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Anthony Pompliano put out a pitch that is worth your attention, though not for the reason he intended. In his post, Bitcoin had run up to 126,000 and then dropped to 62,000, and that cut in half was his reason to get excited. His message: “If you liked Bitcoin at $126,000, you should love it at $62,000.”

Then the reasons. It is a store of value. Wall Street is adopting it. It is becoming the backbone of digital credit. Sovereign wealth funds are buying it. It keeps producing block after block. Nothing has changed, he says. Buy the dip.

Read that and notice what is missing. Every line is a story. Not one of them is price.

This is the oldest trap in the market dressed in new clothes. “You liked it higher, so you should love it lower” only makes sense if you have decided in advance to ignore the one number that pays you. An asset that falls fifty percent is not on sale. It is in a downtrend until price proves otherwise. The discount you think you are getting is the market telling you something, and the story is what people reach for to argue with the tape.

Look at the five checkmarks again. Store of value. Institutional adoption. Digital credit. Sovereign buyers. Blocks on the chain. Every one of those can be true while the price falls by half again. Narrative and direction are not the same thing. The market has never once paid a trader for being right about the story. It pays you for being on the right side of the move. That is the whole game, and it is the part the story sellers leave out, because “I have a thesis” sounds smart and “I follow price” sounds boring.

Here is the line that gives it away. Nothing has changed. One thing changed. The only thing that matters. The price got cut in half. That is not noise around the thesis. That is the message, and the thesis is what keeps people from hearing it.

Now hear what I am not saying. I am not telling you Bitcoin is good or bad. A trend follower does not hold an opinion on Bitcoin any more than he holds one on soybeans or the yen. If Bitcoin trends up, you ride it up. When the trend breaks, you step aside and let the people with conviction catch the falling knife. When price turns and proves itself again, you get back on. No thesis required. No dip to be brave about. No need to love anything.

That is the difference between a story and a trade. A story asks you to believe and hold and add while the chart bleeds. A trade asks you one question. Which way is price moving, and are you on the right side of it. You can love a story all the way to zero. The trend does not care how you feel, and that is why it is the only thing worth following.

Are you buying the dip? Wrong question. Are you following the trend? That is the only one that has ever paid.

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Feedback in:

“You are not trading… you are donating.”

Love it!

David N.

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Thanks!

Welcome!

How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

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Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Feedback in:

Dear Michael,

My childhood dream was to become an airline pilot. I was privately educated in the UK in the late ’80s and early ’90s, however I was told to give up on that dream, as it was determined I lacked the aptitude.

I quit that school, wasted 7 years, then decided to take a shot at it. Over the last 19 years I have flow private jets for a number of leading companies in Europe, including Flybe Europe’s largest regional airline at the time.

All those years in aviation has taught me two things, flying private jets is about sacrificing one’s life for modest compensation. The second, the industry is fragile, expect multiple job losses over time.

Following Flybe’s collapse and Covid, I find myself back at a crossroad earning minimum wage, trying to assess what transferable skills I can apply to different industries, getting divorced (not a bad thing), and about to complete a Master’s Degree in Airline & Airport Corporate Management (A challenge I set myself).

I manage my own pensions, have recetly 2x my work pension buying BlackRock Gold & General at the right time, just as people lost money in the dip caused by Trump. I have since taken the profit and diversified the invesment. I have tried learning about stocks, spread betting, CFD trading and Crypto. My biggest missed opportunity was getting out of ETH too early, missing gains of £250,000 from a modest £8,000 invested. I always seem to sell at the wrong time. I also made a small amount of money buying and selling physical gold and silver over the years.

Currently I have finished your book, The Complete Turtle Trader and just started chapter 4 of Trend Following. Once my Masters degree is complete, I will have the freedom to focus on improving my finances. Until then I am using this time of consolidation to further educate myself and learn the skills I need to make better decisions financially. This has brought me back to the markets and trading.

My new dream is to become financially free and able to steer the course of my life without the constraints of the past. I feel trend following is the way forward for me. I must start from scratch, with nothing, just life experience.

Kind regards and best wishes,
[Name]

Many resources in my world. Jump in!

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How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

• Trend Following Podcast Guests
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Performance
• Research
• Markets to Trade
• Crisis Times
• Trading Technology
• About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

“I don’t want to have to worry about the market every minute. I want models that will make money while I sleep. A pure system without humans interfering.”

