Pod Insights Michael Covel's Trend Following Ep. 1370: Merry Christmas Metals with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio About this episode Please enjoy my monologue Merry Christmas Metals with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive.
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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/
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Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 What a time to be alive. December 2025. Approaching Christmas. Another year in the tank. And trend following. Doing the dirty work, doing what it's supposed to do. Following the trends when they happen. And surviving. When the shit hits the fan. We all saw early 2025. Trump and his tariffs. Absolutely no good for trend following. No good for anybody. Unless you add some inside information. But that quickly subsided and then the trends started to build. And we all know it's the metals. Gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper.
0:44 Speaker 00 How much do you know about the fundamentals of any of those? Oh, they use them in computers. It's for jewelry. Gold and silver have gone up. Massive amounts. 60%, 100%. Are you kidding me? No, that's what happened. That's reality. Was that predictable? No. It just happened. It's so hard for people to accept. But it's life in the markets. Let's just say you don't know anything about the markets. You don't know anything about trading. But you hear the CNBC, you hear the Bloomberg, you read your newspapers, you talk to your broker.
1:22 Speaker 00 And it's all about a message, all about a narrative, all about what will happen tomorrow because I'm so smart and I heard this news. And blah, blah, blah. And it's all bullshit. We know it's all bullshit. But what's the alternative? Alternative is the middle name for trend following. It is an alternative. Trading or investment opportunity. And when something happens. Like we're seeing in the last few months with the metals. This explosion upward. Now, don't get caught up about whether or not it's a bubble. It could be very well damn a bubble. So what? You can make money in a bubble. Now, if you ride the bubble up and ride the bubble down, you don't make any money.
2:07 Speaker 00 True that. That's not what trend following does. Remember, trend following is the strategy that says, "We can't predict a damn thing. If we get some momentum, if we get a signal to enter, we will take that entry. We don't know what's going to happen next, but we're on board. And if something big happens, we're on board. "Well, when do we get out, Mike? "We need to get out." "Yeah, of course." There is an exit strategy. And the simple way to think about it, if you don't have rules yet, the market reaches a peak, and it comes off that peak by some percentage. Let's say the peak is 1,000 for whatever market. Let's say it comes off to 800. There's your exit.
2:51 Speaker 00 "But Mike, the market went up to 1,000." Hey, man, you don't get to be a greedy SOB here. The idea is to capture the middle meat of the trend and survive and not predict because you can't predict. So that gold trade that's running, that silver trade that's running, platinum palladium, all-time highs here in December of 2025, you're waiting for it to come down from the all-time highs by a significant chunk, and then you say to yourself, "I'm out. No more. Not hanging around." That's trend following. It's counterintuitive. It's not taught in schools. Your local yokel broker's not going to talk about it. No one's going to talk about it.
3:35 Speaker 00 Now, of course, in my world, we're going to talk about it. The people that I've had on my podcast, we're going to talk about it. But it's a relatively small population of people that are in tune to this. Why? Come on, you've got a century of people going to universities and colleges, studying how to predict the market, getting degrees, framing those degrees, putting them on the wall, bragging to their friends about how smart they are. You actually think that people want to give up the ruse? Do you think they want to stop pretending because there might be something better? Of course not. That's not human nature. Human nature is all about pride, ego.
4:19 Speaker 00 Look, I happen to be in the northern Virginia area right now. Around DC, the land of government workers, the land of people with guaranteed salaries, the land of people who do not have to justify their existence because the paycheck comes in no matter what. They can't be fired. There's a cost of living adjustment every year. What do you think happens to the mindset of people like that? You can't be fired. You've collected your degrees. Pride and ego is off the hook. Look, Peter Thiel has a famous line about the Washington DC area. And it goes something like this.
5:02 Speaker 00 If you're in a boardroom, a conference room in the Washington DC area, everyone sits around and recites their CV, their resume, back to age six because it's not about the truth. It's not about the facts. Look, the neuroscience is in. If you tell yourself something that is perhaps counter to facts, if you tell yourself that something long enough, you will actually believe that something. And that's what I find so remarkable when I'm in the DC area. The people literally believe, a land of government workers, that they are irreplaceable, important, but it's not true. So you see, when it comes to something like trend following, one of the reasons that it will always work
5:47 Speaker 00 is because there are so many people out there in this great zero-sum game, who do not care about the truth. They care about doing whatever they've been told to do, whatever they believe they're supposed to do. The teacher told them, "Little Johnny, you sit there and don't ask a fucking question. Just sit there, little Johnny. Don't raise your hand. Don't say a fucking thing, little Johnny. You just be quiet," as Roger Waters in The Wall. Be quiet. Laddie, and markets are a zero-sum game, especially the futures markets. To be a winner, there's got to be a loser. To be a loser, there's got to be a winner.
6:29 Speaker 00 This is how it rolls. So you take all these different mindsets across the planet. Look, I'm just describing today the Washington DC area because I happen to be there and I happen to have grown up there and I can't stand the thinking of the area. But there's all kinds of polluted thinking across the planet. Now, the great thing about trend following, and back to our metals examples here, gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper, it doesn't matter. None of this matters because trend followers say it's all baked into the cake. It's baked into the cake in the sense that everything is embedded in the damn price. So if gold is going up, gold is going up. That's all that matters.
