Persistence, Patton and Reincarnation with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio
Please enjoy my monologue Persistence, Patton and Reincarnation with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive.
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Why Tactical Macro Investing Still Makes Sense — Further Revisiting Kat’s “Managed Futures and Hedge Funds: A Match Made in Heaven” (PDF):
In November 2002, Cass Business School Professor Harry M. Kat, Ph.D. began to circulate a Working Paper entitled Managed Futures and Hedge Funds: A Match Made in Heaven. The Journal of Investment Management subsequently published the paper in the First Quarter of 2004. In the paper, Kat noted that while adding hedge fund exposure to traditional portfolios of stocks and bonds increased returns and reduced volatility, it also produced an undesired side effect — increased tail risk (lower skew and higher kurtosis). He went on to analyze the effects of adding a macro investment approach known as “managed futures” to the traditional portfolios, and then of combining hedge funds and managed futures, and finally the effect of adding both hedge funds and managed futures to the traditional portfolios. He found that managed futures were better diversifiers than hedge funds; that they reduced the portfolio’s volatility to a greater degree and more quickly than did hedge funds, and without the undesirable side effects. He concluded that the most desirable results were obtained by combining both managed futures and hedge funds with the traditional portfolios. Kat’s original period of study was June 1994–May 2001. In this paper, we revisit and update Kat’s original work. Using similar data for the period Jan 2001–December 2015, we find that his observations generally hold true about 15 years later. During the subsequent 141⁄2 years, a highly volatile period that included separate stock market drawdowns of 36% and 56%, managed futures have continued to provide more effective and more valuable diversification for portfolios of stocks and bonds than have hedge funds.
Don’t Let Them Fuck You Around with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio
Please enjoy my monologue Don’t Let Them F*** You Around with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive.
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My guest today is Dr. Alexander Elder, a trader, educator and author. Dr. Elder’s unique and inspiring story starts with his dissatisfaction with the system in his home country of Estonia. At 23, while working as a ship’s doctor, he jumped a Soviet Union ship in Africa and received political asylum in the United States; he also ended up on the KGB’s wanted list. Dr. Elder worked as a psychiatrist in New York City and taught at Columbia University.
The topic is his book Trading for a Living: Psychology, Trading Tactics, Money Management.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:
Experience as a psychiatrist provided him with a unique insight into trading
Psychology of trading
How a high degree of education can sometimes be a hindrance
The most dangerous personality traits to have as a trader
The stages of trader development
The importance of money management
The importance of keeping records and diaries of your trades
The notion of exiting long positions and shorting weakness
The similarities and differences between traders in different geographic locations
How financial markets can be like manic depressive patients
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My guest today is Steve Brechtel. Over the past 20 years Brechtel has worked as a trader for three of the top 100 hedge funds in the world: Trout Trading (now Tewksbury Capital) in Chicago and Bermuda, Crabel Capital in Milwaukee, and now Two Sigma in NYC (a $10 billion fund) — all short-term systematic funds.
The topic is trading.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:
Brechtel’s history, from his beginnings roughing it as a Pizza Hut manager while working an insurance job, to finding his way to Monroe Trout, to working at Crabel, to his career at Two Sigma today
History in Virginia
Why he was hired at Monroe Trout in the first place as a new trader and the advantages of having a beginner’s mind
The difference between the short term/systematic traders that Brechtel worked for and the longer term trend following Covel talks about
The six strategies Brechtel learned trading the pits
What’s changed and what’s the same now that technology has evolved
Ayn Rand, objectivism, and Trout
Brechtel’s transition from Trout to Crabel, and the differences between these two firms
His work at Two Sigma today
Brechtel’s screenplay (“Unhedged”) using hedge funds and high finance as its backdrop
Writing the script, how his movie differs from other Wall Street movies
Covel talks with him about his experience in making his own documentary, “Broke: The New American Dream”
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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 this site’s top reviewers for books about trading and investing having read and reviewed several hundred books.
The topic is his book New Trader, Rich Trader: How to Make Money in the Stock Market.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:
Tech bubble of the late 1990s
Chapter titles in Burns’ book
Problems with buy and hold
How “rich” can be a mindset rather than a number
The role of luck and circumstance in trading
Staying away from the need for constant action and waiting for the “fat pitch”
Developing a robust system
Staying away from predictive trading approaches
Viewing the markets as a video game as a means to help with trend trading understandings
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