My guest today is Mark Kritzman, a Senior Lecturer in Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, founding Partner and Chief Executive Officer of Windham Capital Management and serves as a senior partner of State Street Associates. Mark has written six books, his latest titled “A Practitioners Guide to Asset Allocation”. Mark began his career on Wall Street in 1974 and was immediately drawn toward systematic trading. At a time when there were not many quantitative traders, he was affectionately titled a “token quant” within his company. Over the years Mark has been an advisor to many funds.
The topic is his book A Practitioner’s Guide to Asset Allocation.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:
Listener: Recently, I read three books you have written about Trend Following. Primarily, I am a value investor, but your book opened my eyes. Thank God for that. I am not saying value investing does not work but trend following is perhaps more important.
Thank you very much for having written your splendid books and educating me on Trend Following.
Covel: Thanks [Name]!
Listener: You are welcome Mr. Covel. I have actually bought another one of your books, Trend Commandments. It is very good. I am always surprised at people’s dating and money making strategy and how convinced they are that they have it right even if they are not getting results. To quote John Maynard Keynes who said “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do Sir?”. Unfortunately, people rarely change their mind.
I am surprised you don’t have higher book sales than you have presently. Your books are probably some of the most important works on investing I have read in the last few years. People are lemmings and they’ll easily forgo pots of gold if it means that they’ve stand out of the crowd. I am following you on Twitter now.
Covel: Thanks for the nice words! But I have sold over 200,000 books. My Turtle book is #3000 out of 10 million books on amazon right now. So actually some of best investing sales around.
“…entrepreneurship, or at least some mental habits useful for it, can indeed be taught. More surprising was how poorly the conventional training performed: as far as the researchers could tell, it had no effect at all. Budding entrepreneurs might want to avoid the business shelves and make for the psychology section.”
Please enjoy my monologue Mega Decision-Making Episode with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:
Aversion to negotiation
Negotiating skills
Never pretend people are rational
Business negotiations compared to hostage negotiations
Lying three times
“How” and “Why” questions
What are superforecasters?
Probabilistic thinking
Looking at data
Location independence
80/20 rule
Known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns
Jesse Livermore’s bio ‘Reminiscences of a Stock Operator’ is always good reading (PDF).
Excerpts:
“I think it was a long step forward in my trading education when I realized at last that when old Mr. Partridge kept on telling other customers, “Well, you know this is a bull market!” he really meant to tell them that the big money was not in the individual fluctuations but in the main movements that is, not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend.”
“Another lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again. I’ve never forgotten that.”
“You watch the market — that is, the course of prices as recorded by the tape with one object: to determine the direction. Prices, we know, will move either up or down according to the resistance they encounter. For purposes of easy explanation we will say that prices, like everything else, move along the line of least resistance. They will do whatever comes easiest, therefore they will go up if there is less resistance to an advance than to a decline; and vice versa.”
“I think it was a long step forward in my trading education when I realized at last that when old Mr. Partridge kept on telling other customers, “Well, you know this is a bull market!” he really meant to tell them that the big money was not in the individual fluctuations but in the main movements that is, not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend.”
Jesse Livermore Books:
• How to Trade in Stocks (PDF)
• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (PDF)
I am addicted to your podcast because it is so much more than “trend following”, as the real trend is not in the stock market or any financial market, but in lifestyle and how we interact with those around us.
I am currently listening to your podcast Episode 600 interview with Roger Ver, and it keeps bringing me back to [Name] of The [Name] Podcast. He has a unique and valuable perspective on the economy, especially regarding the political landscape. I would Love for you to have him on your show, as he is a strong libertarian/anarchist but has thought through concepts deeply and is willing to say “I don’t know”. Much like how you communicate that “trend-following” is much more than a trading strategy, he has taught that “permaculture” systems can be applied to all aspects of life, much more than just planting a garden.