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Category: Interviews

Ep. 147: Rolf Dobelli Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Posted on by Michael Covel
Rolf Dobelli
Rolf Dobelli

My guest today is Rolf Dobelli, a Swiss author and entrepreneur. Dobelli is a member of Edge Foundation, Inc., PEN International and the Royal Society of Arts. He is the founder of the World Minds foundation.

The topic is his book The Art of Thinking Clearly.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • Availability bias
  • Statistics
  • The sunk cost fallacy
  • The difficulty of logical thinking
  • Authority bias and outcome bias
  • Process vs. outcome
  • The irrelevancy and “white noise” of news
  • Information overload
  • Neomania and the obsession with the “new”
  • Nassim Taleb, outliers, and the black swan
  • J.P. Morgan, banks, and looking behind the facade
  • Why watching and waiting is torture for people (the action bias)
  • The idea that “the boat matters more than your rowing”
  • The paradox of choice, closing doors, and settings fire to ships
  • The “it will get worse before it gets better” fallacy and stop loss
  • Applying these lessons to daily life

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Ep. 144: Jon Boorman Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Posted on by Michael Covel
Jon Boorman
Jon Boorman

My guest today is Jon Boorman, CMT, a market technician, analyst, and trader with 25 years of experience in global equity, FOREX, and futures markets. Boorman employs trend following and momentum strategies to generate actionable trade ideas. Boorman has been with many big firms in the past 25 years, but now works on his own outside of the infrastructure of the big investment banks and brokerage firms.

The topic is Trend Following.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • What it was like working within the big firms
  • Boorman’s beginnings and how he found his way to where he is today
  • What advice Boorman would have for newcomers, and whether the training Boorman went through is still relevant to up-and-comers today
  • How regardless of your access, success comes down to the individual
  • Price-based trend following vs. other technical analysis
  • Boorman’s early “a-ha” moments towards trend following
  • Trend following complexity, and why it can be “simple, but not easy”
  • Trading your own personality
  • Van Tharp, risk management and position sizing
  • Trend predicting vs. trend following
  • The fantasy of calling tops and bottoms
  • Why the major media outlets don’t give trend following proper coverage, and why trend followers don’t make good “copy”
  • Mistaken emphasis on entries rather than exits
  • The idea that Boorman “no longer having a need to be right” after he left Lehman Brothers
  • Alpha capture
  • Acceptance of trend following amongst the larger financial community
  • Understanding the legendary trend following traders such as Bill Dunn and Jerry Parker

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Ep. 140: Tom Asacker Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Posted on by Michael Covel
Tom Asacker
Tom Asacker

My guest today is Tom Asacker, an artist, writer, inventor, and philosopher. He writes, teaches, and speaks about radically new practices and ideas for success in times of uncertainty and change.

The topic is his book The Business of Belief: How the World’s Best Marketers, Designers, Salespeople, Coaches, Fundraisers, Educators, Entrepreneurs, and Other Leaders Get Us To Believe.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • Choice and distraction/distrust
  • Belief and its connection to how people make decisions and habit
  • Faith healers and how information can change our beliefs and perceptions
  • How the supermarket works as a metaphor for belief and choice
  • Vernon Smith and Daniel Kahneman
  • The instinctive “feeling” mind vs. the slow, deliberate thinking mind
  • Leading people to choose themselves vs. just getting a job
  • Thinking like a child
  • Comfort vs. desire
  • Why those that have nothing to lose can put themselves in the best position for success
  • Pulling the curtain back on your own mind to determine what your own mind is doing to prevent you from living a full life
  • The power shift to the individual via the internet
  • Why we see what our minds are conditioned to see
  • Practice, hard work, and passion
  • The metaphor of baseball, perception, belief, and behavior
  • Thinking your way to a change vs. acting your way to a change
  • Alan Watts, and the question of “What if money was no object?”

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Check out this guest post by Robert Kramer on How our beliefs can affect our reactions to truth, facts, and lies.

Ep. 139: Steve Burns Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Posted on by Michael Covel
Steve Burns
Steve Burns

My guest today is Steve Burns. Burns has been investing and trading in the stock market successfully for many years. He is the author of seventeen books about the stock market. He is one of the top reviewers for books about trading and investing, having read and reviewed several hundred books.