7:14 Speaker 00 It's going up. Can you lower your ego and your pride enough to say to yourself, "I can accept that. I don't know anything more, but I can accept that. I can accept that it's going up and I've got a plan to get out when I'm supposed to get out." Hey, if you could do that, man, you are off to the races on life. It's the bullshit artists. It's the nonsense seekers. It's the crazy people who just want to talk and talk. And look, I'm in the business of explaining things, so I do my fair share of talking. But I'm not talking because of ego or pride. I'm talking because, look, I've been in the middle of something that is terribly interesting.
7:57 Speaker 00 I like to share it with people. It's fun. You know, in this podcast, there's been some great conversations with super smart people, and that is just a joy for me, especially as we're in the Christmas season 2025. I love that kind of stuff. Now, I will admit, it's damn hard to get guests these days. And I can get guests. It's easy to get guests. It's harder and harder to get really interesting people. So much of the book world today, now I know this sounds a little bit of a riff today. Hey, doesn't everything I do sound like a riff? But look, it is harder and harder to find smart people to come on a podcast because everyone is protecting themselves. The old trading masters, they didn't grow up with the internet.
8:41 Speaker 00 They didn't grow up worried about whether or not they said the wrong damn adverb or pronoun. They don't give a shit. But so many people today do. And so much of the book world, the interview world, look, it's just not interesting. I will always do my level head at best to get interesting guests to come on the show, but I gotta tell you, it is damn hard. Now, I promise, as I come into 2026, a significant number of trend followers will be on again. But they're my interest. I mean, I've kind of come full circle. I started on this podcast with only trend followers. And then I diversified out and I had everybody on under the sun. Fantastic minds. But you know what?
9:23 Speaker 00 A lot of them were Gen X, Boomers, and even older. The younger crowd is different. There's far less people that are willing to be ballsy enough to say something that grabs your attention. People are too close to the vest. But to take it back to these metals racing off, something like silver going over 65 bucks an ounce, all time highs, up 100% in 2025. Now, why is this? Wrong question, Mike. I know it's the wrong question. Of course, it's the wrong question. I mean, you can sit around with your great resume and all of your education and you can debate why silver is going up in 2025. But why the fuck does it matter?
10:09 Speaker 00 Why the fuck does it matter? If it's gone up 100%, it's gone up 100%. Here's where it gets even a little more fun. You could put that chart on the wall. And if you're a trend following trader, you didn't have to know the damn name of the market. Why was the market name even relevant? Talk about taking an ego check and a pride check. The brilliance in trend following is accepting the truth of the markets, accepting the truth of human behavior. That's the brilliance in trend following, not some bullshit prediction, not some bullshit, I've got an explanation why. That's not the point. The point, as I
10:53 Speaker 00 will continue to drive home on this podcast, as I have for over a decade, is if the damn market is taking off and you're on board, don't ask why, just get the hell on, sit there tight on your rocket ship and make some freaking money. I've talked about it recently, and it's so cool on something like TikTok. The Turtle Trader book has got this crazy following, my Turtle Trader book has got this crazy following on TikTok. Because when people understand that story, they just fall in love. All these decades later, it's timeless. There is no Wall Street story more timeless than the Turtle Traders and their trend following.
11:36 Speaker 00 Absolutely nothing. Why in the hell are people making viral videos reviewing my book on TikTok in 2025 about a story that happened in 1984? Because those people understand it's timeless. They figured it out. They figured out that what Rich Jennis and Bill Eckhart taught the Turtles how to trade the markets all those decades ago would work on the metals in 2025. It would be exactly how you would make money on your gold and your silver in 2025. It's so amazingly stupendously crazy, the story of trend following and how it works and the
12:21 Speaker 00 longevity and the timelessness of it. You scratch your head and you say, this can't be true. But it is true. And I gotta tell you, as we go into 2026, Always facing what we hope is great new trends and great new opportunity. I want to wish everyone the best. I've had an interesting 2025. I can't complain. I feel stronger. I feel more coherent. I feel more with it, more alive, more awake. I mean, we are living in a strange, crazy time. Social media, the internet, apps. Everyone is distracted. Everyone thinks they've got it all figured out.
13:03 Speaker 00 But at the end of the day, the thrust of the conversation that I'm sharing with you right now is about trend following. It's the beat you over the head and say, if you don't get it, please come with me. Pick up one of my books. Find Jerry Parker, Tom Bosso, Larry Height, Ed Secoda, find them on this podcast. Take a course with me. Do whatever you've got to do to get there. And I promise you this much, the great thing about what I can give you is I will get you there faster. There is no one else on this planet who will get you there faster than me. It's 360 degrees in terms of education, 360 degrees in terms of information, 360 degrees in terms of insights.
13:47 Speaker 00 No one else has done the deep dive. I'm not saying I'm the smartest guy out there. I'm pretty smart, but there's plenty of brilliant people out there, Ed Secoda being one. Guess what? Ed Secoda is not doing this. He's not out there doing this. I am, and I'll make sure that if you want to get to the essence of trend following so you can be a great one, I will absolutely help you as we roll into 2026. And with that, I wish you a Merry Christmas and I will talk to you next week.
14:25 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.
14:36 Speaker 01 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. 1369: Trading Mindset with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio Next Ep. 1371: The Performance Perspective with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio Page updated November 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
