Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets, New Expanded Edition, (Paperback) by Michael W. Covel

Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #5123 in Books
Published on: 2007-03-19
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
448 pages
Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

THE INVESTMENT STRATEGY THAT WORKS IN ALL MARKETS...WITH PROOF TO BACK UP THE PROMISES
Reveals the trading strategy that made John W. Henry rich enough to buy the Boston Red Sox.
Contains 50+ pages of easy-to-understand charts, actual results from top Trend Followers.
Shows how to apply trend following in your portfolio–one step at a time, in plain English.

“Trend Following will replace Market Wizards as the must-read bible for a new generation of traders.”

—Jonathan Hoenig, Portfolio Manager, Capitalistpig Hedge Fund LLC/Fox News Contributor


“Michael Covel’s Trend Following: Essential.”

—Ed Seykota, Trend Follower for 35 years and Original Market Wizard


“Investment books that have a lasting appeal offer insight that resonates with a large number of investors. We believe Michael Covel’s Trend Following will be such a book.”

—Richard E. Cripps, Legg Mason Chief Market Strategist


“A mandatory reference for anyone serious about alternative investments.”

—Jon Sundt, President and CEO of Altegris


“Michael Covel does an excellent job of educating his readers about the little-known opportunities available to them through one of the proven best hedge fund strategies. This book is like gold to any smart investor.”

—Christian Baha, CEO, Superfund


“Please read [Trend Following] whether you think you have an interest in trend following or are not quite sure…Covel has hit a home run with it.”

—Gail Osten, Editor-in-Chief, Stocks, Futures & OptionsMagazine


“Covel has created a very rare thing—a well documented and thoroughly researched book on trend following that is also well written and easy to read. This is one book that traders at all levels will find of real value.”

—John Mauldin, author of Bull’s Eye Investing


For more than 30 years, one trading strategy has consistently delivered extraordinary profits in bull and bear markets alike: Trend Following. Just ask the billionaire traders who rely on it...traders like John W. Henry, whose trading profits bought the Boston Red Sox!


In Trend Following, New Expanded Edition, you’ll meet them...and discover exactly how to use trend following in your own portfolio. This expanded edition includes more than 50 pages of easy-to-understand performance charts. It is the book multi-billion-dollar hedge funds have

made mandatory reading for their staffs.


Michael Covel goes right to the source, presenting powerful insights straight from the world’s top trend followers, and debunking Wall Street myths and misinformation from well-known pros who ought to know better. You’ll learn how to manage risk, employ market discipline, and, when the moment is right, swing for the home run.
Real proof, real data, real results
Decades of actual performance charts from professional money managers
All the information you need...in one number
Why the market price tells you all you need to know to trade
Pinpointing targets of opportunity
What to trade, when to trade, and how much to trade
How it’s done: classic case studies
Who profited from the global scandals of the last 15 years…and how they did it
Meet today’s leading trend followers
Extraordinary trader profiles, including top traders from the past 30 years

MICHAEL W. COVEL is the founder and President of Trend Followingâ„¢. A researcher of the most successful trend following investment managers, he has been in the alternative

investments industry consulting on trend following to individual traders, hedge funds, and banks for ten years.


From his writing to public speaking, Covel pulls no punches. Passionately educating his clients in order to find that “edge” has made Covel a widely respected expert in the field. He writes for numerous industry publications and is continually quoted and interviewed by Barron’s, Bloomberg, and RobTV, to name but a few. An experienced and successful entrepreneur, he is a frequent guest on national TV and radio shows and regularly gives presentations at international hedge fund conferences from Hong Kong to Tokyo, advising listeners on proper trading, decision-making, risk management, and trend following. Covel is also Managing Editor at TurtleTrader.com, the leading trend following news and commentary resource since 1996.


Living and working in Virginia, he is a lifelong baseball fan.

About the Author

MICHAEL W. COVEL is the founder and President of Trend Followingâ„¢. A researcher of the most successful trend following investment managers, he has been in the alternative investments industry consulting on trend following to individual traders, hedge funds, and banks for ten years.


From his writing to public speaking, Covel pulls no punches. Passionately educating his clients in order to find that “edge” has made Covel a widely respected expert in the field. He writes for numerous industry publications and is continually quoted and interviewed by Barron’s, Bloomberg, and RobTV, to name but a few. An experienced and successful entrepreneur, he is a frequent guest on national TV and radio shows and regularly gives presentations at international hedge fund conferences from Hong Kong to Tokyo, advising listeners on proper trading, decision-making, risk management, and trend following. Covel is also Managing Editor at TurtleTrader.com, the leading trend following news and commentary resource since 1996.