That is Jim Simons. Not a blogger. Not a guru with a seminar to sell. The mathematician who ran Renaissance Technologies, whose Medallion fund returned something close to 66 percent a year before fees for three decades. Nobody in the history of markets has come near that record. And here is the man at the top of the mountain telling you what he actually wanted. Not a hot tip. Not a forecast. A system that runs without him in the room.

Read it again, because the financial press will never frame it for you this way. The greatest trader who ever lived did not want to watch the screen. He did not trust his gut. He did not trust anyone’s gut, his own included. He wanted the human taken out of the machine.

It did not start that way. Early on, Simons traded the way everyone tells you to trade. Fundamentals, newspapers, instinct, gut calls. It worked some of the time and it wrecked him the rest of the time. The swings left him sick to his stomach. Win and you feel like a genius. Lose and you feel like a fool. He decided he was finished living on that rollercoaster, and he went looking for something that could not panic, could not get greedy, and could not talk itself out of a winning position at the worst possible moment.

So he built it. Then he protected it with one hard rule at Renaissance: never override the computer. Sit with that. The smartest man in the building was not allowed to use his own judgment in the moment. Why? Because they had the data, and the data said that when humans reach in to fix the system, they tend to make it worse. Even Simons.

Now look at what the rest of the industry sells. The brilliant call. The manager who saw it coming. The face on television who knows what happens next. It is theater, and it always was. The man who solved the market spent his life and a good piece of his fortune engineering that exact theater out of his process.

Here is what I want you to take from a man who lapped the entire field. You do not need to be Jim Simons. You do not need a building full of physicists. But you can borrow the one idea that made him: the enemy is not the market. The enemy is the human in the chair. Your fear sells the bottom. Your greed buys the top. Your need to be right makes you nurse the losers and dump the winners. A rules-based system does none of that. It follows the plan while you sleep.

Stop interfering. Build the rules, then get out of their way.

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How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

• Trend Following Podcast Guests
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Performance
• Research
• Markets to Trade
• Crisis Times
• Trading Technology
• About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Subscribe to Trend Following Radio on iTunes

Please enjoy my monologue It’s Never the New New Thing with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio.

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Jerry Parker posted something this week that made me laugh, and Jerry does not waste words. He was one of Richard Dennis’s original Turtles. He has run Chesapeake Capital for decades on a single idea: systematic Trend Following. So when Jerry points at the so-called experts, he is pointing from inside the arena, not from the cheap seats.

Here is what he saw. A whole crowd of experts trash systematic Trend Following in public. Then they turn around and write books telling investors to do this:

Diversify. Respect price. Follow trends. React instead of anticipate. Stay flexible and adapt when the market changes. Stop deciding a market is too high or too low. Accept that trying to call tops and bottoms means missing the biggest moves. Cut losses. Let profits run. Focus on the size of your winners, not how often you are right. Manage risk without mercy.

Read that list again.

That is not a critique of Trend Following. That is the definition of Trend Following. Word for word. Every line on that page is something a trend follower has been doing since the first market opened. The experts did not discover a better way. They described our way and slapped a different cover on the book.

So why the act? Why trash the method in one breath and teach it in the next?

Because saying it out loud costs them something. The prediction business is a good business. Telling people you know where oil goes next quarter sells newsletters, fills seminar rooms, and gets you back on television. “Follow the trend and control your risk” makes a poor headline. It is too plain. It does not flatter the guru and it does not flatter the crowd. Nobody wants to pay for permission to stop guessing.

There is ego in it too. To call it Trend Following is to admit you do not know the future. That is a hard thing for a man who built a career pretending he does. Easier to mock the name, borrow the rules, and hope nobody notices the contradiction. Jerry noticed.

Here is the part I want you to keep. Do not get dragged into the fight over the label. Let them call it whatever they want. While they argue about the name, you do the work. You diversify. You respect price. You cut the loser the moment it proves you wrong, and you sit on your hands while the winner runs. You stop asking whether the market is too high. You react to what price is doing instead of betting on what you wish it would do.

The experts already wrote down the answer. They just refuse to say the two words. You do not have that problem.

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How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

• Trend Following Podcast Guests
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Performance
• Research
• Markets to Trade
• Crisis Times
• Trading Technology
• About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.