Pod Insights Michael Covel's Trend Following Ep. 1334: Markets Whipsaw with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio About this episode Please enjoy my monologue Markets Whipsaw 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 Wild times. You gotta give the orange man credit. The orange man knows how to take power. And he knows how to use it.
0:13 Speaker 00 Maybe it works for the benefit of most people. Maybe it doesn't.
0:20 Speaker 00 I mean, if we go back in time
0:23 Speaker 00 to the dot com era. And we look at the gas that was poured into tech. Ninety-four until 2000, when the dot com bubble burst. And we get to the fall of 2002. The NASDAQ is down 77%.
0:43 Speaker 00 Almost two years after the bubble burst. And to get out of that bubble.
0:49 Speaker 00 They created the next bubble, the big short film, which we all love. It's a great film. But after the big short.
0:59 Speaker 00 They had another bubble that had burst. I'm shortening the timeframe here, but we went into 10 years of zero interest rate policy. For a decade, you got no interest on your money.
1:14 Speaker 00 Then we got COVID.
1:16 Speaker 00 Then we told everybody to stay home, lockdown. We'll send you money.
1:24 Speaker 00 Obviously, money that did not come without a cost because creating free money out of thin air leads to inflation, which is what we got. Then we got Trump again for a second time. And this last 25 years of Wall Street manipulation. Trump is attempting to do something about it. I have no idea if he'll be successful. But in spirit, I'm with him. Because it's a shitty system. Go back and look at 2008. Ken Griffin of Citadel was gone without a bailout. Morgan Stanley was gone without a bailout. Goldman Sachs was gone without a bailout.
2:08 Speaker 00 And remember what they told us. If we don't save all these blue chippers. You're all gonna lose.
2:17 Speaker 00 And we all bought into it. And here we are in this connected thread, all the way back to Netscape going public in 1995, arguably, all the way back to 1991, when the USSR went under and perhaps, without the financial engineering that America started in the 90s, we'd be under too. And arguably, that's where we're headed. Now, that's just me trying to read the tea leaves. I have no idea. But coming on the back of that, and don't worry, I'm going to get to trend following in a second, but coming on the back of that, I asked AI for some outlandish, Grok AI, that is.
2:58 Speaker 00 I asked AI for some outlandish fund manager, CBC analyst quotes from April of 2025. And it gave me some, but then it gave me a bunch of hypothetical ones, which I was not even asking for. But they're great. So let me read some of them. "They will surely get you into the spirit of where you are right now, as you watch all global markets whipsaw like fuck."
3:26 Speaker 00 These are all hypothetical. "From an unnamed fund manager, Trump's tariffs are a sledgehammer to the market. Expect a 5,000-point Dow crash by Memorial Day." "From a CNBC analyst, the Nasdaq's done for. AI can't save us from a trade war that's gutting tech like a fish."
3:45 Speaker 00 "From a top hedge fund manager, this isn't a dip, it's a death spiral. Tariffs are turning Wall Street into a graveyard." Another CNBC contributor, "China's 84% retaliatory tariffs? That's the guillotine dropping on American exports. Game over." Another fund manager, "The Fed's clueless, the market's toast. 20% losses are just the appetizer." Another hypothetical CNBC analyst, "Trump's be cool tweet is a red flag. We're one X post away from total collapse." "From a portfolio manager, the bond market's screaming bloody murder. Yields are about to blow the roof off."
4:26 Speaker 00 "From a CNBC guest, Apple's down 19% in three days? Try 50% by June. Tariffs are the grim reaper of big tech." Another one, "Forget inflation, this is stagflation on steroids, courtesy of Trump's chaos circus."
4:41 Speaker 00 Another one, gold's at 3,000 because the dollar is dead. Trump's trade war buried it. Another one, the S and P's house of cards is a tariff tornado. 4,000 is generous, we're going lower. Now, my voice already hurts from reading that shit. But that shit is what most people live with. That shit is what most people attempt to use for their decision making. And it's no damn way to live. I mean, we've got all this AI now. Who is going to take every comment by every motherfucker for the last 30 or 40 years?
5:25 Speaker 00 Run it through AI, take their damn predictions, connect it to the price data, and show what fucking morons they are?
5:36 Speaker 00 Now, what's really kind of crazy about that thought is most people wouldn't care. Even if you cleverly show everything that Jim Cramer has said since inception and connect it to price data.
5:54 Speaker 00 And it shows a person that probably makes no sense to listen to at all for anything. People would still listen. Because there's always a new generation coming. And by the time someone gets older and maybe they understand a little bit more, there's a whole new army of young people coming along. And everybody wants to get freaking rich overnight. And they'll do anything for it. And with that kind of mindset,
6:26 Speaker 00 if you've got a little bit different perspective, let's say a trend following perspective where you don't listen to all the shit that I just said. You've got a chance. I mean, look, you could always just do buy and hold and take whatever the S and P gives you. You could always do Warren Buffett and take whatever Buffett gives you. I mean, Buffett's worked out pretty good. But you know, he did get essentially the bailout in 08. He was down 50%. So yeah, it's worked, but it hasn't worked naturally. Let's say he's in his 90s now. I don't know how much longer he'll be around. But if there is another meltdown, will he get the bailout?
