Pod Insights Michael Covel's Trend Following Ep. 1354: Attitude Adjustment with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio About this episode Please enjoy my monologue Attitude Adjustment 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 Five points today that I want to make that I think are terribly important for trend following success and life success in general. And what is success? We'll get to that, but hint, it's freedom. Number one, Naval Ravikant. The smartest people are all self-taught, even if they went to school. Look, let's be frank. I have relatives currently in college, at big-name schools in America. They have been forced to sit through gender studies classes, where they bring men in
0:38 Speaker 00 wearing dresses and these freak shows describe whatever issues they have. There's absolutely nothing that you, your kids, your family, your friends can learn from some freak show showing up wearing a dress. This is deviancy, my friends. It's not learning. And beyond just the sheer fact of teaching something nonsense like that, what about modern finance classes? What are you learning there? Can you find someone who's learning about trend following in a university? Please, you can't. There's a few professors that might talk about it, and they've all appeared on my podcast.
1:22 Speaker 00 And just these few examples for me are just to make the point, to drive home the point. You don't get the education you really need to find success, to find freedom, by sitting in a university classroom, by sitting in a high school classroom. Think about who is teaching you. Think about what they know. Think about what they're asking you to memorize. Think about the propaganda. Back to Naval's point, the smartest people are all self-taught, even if they went to school. Well, yes, most of us went to school, but if you're honest with yourself, you know damn well that the most important things that you've ever learned had nothing to do with school. And if the most important things you ever learned were in school, look, excluding engineers,
2:07 Speaker 00 lawyers, doctors, there is a base knowledge there, but for most of us, let's be frank, it's not in school. School at best, education at best, is a foundation. Mastery is self-directed. The famed physicist Richard Feynman, it was all about teaching himself concepts.
2:27 Speaker 00 The great traders, they didn't learn systems in school. They learned by trial and error and persistence. At best, maybe, school is a framework. The genius comes after class ends. The curiosity takes you and pushes you and pulls you if you really want to learn. Think of it this way, in a world where knowledge doubles every few years with AI upon us, self-teaching is survival. Self-teaching can involve a lot of different things. It can involve a course, it can involve a coach, it can involve you just in the damn library, or you with AI, or you with the internet, whatever. But you gotta go the extra mile.
3:13 Speaker 00 Because here's the deal, if you stop learning when the diploma's handed out, if you don't keep questioning, if you don't keep exploring, and you don't keep teaching yourself daily, you're gonna be pet waste. I don't think I've used the phrase "pet waste" on this podcast before, but that's damn well what you're gonna be. The number two issue I want to talk about today is a graphic. And it shows a flat line, imagine a chart, like a market chart. And there's, let's say, 10 points, and it's just going flat. And the caption is, "Effort always goes unnoticed." And then, towards the right side, the chart starts to move up. And the caption is, "Until you win." Meaning, so much of life, including trend following,
3:58 Speaker 00 is going sideways until the big move happens. The core idea here? The grind is invisible, the win is visible. J.K. Rowling, the author, rejected 12 times before Harry Potter became a phenomenon. Nobody cares about the rejections. Everyone cares about the winners. No one gives a shit about Mike Covel writing a book in 2002. Now, apparently, they gave a shit when the book came out in 2004. My point, though, for many years, it was me grinding. Me making sure I put down these unique thoughts about trend following that, from my perspective,
4:40 Speaker 00 had never been put down into one volume before. That drove me. Look at something like Netflix. And look, I'm not a huge Netflix fan because most of the content is damn boring, or I've seen it all. But Netflix had years of losses before streaming suddenly worked. Kobe Bryant, okay, yes, he had some natural gifts, but he was in the gym at 4:00 a.m., no cameras, no applause. But then we see the championships. There is that flat period, and then there is the curve up. Whether it's the markets in trend following, or whether our personal life.
5:21 Speaker 00 You must push, you must drive, you must give a shit before anyone else gives a shit. Because if you don't give a shit, you're gonna fucking lose. My third point today is another graphic that I found, and I think I posted this on my social media, but it goes from left to right, and there are three points. Number one, if you're lost, the answer is education. Number two, if you're educated, the answer is execution. Number three, if you're executing, the answer is consistency. So for example, right now, you might be lost as shit about trend following. You might not have any idea what trend following is.