The topic is trading.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • Risk management
  • Position sizing
  • The magic of compounding
  • Why individual trades have very little meaning
  • Turning down the volume on your emotions in your trades
  • How your losses can be an education
  • Concept and theory with regard to trend following
  • Quantifying and capturing trends
  • “Just trading the numbers”
  • Greed and fear in the context of trends
  • The common attitudes and misconceptions of novice to trend following traders
  • Trading against the market vs. trading against yourself
  • Drawdowns, and the importance of studying the track records of the great traders
  • Entry and exit strategies
  • The importance of starting “right” in every enterprise
  • The curse of laziness
  • Ignoring the talking heads
  • Why you don’t need 20 screens on your desk to trade optimally
  • Cutting your losses
  • The 1% rule
  • Being blinded by the fundamentals
  • Why if you diversify, control your risk, and go with the trend, it just has to work
  • I.Q. vs. emotional intelligence (E.Q.)
  • Technology and long term trend following

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Ep. 134: Brendan Moynihan Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Posted on by Michael Covel
Brendan Moynihan
Brendan Moynihan

My guest today is Brendan Moynihan, an editor-at-large for Bloomberg News, where he manages the popular column Chart of the Day and writes about the economy and Wall Street. He has been with the company since 2007 after spending more than twenty years on Wall Street as a trader and risk manager.

The topic is his book What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • How Moynihan’s background, the background of his subject, Jim Paul, and how the two came together in “What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars”
  • The psychology of loss and what we can learn from losing
  • The idea that you “just have to make the money” and why that can be a bad place to start as a motivator
  • Personalizing loss
  • Paul’s interactions with Rich Dennis
  • Studying the contradictions of great traders, and how loss is the only topic they agree on
  • Controlling how much you can lose
  • Staying the course and the importance of not changing your strategy mid-stream
  • Profit motive vs. prophet motive
  • The difference between investors, traders, speculators, bettors, and gamblers
  • The slippery slope of always wanting to be “right”
  • The five stages of internal loss
  • The danger of personalizing your success
  • The difference between discrete events vs. continuous events
  • The “uncle” point
  • Why it’s important to go broke at least once in your life
  • The difference between emotions and emotionalism

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Ep. 126: James Altucher Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Posted on by Michael Covel
James Altucher
James Altucher

My guest today is James Altucher, an American hedge-fund manager, author, podcaster, and entrepreneur who has founded and cofounded over 20 companies. He has published 20 books and is a contributor to publications including The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, and The Huffington Post.

The topic is his book Choose Yourself!

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • The new book and why all the rules we thought of as normal (“The banks will always finance my house”, “The stock market will always go up”, “The big corporations will always hire me”, “If I have a college degree, there will always be a job for me”) are imaginary
  • Why a good trader trades their own self first, and the importance of choosing yourself and making a consistent inner life
  • The need to become an entrepreneur and artist in today’s climate, and why you might be looking down the barrel of a career in temp staffing if you don’t
  • The collapse of the middle class and 9-5 “jobs” as we know them
  • The importance of doing the un-obvious
  • Why you’re only as valuable as your network
  • The need to exercise your idea muscle
  • Sunk costs and opportunity costs
  • Breaking the cycle of consumerism, buying memories and not buying objects
  • Commitment bias
  • Finding a career at 27, Stan Lee of Marvel Comics, endurance, and the importance of doing something for yourself today
  • David Gilmour of Fiji Water and the benefits of adventure
  • Medication, lifestyle choices, and the necessity of good sleep hygiene
  • The need to be an artist where your life is the canvas

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Ep. 116: Jerry Parker Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Posted on by Michael Covel
Jerry Parker
Jerry Parker

My guest today is Jerry Parker. In 1983, Parker was accepted into the Turtle Program, a select investment training program developed by successful Chicago portfolio manager Richard Dennis. He appears in Covel’s “The Complete TurtleTrader” and has been the most successful TurtleTrader. Parker founded Chesapeake Capital Corporation, a global investment manager headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, in 1988.

The topic is Trend Following. 

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • Mistake of combining different strategies with trend following, and the importance of having a concentrated strategy that you can rely on
  • How discretionary moves can get in the way of your system, and “systematized discretion”
  • The psychological effect of following a trend following strategy for decades
  • The idea of going for positive expected value over what’s least risky
  • Why Parker doesn’t like to use the term “managed futures”, and why it doesn’t really tell the story of trend followers
  • Trend followers performing well at different points in time compared to long-only
  • Using trend following as another strategy for investors who only invest through a long-only value-based system
  • The importance of not letting your views on politics and society influence your trading, and maintaining a systematic and disciplined approach
  • The growth of news media since 1984, information overflow, limiting your variables, and using price as your primary indicator
  • How Parker has learned over the years to deal with drawdowns, loving your losses, and the importance the Turtle program played in his education on drawdowns
  • Why governments are the ultimate counter-trend traders
  • Why buy and hold is not a good place to be even if people are saying it’s turned around
  • Parker’s stock-only trend following program, and why the diversified program will do better than the stock-only system
  • Leverage as a tool

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