7:11 Speaker 00 Will Goldman Sachs get the bailout? Will the next long-term capital management get the bailout? I mean, that's the kind of system we live in. We've already given these bailouts. We've already created the moral hazards over the decades. So when the shit hits the fan, how do you know what's going to happen again? What or who can you trust? Let me give you another one. This one's great. I mean, this guy's a real twit. I'm actually going to put a name to this one. Dave Portnoy, the gambling weed guy. Portnoy says he'd be open to voting for a Democrat if stocks kept falling. Quote, "I was never some crazy MAGA guy.
7:56 Speaker 00 I don't think I realized there'd be a market crash." End quote. Come on, man. If you're listening to people like that, what's wrong with you? I know what's wrong with you. If you're listening to people like that, you probably gamble on sports. You probably gamble on slot machines. You probably do a lot of stupid shit. But here's the cool thing. There's a way out. You know, sometimes we get stuck in a rut and we think this is how the world is. The world is, I must digest all these crazy statements that I read at the beginning of this podcast. I must digest what Dave Portnoy said.
8:40 Speaker 00 I must be a degenerate gambling crackhead, or I won't be successful, or I won't fit in. That's not the case.
8:53 Speaker 00 Because you can take a system, an approach, a technique, a rule,
8:59 Speaker 00 that allows you to turn off all of the news. You know, you see these jerk-offs on X and other social media, and they've got 15 monitors on their desk. Have you ever thought about that? You're competing with people like that. Now, some people might think, how can I compete with somebody who has 15 monitors on their desk? They must be so smart. They must be so clued in. They must know what's going on. No, it's bullshit. It's a dog and pony show.
9:35 Speaker 00 What do you do? You sit down and you what? Scan 15 monitors? It's not even humanly possible. It's all a jerk-off session. So what if you could just take the monitors? Take the news? Take the Kramers? Take the port noise? Take all of the shit?
9:54 Speaker 00 And just put it down? Drop it in a hole? And say, I no longer participate.
10:02 Speaker 00 I mean, yeah, you could have your political and economic views, and I have friends who love Trump, and I have friends who hate Trump. But you know how we got Trump? We got Trump because you lied to us for a long freaking time. You gave us LBJ in 1960s wars in Southeast Asia. You gave us an out-of-control welfare system. You gave us unlimited Middle East wars. You gave us COVID vaccines. I don't want to get too violent in my words about COVID vaccines. You gave us an ever-increasing money supply. You gave us crime-riddled cities. So I get it if you hate Trump.
10:48 Speaker 00 But if you hate Trump, you better explain all that other shit. Because if you don't explain all that other shit, I don't know if you really hate Trump. I think you just want to get the power back so you can do whatever the hell you want to do. But across this backdrop of news chaos, information chaos.
11:08 Speaker 00 Reduce it all to the price of the market. You can't understand all the news and all the machinations that surround crude oil, or Tesla, or Nvidia. It is humanly impossible. But you can look at that price data, and you can draw a conclusion. You can say something about it. You can develop a rule set that tells you, "I will enter here, and I will exit here." And information about Trump's tariffs, or anything that Dave Portnoy or Jim Cramer says, bears no relevance. Your buy and sell decisions will be based off price movement alone.
11:53 Speaker 00 Now that is still, for me, one of the most revolutionary ideas ever. It didn't come from me. It didn't just happen in the last 10 years, 20 years, or 30 years. The idea has been around for over a century. Frankly, multiple centuries. Back to David Ricardo. You don't know who David Ricardo is? Go look him up. You don't know who Nicholas Darviss is? Go look him up. You don't know who Jesse Livermore is? Go look him up. Yeah, Livermore committed suicide. Who gives a shit? Go look up the information he put into the record. The idea of taking what's going on right now, the bullshit of right now,
12:37 Speaker 00 and throwing it to the side, and saying the only thing I'm gonna follow is price. I'm not gonna listen to some jerk off who tells me every day, he can call something every day. Anybody who's telling you they can call what's happening on a Monday, and a Tuesday, and a Wednesday, in this kind of current April 2025 environment, is absolutely lying to you. Now, the lying could be on purpose. The lying could be because they're an absolute moron. I'm not sure. I'm gonna take the on purpose. And on purpose to me equals evil.
13:16 Speaker 00 If you've got a long enough memory, what's happening in April 2025 feels familiar. We can go back to the dot com era. We can go back to the Great Recession, the big short time period. We can go back to March of 2020. There is no guarantee that everything will unfold as how Wall Street promises it. So the question, are you really ready? And if you have that deep in your gut feeling of like, damn it, I feel like they fooled me. I feel like they lied to me. I feel like I need something else that puts the power
13:58 Speaker 00 in my hands. So I'm not at the mercy of somebody who's got their fucking boot on the back of my fucking neck and I can't freaking breathe. And that is no reference to any famous event in America. That's just me riffing right now. But the boot on the back of the neck is no way to live. It's no way to survive. So if you've got that boot there and you want a way out, you want a way forward, you want to understand trend following, and you want to put aside all of the damn noise, which is no way to lead
14:36 Speaker 00 a life, I can help. If you'd like a little help, it's free. Drop me an email, [email protected] . And until you receive that information from me, go do some homework on your own. Go read a book about trend following. Go understand some of the key players. Go understand the history. Go look at past events. People are the same, ladies and gentlemen. We don't change. We're batshit crazy. And if humanity is batshit crazy, you gotta have a rule set to deal with that. Again, [email protected] and I'll see you again next week.
15:28 Speaker 00 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. 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. But if you want to buy and hold, trust the government and trust Wall Street, this is absolutely not for you.
Previous Ep. 1333: Thoughts on Bill Dunn with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio Next Ep. 1335: Thinking for a Living with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
