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Michael Covel's Trend Following

Ep. 1078: Bill Dreiss Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Michael Covel's Trend Following

Michael Covel

Investing, Business

4.6730 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2022

⏱️ 56 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

My guest today is Bill Dreiss, a scientist and a seasoned trading veteran with a multi-decade trading track record. He graduated from MIT with a degree in Electrical Engineering. After obtaining an MBA from Harvard, Dreiss worked at a think tank in the late 1960s. Dreiss is a systematic trend follower and uses his own proprietary methodologies, the Fractal Wave Algorithm (FWA) and the Choppiness Index (CI).

The topic is trend following.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • Benoit Mandelbrot
  • Donchian strategy
  • Daniel Kahneman
  • Mental benefits of surfing
  • Geometrical aspect of traditional technical analysis
  • Fractal Wave Algorithm (FWA)
  • Bayesian decision theory
  • Fundamental characteristics of human psychology and economics.

Jump in!

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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/

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

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is trend following radio where great thinking comes alive.

0:10.9

Nobel Prize winners, legendary traders, bestselling authors, and the pros that know what drive us irrational human beings.

0:21.2

I am your host, Michael Covel, not filtered, raw, honest.

0:27.4

That's my passion.

0:33.5

Going back to one of the founding fathers of systems trading, of trend following today.

0:41.1

My guest, Bill Dreis, Bill takes his experience back to the 1970s, maybe even earlier.

0:50.0

Not unlike many rogue traders, so to speak, and Bill might not like that word, but I say rogue

0:56.8

affectionately, but somebody outside the system doing his own thing, going about it his own way,

1:04.1

choosing his life, frankly, a life of freedom.

1:07.8

He did not go the direction of having the most assets under management,

1:11.9

but he has endured for decades with an approach that's rock solid scientifically.

1:20.3

This is one of those moments where you get a chance to dive into the mind of someone

1:25.3

who's essentially a founding father in the industry.

1:29.6

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Systems Trader, Bill Dreis.

1:51.2

I want to jump in with one of your, I don't know if you would call them your heroes, but Benoit Mendelbrot. I want to stay at something very philosophical at the beginning. And he had a point

1:56.3

in talking about the 2008 time period. And he's talking about the efficient market theory proponents.

2:03.8

He said they like to take these 2008 events and sweep them under the rug like they're

2:09.8

an act of God and forget about them.

2:12.1

I'm sure you connect with that.

2:14.1

Why don't you tell the audience where he's really going with that?

2:19.3

Actually, what he's saying is that from a statistical point of view, markets are not random walks. There's a bias in the markets.

2:25.6

There's a persistence in the markets that leads mathematically to what we call fat tails.

...

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