Living and working in Virginia, he is a lifelong baseball fan.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Preface

"Men wanted for hazardous Journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success."1

This book is the result of an eight-year "hazardous journey" for the truth about Trend Following. It fills a void in a marketplace inundated with books about finance and trading but lacking any resource or, for that matter, practically any reference to what we believe is the best strategy to consistently make money in the markets. That strategy is known as Trend Following:

When it is a question of money, everyone is of the same religion.

Voltaire

"Let's break down the term 'Trend Following' into its components. The first part is 'trend.' Every trader needs a trend to make money. If you think about it, no matter what the technique, if there is not a trend after you buy, then you will not be able to sell at higher prices . . . 'Following' is the next part of the term. We use this word because trend followers always wait for the trend to shift first, then 'follow' it."2

Trend Following seeks to capture the majority of a trend, up or down, for profit. It trades for profits in the major asset classes—stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities. However simple the basic concepts about Trend Following are, they have been widely misunderstood. Our desire to correct this state of affairs is what, in part, launched our research. We wanted to be as objective as possible, so we based our writing on the available data:

Trend followers' month-by-month performance histories.
Trend followers' published words and comments over the last 30 years.
News accounts of financial disasters.
News accounts of the losers in those financial disasters.
Charts of markets traded by trend followers.

Charts of markets traded by losers in the financial disasters.

Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.

Ludwig von Mises

If we could have developed a book comprised of only numbers, charts, and graphs of Trend Following performance data, we would have. However, without any explanation, few readers would have appreciated all of the ramifications of what the data showed. Therefore our approach to writing Trend Following became similar to the one Jim Collins describes in Good to Great, in which a team of researchers generated questions, accumulated data in their open-ended search for answers, and then energetically debated it.

Trend followers we studied form a sort of underground network of relatively unknown traders who, except for an occasional article, the mainstream press has virtually ignored. What we have attempted to do is lift the veil, for the first time, on who these enormously successful traders are, how they trade, and what is to be learned from their approach to trading that we might apply to our own portfolios.

Trend Following challenges much of the conventional wisdom about successful trading. We were determined to avoid being influenced by knowledge institutionalized and defined by Wall Street. We were adamant about fighting "flat earth" thinking. During our research, we tried to avoid starting with an assumption and then finding the data to support it. Instead we asked the question and then, objectively, doggedly, and slowly, let the answer reveal itself.

If there was one factor that motivated us to work in this manner, it was simple curiosity. The more we uncovered about trend followers, the more we wanted to know. For example, one of our earliest questions was who profited when Barings Bank collapsed in 1995. Our search unearthed Barings Bank-related performance data including that of trend follower John W. Henry (now the majority owner of the Boston Red Sox). His track record generated new questions, such as, "How did he discover Trend Following in the first place?" and "Has his approach changed in any significant way in the past 20 years?"

We were also curious about who won the $1.9 billion Long Term Capital Management lost during August and September 1998. We wanted to know why the biggest banks on Wall Street would invest $100 billion in an options pricing model, Nobel prize-winning or not. Further, considering what mutual fund managers have lost in the past few years and what successful trend followers have earned during the same time period, we could not understand why so few investors know anything about Trend Following. We also became interested in:

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

Sir William Bragg

How trend followers win in the zero-sum game of trading.
Why Trend Following has been the most profitable style of trading.
The philosophical framework of trend followers' success.
Timeless principles of Trend Following.
The Trend Following worldview of market behavior.

Reasons why Trend Following is so enduring.

Many of the trend followers we studied are reclusive and extremely low key. Some discovered Trend Following on their own and used it to make their fortunes out of home offices. Bill Dunn, a successful trend follower who has beaten the markets for over 25 years, works out of a quiet, spartan office in a Florida coastal town. For Wall Street, this approach to trading is tantamount to sacrilege. It goes against all the customs, rituals, trappings, and myths we have grown accustomed to associating with Wall Street success. In fact, it is our hope that our profiles of trend followers will correct the public's misconception of a successful trader as a harried, intense workaholic who spends 24/7 in the labyrinth of a Wall Street trading firm, surrounded by monitors and screaming into a phone.

