This is trend following radio where great thinking comes alive.

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

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

That's my passion.

I want to talk a little technology today, a little software, a little code. Now, before that

scares you, before that disinterest you, stay with me for a second. Now, as a quick little

process before this monologue, check out a link. Trendfowing.com slash software. Free link,

no tracking, no nothing, just read it. I can recall back in the day

when I was first learning about trend following, the automation part of it, the computer part of it,

the coding part of it. And I thought it was so fascinating that even in the midst of this

dot com revolution and all

of this new technology and a Bloomberg terminal on every desk, that there were trend following

traders managing over a billion dollars at the time, we're talking 25 years ago, running

their entire operation on Lotus 1,2,3 spreadsheets.

For those of you not familiar with Lotus 1,23, frankly, I was never a user either,

but it was the precursor to Excel.

Now, how the hell does a trading firm run its trading system off a spreadsheet. Don't you need the fancy screens everywhere

and the squiggly lines on the screen and the colors and the graphs and the nonstop visual

feedback? Don't you need that? You don't need it. You've never needed it.

You won't need it for the rest of your life if you don't want it.

Now, if you want to keep chasing the idea that there is a bell out there, a whistle out there that you need to have,

somebody has seduced you with a piece of marketing about how they've got this great new trading piece of software. It will make your life easier. Let's just take a step back for a second. An Excel spreadsheet

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