Pod Insights Michael Covel's Trend Following Ep. 1314: It's Time for Motivation with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio About this episode Please enjoy my monologue It's Time for Motivation with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive. --- I’m MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I’m proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I’d like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can’t get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel Facebook: @trendfollowing LinkedIn: @covel Instagram: @mikecovel Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 I gotta tell you, I'm pretty excited. I'm excited that America made a change.
0:07 Speaker 00 I'm excited that with all these new voices, they're saying things that resonate with me. Markets, fairness, no more set asides, no more affirmative action, no more DEI. A merit-based group of people.
0:28 Speaker 00 Let's keep our fingers crossed. Let's hope it plays out that way. But we can't know for sure. And as people involved in the markets,
0:39 Speaker 00 we still need to have our rules.
0:42 Speaker 00 Because even if right now, everything looks like it's going to the moon, markets don't go to the moon forever. So you're gonna need systems, you're gonna need rules, you're gonna need techniques that can guide you.
0:56 Speaker 00 Of course, I'm talking about trend following. My expertise, what I share with people across, what, eight books now?
1:05 Speaker 00 Across 75 countries with clients that have bought my training?
1:13 Speaker 00 And over 1,300 podcast episodes?
1:17 Speaker 00 Thank you for all of that support. It keeps me motivated to keep going. The search for the truth. The search for meaning. I have some motivational excerpts I want to share with you today.
1:33 Speaker 00 The first one, and I don't have any sources I'm gonna give you on these. You can figure out the sources if you want to. But the first one, the big picture. Play in decades. Your world changes when you do one thing forever. Find one craft, one company, one mission. Then close your eyes and compound for 4,000 days or more. Filter your existence down to one output. Take a simple thing to extreme lengths. Do what's natural with unnatural effort. Because competition disappears when you're on a timeline most never consider. You can't force this or fake it. It might take years to find your thing. You might not ever find it.
2:17 Speaker 00 But when you do, you know. And sacrificing everything for it will never feel like a sacrifice.
2:25 Speaker 00 Now, I've got my own way that I can think about those issues. And if you know something about me, you can guess. But for you out there right now, that could be trading, it could be investing, it could be your business, it could be your family. You gotta have it. You gotta chase it.
2:43 Speaker 00 You've gotta want more
2:46 Speaker 00 than just hitting the punch clock.
2:49 Speaker 00 You're after legacy. You're after building something big. That's what you really want, even if you can't admit it to yourself. You know, ever since I first got into this trend following world, I wanted to take what you might call unstructured data and make it actionable.
3:14 Speaker 00 Now, what could be considered unstructured data? Well, price data for one. If you just look at price data for an assortment of markets, from currencies to aggregates, to softs, to energies, it doesn't look so special. But it is special. Because inside of that data, there are trends. Trends that you can capture. And if you capture those trends, if you got the cojones,
3:46 Speaker 00 you've got a chance at something big. You've got a chance at more freedom in life to do the things that you want to do. That's what this is all about. It's about freedom. What an amazing world trend following is to take this quote unstructured data like price data
4:08 Speaker 00 and make it actionable to buys and sells, entries and exits, position sizing, your portfolio, all in the price data.
4:22 Speaker 00 This isn't predictions. This isn't about saying, I know what's gonna happen tomorrow. This isn't one big bet on one market just because you have a gut feel. None of that. And it's not day trading. It's not candlesticks, it's not support and resistance, it's not Elliott Wave bullshit. Trend following is something damn, damn cool.
4:47 Speaker 00 Now, I'm a little bit all over the map today, maybe because I'm feeling giddy after the election. Giddy is kind of a lame ass word, but you get my point. I mean, things are taking off. Everyone can feel the energy.
5:04 Speaker 00 And it's okay to want to ride that energy, ride that trend. But if you ride that trend, and we can think back to the 80s, under Ronald Reagan, there was a lot of energy under Ronald Reagan. But in 1987, the stock market dropped 25% in one day. There was also a lot of energy under Bill Clinton during the dot-com era.
5:27 Speaker 00 And by the fall of 2002, the NASDAQ had dropped 77%.
5:33 Speaker 00 Does that mean I'm predicting the end of the world again? No, I have no idea what's gonna happen, but you better be damn ready for anything.
5:43 Speaker 00 History is a guide. History tells us what can happen.
5:47 Speaker 00 It was the roaring 20s, and then it was over.
5:52 Speaker 00 Shit happens. And so if you adopt a mindset, a technique, a strategy like trend following,
6:00 Speaker 00 people might not want to believe in you. And I have another excerpt that I want to share, another quote, that will put you in the spirit of being out there on a ledge with trend following, when maybe your friends and your neighbors are not. Here goes. "Your best decisions are when average people look at you in a state of confusion, with disdain and judgment for your weirdness and foolishness. Then the years pass. The consensus changes. Reality validates your theory. Then they ask how you knew and why you didn't tell them."
6:38 Speaker 00 Sort of like the famed trader Paul Mulvaney, who made a fortune in cocoa in 2024. Not the only trend-following trader to make a fortune in cocoa, but he might have been the king cocoa man for 2024. And he's stuck to his guns. He traded trend-following in a classic way, like the old-school guys trying to make a fortune. I mean, if you go find Paul Mulvaney's track record, his trend-following performance track record, it's not about trying to get dividend income. It's not about trying to beat the S&P. He's clearly trying to get rich.
