like working with Jack Ma
  • Short-term vs. long-term entrepreneurs
  • The lack of knowledge/insight America has for China
  • The perceived threat of China to America
  • Whether nationalism played into Ma’s success
  • The commonalities between the greatest internet entrepreneurial success stories
  • Government interference with Alibaba
  • How eBay was defeated by this small startup in China

Listen to this episode:

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The High Priests of Finance

Courtesy of The Economist:

Finance even has its own high priests in the form of the analysts and fund managers who promise their clients heavenly rewards if only they listen to their advice. They preach regular sermons in the form of brokers’ notes and quarterly reports, and they house themselves in vast cathedral-like buildings that dominate the skyline. Each day also has its canonical hours as traders pray for profitable opportunities at the European, American and Asian market openings. Finance has its annual calendar, too, marked with festivals known as results seasons in which the lucky participants receive their temporal (rather than spiritual) dividends.

And like any self-respecting religion, finance has its doctrinal schisms as well. Active fund managers are a bit like the medieval Catholic church, offering eternal salvation to those willing to pay the appropriate sum, which are known in modern parlance as performance fees rather than indulgences. The active-investment sect has its elaborate rituals and language, with a liturgy (“information ratios” and “alpha generation”) as baffling to the layman as the Latin mass was to the medieval peasant. Clients are supposed to listen to their presentations in a reverential hush, trusting that all the mumbo-jumbo will deliver superior results. The passive fund managers, or index-trackers, are akin to early Lutherans. Investors have no need for priestly intermediaries between them and the market, say the index-trackers. All they require is the full text of those companies that are included in the benchmark.

Finance also has its equivalent of holy men, the gurus who pronounce on the market outlook. Not for nothing is Warren Buffett known as the “sage of Omaha”. The faithful conduct an annual pilgrimage to Nebraska every year to attend the annual meeting of his company, Berkshire Hathaway. His folksy demeanour would surely make him the ideal neighbourhood priest, bringing comfort through life’s ups and downs.

Nice.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.