We've assembled the first comprehensive look at Trend Following, but this is neither a course nor the only resource you will ever need. It is to be used in conjunction with our Web site at www.trendfollowing.com. We have tried to be comprehensive with our definitions. However, if we mention an unfamiliar word, name or reference a source you haven't heard of, please go to Google (www.google.com).

Fish see the bait, but not the hook; men see the profit, but not the peril.

Chinese Proverb

We have tried to make the material accessible and interesting enough so it might give you an occasional "aha" experience. However, if you're looking for trading "secrets," you need to look elsewhere. There are none. If you're in the mood for stories about what it's like inside a typical Wall Street firm or how greedy traders sow the seeds of their destruction, like in Den of Thieves, or Barbarians at the Gate, we will not meet your needs.

To be aware how fruitful the playful mood can be is to be immune to the propaganda of the alienated, which extols resentment as a fuel of achievement.

Eric Hoffer

You may have noticed that I use "we" instead of "I" when describing the process of writing this book. That's because it could not have been written without the generosity of the traders, professors, investors, colleagues, and friends who graciously shared their wisdom and trading experiences with me. Without their support, hard work, long hours, and creativity, Trend Following would still be an ongoing hazardous journey. So if there is any "honor and recognition" to be given, it is to everyone who participated, not just the person whose name appears on the cover.


© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.
Customer Reviews

Great Read
I bought both of this author's books on the recommendation of Amazon. The first book, the Complete TurtleTrader was the one that I read first. I wish I would have read them in reverse. Trend Following built up the story. After reading Trend Following I went back and read the Complete TurtleTrader again.

What made the book great? Well like most reading these types of books, I am a person who wants the most out of my money. I want my money to perform. The little girl in side of me still says that I can make serious money like the boys do. This book inspired me to make the most of what I can use.

Read it - but take my advice, read Trend Following first, Complete TurtleTrader second.

Impressionable, but...
If you are looking for clear cut set of rules/strategy that you, the individual investor, can follow to make money, then look elsewhere. The trend followers solely follow the movement of the price in exclusion to everything else. They identify a trend - uptrend or downtrend - and play upon it. As noted in the book, they react to and not predict the prices.

The methods, far and few, explained in the book are definitely not suitable for me - the retail investor. First of all, I don't have access to a trading system that can follow the rules outlined. Second, I am not a trader in the strict sense myself, where trades are triggered by a system without me realizing what is happening. To perfect such a system would take me ages given that investing isn't my main bread winner. This book will pass off as a great text book in the annals of the Ivy League schools, but when it comes to making money for you, the individual investor again, I think you are better off reading the likes of Jesse Livermore, Nicolas Darwas and William O' Neal. Read the Lessons from the Greatest Stock Traders of All Time' by John Boik or any of William O'Neals books. They define clear cut rules that we can all follow and make money. How else would I have made about 80K in the past three years compared to the first 8 years of my investing where I barely made any.

There are a lot of anecdotes in the book - literally, every page has 2-3 of these. All of these may impress, but in the end they are nice to feel scholarly about. If you are a beginning investor, the first chapter -Trend following, all of 22 pages - lays the foundation by explaining the different schools of thought regarding investing. Then there is 55 pages outlining the great trend followers are their performance but never in clear and precise terms or rules what their methods are. It almost feels sycophantic reading about other 'great' beings the way it is written. At last, after reading almost 210 pages, I got to see some system of trading. All these are pretty dry.

This is possibly the only one exception to the many great investing books in my library that I could have borrowed from the library. You will be better off reading 'How to make money in stocks..' by William O' Neal again and again and again.

Not bad, but not very useful
I own this book, I even recommend this book. But let me explain the 2 star rating....

While the book is a good history lesson, and shows how some of these guys make a lot of money, it's just not practical advice for the rest of us. I highly doubt that many of us have a billion dollar hedge fund to run.

Also, there are no real strategies in this book.

However, it did get me thinking in a different way. So for that, it is worth the money. (The main thing was to allow for larger swings against your position, allow the market a little more room than I did before.)

I know that this guy sells other products on his website, but to be honest, I don't see them being worth it. Most of this book is about defending trend traders, which is fine, but I wasn't attacking them in the first place.

I have begun to use the 4 hour chart more with his thinking, and I have to say it makes a little more sense. Not to get caught up in "micro-movements" as I call them. But to allow massive 300 pips swings against you on a weekly chart isn't practical for most of us.

So in conclusion, I think it's a good read, but if you get what I got out of it from my review, then it may or may not be worth the money.