6:03 Speaker 00 Maybe you read my books, maybe you listen to my podcast, it still doesn't click, but you can't stop. I didn't stop. All the fame traders that I know didn't stop. So why are you stopping? Why are you being a you-know-what? Because if you stop, it's worse than lazy. You're just weak. You don't deserve it. You're a lottery ticket scratcher, a lottery ticket sniffer. Yeah, not pretty. What's pretty is sticking with it. Getting the education. Then, once you get the education, executing. Once you're executing, consistency. You know, if you do any searches recently, you might find out that one of the most popular and successful entrepreneurial ideas...
6:49 Speaker 00 Laundromats. Coin-operated laundromats. Now, that's not sexy at all. Completely unsexy. Boring. But if it's put together in the right way, and it's consistent, you might want to go do some homework and find out who funded the movie The Dark Knight. He actually got his start with laundromats. No joke. Had no connection to Hollywood at all. But somehow or another, getting a grub steak through laundromats, meeting a venture capital firm, he found his way into financing major Hollywood pictures. And he's made himself over a billion dollars.
7:34 Speaker 00 Look, Elon Musk is SpaceX. How many of these damn rockets have blown up? I think at one point, three blew up in a row. Did he stop? Did he quit? I believe SpaceX is now the most valuable private company in existence in America. What's the takeaway here? Education without action, paralysis. Action without consistency, wasted energy. Consistency turns small steps into compounding. Here's another way to think about it. Ask yourself, am I stuck learning forever? Or acting once and quitting? Or am I compounding through consistency? I have people that have read my books. I have people that have paid for my courses. And they'll write me, and they complain. I don't understand.
8:19 Speaker 00 And they'll ask questions that are so basic, you can see what they're doing. They're looking for an opportunity to quit. They're trying to find a way to quit. And these people always think they're clever. They always think that we don't see what they're doing. But they're just, again, you know what? I try not to say that word too much on this podcast, but they're weak. They're worthless. And they are never to be learned from. At the end of the day, we are all responsible. We can assign no blame. We must take all blame. It is on us. We did it. If we didn't do it, it's our fault. Because if we don't take blame, then how the fuck can we learn?
9:04 Speaker 00 We have to take blame for all of our condition. It's the only way to get ahead. Now this fourth one is quite popular on my social media right now. Just a simple image. And it says, "Everyone wants to win until they realize how many losses it takes." That's it. Trend following 101. Larry Height's book, "The Rule." David Ricardo, "Cut your losses and let your profits run on." It's amazing how trend following really is. And most people don't think of it that way. Now, of course, it applies to life too, but everyone wants to win until they realize how many losses it takes. What's the core idea?
9:46 Speaker 00 People love the idea of success, not the reality of sacrifice. Examples we've all heard, Thomas Edison. "I've not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." The light bulb was built on failures. Michael Jordan, missed 9,000 shots, lost 300 games, failed 26 times on game-winning shots. The losses made him legendary. Look at the startup scene. 90% fail, but the few that succeed pay for all the failures. That's the mindset. "We can't fantasize about winning without first accepting the volume of losing it requires."
10:26 Speaker 00 And this applies to rather unusual things that we might not necessarily think of. And of course Larry Height has talked about it on this podcast many times. But look at relationships. Now, in the good old days, maybe you met the love of your life when you were 16 years old and you stared at each other and it just worked forever. That's the lottery ticket, folks. That's not how life works. In the real world, we all are forced to kiss many a toad to find the lady, or in the lady's case, the guy, the lady that I want, the lady that you want. A lot of trial and error. But that's what it means. To take losses.
11:11 Speaker 00 You put yourself out there. You try. But you know damn well, your chances of success on the first shot are not good. Life is odds. Life is statistics. There is a bell curve. Now, don't come at me with some anecdote about one situation or one example that you think you know about. I always love when something like crime statistics come up. And crime statistics in America are a very well-known thing. And there's a lot of informative data in American crime statistics. Now, some people, when they hear American crime statistics, they go for excuses. They just had more education. Or if they just had more family.
