Ep. 134: Brendan Moynihan Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio
Michael Covel's Trend Following
Michael Covel
4.6 • 732 Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2013
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My guest today is Brendan Moynihan, an editor-at-large for Bloomberg News, where he manages the popular column Chart of the Day and writes about the economy and Wall Street. He has been with the company since 2007 after spending more than twenty years on Wall Street as a trader and risk manager.
The topic is his book What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:
- How Moynihan's background, the background of his subject, Jim Paul, and how the two came together in "What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars"
- The psychology of loss and what we can learn from losing
- The idea that you "just have to make the money" and why that can be a bad place to start as a motivator
- Personalizing loss
- Paul's interactions with Rich Dennis
- Studying the contradictions of great traders, and how loss is the only topic they agree on
- Controlling how much you can lose
- Staying the course and the importance of not changing your strategy mid-stream
- Profit motive vs. prophet motive
- The difference between investors, traders, speculators, bettors, and gamblers
- The slippery slope of always wanting to be "right"
- The five stages of internal loss
- The danger of personalizing your success
- The difference between discrete events vs. continuous events
- The "uncle" point
- Why it's important to go broke at least once in your life
- The difference between emotions and emotionalism
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. |
| 0:32.8 | So today in the show I have Brendan Moynihan. |
| 0:36.0 | Brendan wrote a book, which first came out about 20 years ago called What I Learned Losing a Million |
| 0:41.4 | Dollars. |
| 0:42.6 | It was a profile of a trader named Jim Paul, along with Brendan's ideas and thoughts about |
| 0:50.8 | essentially the behavioral finance, risk management, and loss-taking strategies that all |
| 0:57.6 | great traders acted on, that there were some commonalities there. |
| 1:01.8 | So it's kind of a two-part thing where Brendan took this great story from Jim Paul, |
| 1:06.9 | who's no longer with us, and he laid out all of his views on trading. |
| 1:12.3 | So this is a really kind of timeless type conversation. |
| 1:17.0 | We don't go into everything. |
| 1:18.3 | Obviously, we're talking about Brendan's book. |
| 1:20.0 | I do implore you to take a look. |
| 1:21.4 | It's worth the read, worth your time, and hope you enjoy the interview. |
| 1:25.1 | Let's jump right in. |
| 1:33.9 | Thank you. and hope you enjoy the interview. Let's jump right in. Brendan, thank you for joining me today. |
| 1:36.4 | Happy to be here. |
| 1:37.9 | So this is an interesting book. |
... |
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