Ep. 116: Jerry Parker Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio
Michael Covel's Trend Following
Michael Covel
4.6 • 732 Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2013
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My guest today is Jerry Parker. In 1983, Parker was accepted into the Turtle Program, a select investment training program developed by successful Chicago portfolio manager Richard Dennis. He appears in Covel's "The Complete TurtleTrader" and has been the most successful TurtleTrader. Parker founded Chesapeake Capital Corporation, a global investment manager headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, in 1988.
The topic is Trend Following.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:
- Mistake of combining different strategies with trend following, and the importance of having a concentrated strategy that you can rely on
- How discretionary moves can get in the way of your system, and "systematized discretion"
- The psychological effect of following a trend following strategy for decades
- The idea of going for positive expected value over what's least risky
- Why Parker doesn't like to use the term "managed futures", and why it doesn't really tell the story of trend followers
- Trend followers performing well at different points in time compared to long-only
- Using trend following as another strategy for investors who only invest through a long-only value-based system
- The importance of not letting your views on politics and society influence your trading, and maintaining a systematic and disciplined approach
- The growth of news media since 1984, information overflow, limiting your variables, and using price as your primary indicator
- How Parker has learned over the years to deal with drawdowns, loving your losses, and the importance the Turtle program played in his education on drawdowns
- Why governments are the ultimate counter-trend traders
- Why buy and hold is not a good place to be even if people are saying it's turned around
- Parker's stock-only trend following program, and why the diversified program will do better than the stock-only system
- Leverage as a tool
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. |
| 0:24.0 | Not filtered, raw, honest. |
| 0:27.3 | That's my passion. |
| 0:32.5 | Today on the podcast, I have a fun guest, a very successful guest. |
| 0:39.5 | In fact, his trend following success goes back to early 1984 when he was selected to be a part of the Turtle program under |
| 0:46.6 | Richard Dennis. My guest today is Jerry Parker. He was originally featured in my book |
| 0:52.2 | The Complete Turtle Trader, and we've had a chance |
| 0:55.1 | to talk over the years. |
| 0:56.6 | In fact, I met Jerry for the first time, and I believe December 1995, so long time ago. |
| 1:03.8 | But anyways, our conversation follows. |
| 1:07.3 | I happen to be in Saigon. |
| 1:09.1 | Jerry is on the East Coast, separated by 8,000 miles. |
| 1:13.4 | A nice Skype connection allowed this podcast to come together. |
| 1:18.3 | I hope you enjoy it. |
| 1:27.2 | So, Jerry, you know, we're exchanging some notes and I'm looking at your description of your |
| 1:32.8 | trading strategy. And it's pretty straightforward. It's trend following plus one other thing. |
| 1:40.8 | Yes, trend following plus nothing. I think that sort of sums it up. I think it's very good idea to |
| 1:47.0 | have a concentrated strategy that you can kind of become an expert in and try not to be everything to |
| 1:52.4 | everybody. And it's also great that it doesn't live a lot of mystery to the clients or potential |
| 1:59.1 | clients of what they're actually going to get. |
... |
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