Michael Covel's Trend Following Manifesto

I do one thing really well, and love to do it. I passionately teach the lessons of great traders who made their fortunes over the last four decades. That means providing Aha moments to people for a living. Forget Buy and Hold and CNBC; those are not my game. My subject of choice is an obscure trading style called trend following trading that has produced untold millionaires and a few billionaires. It is a style of trading ignored by the mainstream press, all universities and much of Wall Street. I am now the point person on trend following, but it did not start off this way.

How did it begin? In 1996 I co-launched a simple four-page website affectionately called TurtleTrader.com® (more to come on that name). It has attracted millions of visitors and thousands of clients all looking for insights into trend following trading. All that from a little web site launched 13 years ago? Yes! It was a wild ride of trusting my gut and chasing down leads. Even though my chosen path was to figure out the secretive world of the most successful money makers around, not cracking their code was never an option.

However, the success of TurtleTrader® had me thinking bigger. So in 2004 my first book Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets (FT Press, Apr. 04, Nov. 05, Feb. 07 and Feb. 09) hit the streets. It profiled great trend following traders and explained trend following in print for the first time. It quickly became a bestseller and has sold over 100,000 copies. It is available in German, Japanese, Chinese (Complex and Simplified), Korean, French, Arabic, Turkish and Russian. The books success screamed that I had struck a chord.

My second book The Complete TurtleTrader: The Legend, the Lessons, the Results (Collins, Oct. 07 and Feb. 09) is different. It is the definitive behind the scenes look at a real life trading legend. It is a narrative account of super-trader Richard Dennis and his student traders nicknamed the Turtles. It was a blast to research and write filled with ups, downs and chaos by the bushel. You think trading success only happens for guys named Mortimer born with a silver spoon? This book will prove you wrong! It is the true story of nurture trumping nature and will always be the inspirational lynch-pin to all that I do.

Now what? I was asking myself that same question. The answer: Make a film. My debut documentary film Broke: The New American Dream premiered on The Documentary Channel in October 2009. It explores human behavior (read: behavioral finance) during the 2007-2009 market crash. It is my 75,000 mile odyssey through a Tokyo fish market, a Virginia sheep farm, a lottery store and Las Vegas and Macau poker tables all to learn how and why we make so many wrong financial decisions.

My team and I shot the film in 13 major cities and packed it with big time names in the trading world (Larry Hite, Jim Rogers, David Harding, Mark Mobius, and Bill Miller to name a few). I also conducted face-to-face interviews with legendary Nobel Prize winners Dr. Harry Markowitz and Dr. Vernon Smith — what a place to end up at after starting a simple website over a decade ago! And when it comes to film-making I fully admit to being inspired by Michael Moores ability, but I worked hard to consciously present a non-partisan, timeless and common sense message that everyone can embrace.

Today, I find myself as a trader, author, director, journalist, web developer and an entrepreneur. Those roles leave people liking me and hating me for the same reason: I passionately speak the truth, and that is not about to stop any time soon.

More:

http://www.michaelcovel.com...