7:22 Speaker 00 And even at a higher level, he's playing a game. Not a silly game. He's playing a very serious game. He's clearly playing a game with himself. A game where he's challenging himself to do the best that he can with his system, with his trend-following system. That's aspirational. That's inspirational. Who doesn't want that? Look, I love helping people through my world, whether that's giving insights on trading, investing, politics, economics, government. I'm here to try to pass along things that you might not know,
8:07 Speaker 00 or perhaps you've thought about them, but you don't think about them as clearly as you might. And I feel like I do that very differently than most people. If you listen to most political commentators, or economics people, or media people, listen carefully to what they do. They don't say anything. They just talk about bullshit. They never get to the numbers. They never get to the data. For example, and let me get to something controversial when I say data. For example, the education data. The crime data. Just two.
8:50 Speaker 00 Two examples. What's the education data and the crime data by assorted groups across the globe? It's a conversation that no one wants to have. Instead, what do we do? We talk about education in broad brushstrokes. We talk about crime in broad brushstrokes. We don't talk about who the hell's doing the crime.
9:10 Speaker 00 That's gotta stop. And if we all see ourselves as leaders, we can't fix society, we can't fix civilization by pretending that something's not happening. So I feel like that's one of my unique propositions. The unique value proposition that I bring to the table is the unvarnished raw truth, not the bullshit talking points. I just don't care. I mean, I care in the sense that I want my audience, I want you, I want my friends, I want my family to think I'm an okay person.
9:45 Speaker 00 But at the end of the day, I'm motivated by truth. And I want to know the truth. I want to know how things work. I don't want someone to give me a soundbite and tell me, "Just believe and just trust." No, thank you.
10:00 Speaker 00 Now, I have something big coming up here in the next few weeks. And this is a little bit of a sales pitch. So if you don't like it, you want to turn off, that's fine. Black Friday, Cyber Monday. A way that you can support the cause, to keep the team going, to expand the team, to bring more trend-following content, to bring more controversial content to the playing field. So coming up on Black Friday, coming up on Cyber Monday, my best work, my best systems, my best techniques at my best price.
10:43 Speaker 00 And if you want to know now how you can participate, simply drop me an email, [email protected] , C-O-V-E-L dot com. And I will make sure that you get all of the information so you can participate with my best material, my best work at my best price. Now, sometimes people think, "Well, I don't really need the handholding. I don't need the training. I'll just figure this out on my own." Let me share two excerpts from two traders. One very well-known, one not so well-known, both professional, both running funds. The first one says that he was a client of mine way back, many years ago.
11:30 Speaker 00 Says he was on the right track at the time, but definitely had a few aha moments going through my course. He goes on to say that "my material probably saved him a year or two, not to mention the many dozens, literally, of testing ideas generated from all of my subsequent books."
11:50 Speaker 00 Now, that's not a small piece of information. If you don't know how to do something and you're trying to figure out a way, well, there's a client of mine telling you quite clearly, "I deliver the goods. I bring the goods." The goods being helping you to get there faster, to get you to the point where you can be a trend-following trader for the big money.
12:15 Speaker 00 Let me share one more from a quite well-known trader. Speaking about my training, he says, "Some people think trend-following trading is a system, but it's really much more powerful than that. It's a trading philosophy."
12:31 Speaker 00 He goes on to say that "my course gives comprehensive insight into the most accessible active management strategy currently in use." He states, "You will find revealing explanations of all the critical elements of a successful trend-following trading plan. The concepts espoused here are not just opinions. These techniques have been proven to work."
12:56 Speaker 00 I will also add from conversation with that individual that he essentially used my work
13:03 Speaker 00 as a way to compare to his work to make sure that he was on the right path.
13:08 Speaker 00 That's what I bring to the table. Whether you're new, whether you're a professional, whether you're a college student, it doesn't make a difference. I have clients that have taken my trading course in 75-plus countries. I'll help anyone. I guess you could think of it as the Mike Covel trend-following trading cult. Something like that, right? I enjoy giving people the chance to get there, the chance to break through the matrix, to see how it works, and to apply techniques that just give you a chance at a new life, a chance at freedom. I've been doing this for a long time. I enjoy it.
13:52 Speaker 00 And again, if you're interested in what I'm bringing to the table on Black Friday 2024, and again, I'm feeling quite generous, but if you're interested in my Black Friday 2024 special, including Cyber Monday, drop me an email to righthere. [email protected] , C-O-V-E-L dot com, and I will make sure that you get everything you need to give you your best chance to participate in all of this excitement that we all want to imagine for 2025. And guess what? If the excitement doesn't materialize and it goes the wrong direction, what I'm going
14:36 Speaker 00 to teach you will protect you and take you whatever direction the world and the markets go. That much I promise. See you again next week. I see a time when those awake will understand how to make money in up, down, and surprise markets. Whether a new trader or experienced, college student or financial advisor, protecting against a crash or just trying to make a lot of money, trend-following offers everyone an answer in uncertain times.
15:17 Speaker 00 To get started immediately, send me an email, [email protected] . I will send you the right trend-following steps to take, along with my free video.
15:29 Speaker 00 But if you want to buy and hold, trust the government and trust Wall Street, this is absolutely not for you.
Previous Ep. 1313: Steve Burns Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio Next Ep. 1315: Think and Grow Rich this Black Friday with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