11:56 Speaker 00 And my favorite that they often go to, I know somebody that doesn't apply to. That's a moron way of thinking, a moron way of acting. If there is a data set that gives very specific, concrete data that you can rely on, you don't make excuses for the fucking data. The data is the fucking data, okay? You might not like the capitalist system. You might not like the fact that Nvidia could be in a bubble. Perhaps Nvidia is not worth every bit of money its price says it is. But you can't pick and choose. The best system we have is the price. If Nvidia is quote "overvalued",
12:39 Speaker 00 eventually it will quote "correct". From a trend following perspective, who cares? Because from a trend following perspective, we're just following the damn price. So sometimes we can read into things too much. We can make excuses for things. But at the end of the day, you're gonna have losses. And you gotta try. There's gonna be big trends. There's gonna be booms. There's gonna be busts. There's gonna be bubbles. All along the way of you trying and knowing by trying, you're gonna get losses. My last point, to produce anything worthwhile, you have to be proactive and generate it, not sit around and wait. Most people sleepwalk through life, never asking themselves what they're doing,
13:24 Speaker 00 why, or if it really matters to them. They absorb the values of their culture, parents, and friends, and then accept them unquestioningly. You know what kind of life that is? That's called slavery. That's called zero freedom. That's called you are too weak and too much of a wanker to actually take control of your own life and go make something happen. Now, look, taking control of your own life doesn't mean you're necessarily going to be the next billionaire. It just might mean you're a happy mom. It might mean you're running a coffee shop. It just means that you choose.
14:08 Speaker 00 You do not let the system dictate for you. Most people live reactively. And for a trend following trader, reacting to the markets is great. But in real life, for a human, you've got to question why? Be a skeptic. Winners create proactively. Guys like Picasso didn't wait around for approval to create a new art form. He did it. Jeff Bezos left Wall Street to proactively build Amazon. And look, I can remember. Oh, great, Amazon, they sell books. It was cool, I was an author. They sell books. But did anyone really imagine?
14:51 Speaker 00 Obviously, Jeff Bezos imagined what Amazon could be. And I'm sure some other smart people close to him did. But that was all about being proactive. Go back to who I quoted on the number one point today, Naval Ravikant. He says... It's about escaping default life scripts. Because there's jobs, beliefs, and habits we never question. We just say, "Yes, sir, asshole. I accept your points, asshole." And then you go back to your room and you do what the asshole told you to do. What kind of life is that? Do you enjoy that kind of life? Really? Deep down? No. No one does.
15:34 Speaker 00 The point in bringing it up today, maybe a few people will say, "Damn, it's time to break the chains." So you can be reactive and drift with the cultural norms, or you can be proactive. Question, choose, generate value. And there's a big mindset takeaway here. Don't just consume or copy. Create. Question your defaults and build what matters to you. And ultimately, deep down, back to a point that I made at the very beginning, freedom is huge. Because if you can do what you want every damn day, you're off to a good damn place. Now, this kind of attitude that I've put out today,
16:16 Speaker 00 a couple of my assistants have gotten on me. And they said, "Mike, why don't we do a better job of taking so many of these points, these philosophies, these rats, these things important to you? And why don't we do something consistently with them?" And these two assistants of mine, they said, "You know, your social media is great. People like what you do. But we want to do something even more consistent." With all of these ideas, the books, the concepts, the podcast, the big picture life precepts, they said, "Why don't we create a new set of social media channels across all the different channels?" And the name we came up with is Trend Covel.
17:01 Speaker 00 So you can find that on all the channels. X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. And my assistants will make sure, on a near daily basis, you will get the same kind of attitude that I'm pushing out today. Because I'm damn guilty for not consistently pushing out this attitude. Not consistently pushing out the education that I have and sharing with other people. So please, take a look at these new social media channels. Again, Trend Covel. And I promise you, just like today, I'm gonna give you the fire hose to the mouth. I'm gonna give you insights. I'm gonna give you reminders. I might even give you something you already know, but you're not trying to think about
17:43 Speaker 00 on a daily basis, but I'm here to give you the kick in the ass. And you know what? Please, give me a kick in the ass too. Punch me back. Give me feedback. Anything you want to say to me. I'm easy to reach. [email protected] . Again, all those new social media channels. Trend Covel, easy to find. See you again next week.
18:13 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. 1353: No Risk No Return with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio Next Ep. 1355: Richard Thaler and Alex Imas with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio Page updated November 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
