Ep. 157: Mike Bellafiore Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Michael Covel's Trend Following

Michael Covel

Business, Investing

4.6 • 732 Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2013

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

My guest today is Mike Bellafiore, the co-founder of SMB Capital, a proprietary trading firm in New York City, and SMBU, its trader education company. Bellafiore also writes regularly for the globally popular SMBU blog, where he shares ideas on how to improve trading performance.

The topic is his book The Playbook: An Inside Look at How to Think Like a Professional Trader.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

Real rewards to being a successful trader
Passion in trading
Why professional traders fail
Parallels between trading and writing
Bellafiore's history and definitions of "prop trading"
Trading short timeframes and intraday trading
The "prop desk"
Ups and downs in Bellafiore's career
The early history of SMB Capital
Bellafiore's early struggles with his father's health concerns, his mother's death, an SEC investigation, and how "The PlayBook" came out of it
The ten attributes of a great trader
Trading psychology and mindset
Personality types and short-term trading
Microscalping and swing trading
Expertise, flow, and mastery
Process vs. outcome
Entrepreneurship
The importance of coaching
The four ways to become great at anything

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.
0:27.3	That's my passion.
0:33.5	Today on the podcast, I have Mike Bella Fury, and Mike is the author of the playbook.
0:39.6	And Mike trades an entirely different style than what I write about in my five books, in my film, in my podcast, in my blog.
0:48.0	So for those of you out there that say, I'm only a trend following Homer and I don't put other styles of trading out there.
0:57.8	Well, on contraire, here is an example.
1:10.3	So listen, let me jump right in.
1:12.3	I want to read something that I got out of your book that given that we are coming,
1:17.3	at least in some of our work, from different spheres, same trading world with different spheres,
1:22.7	there is something that I think is a great opening few sentences I want to read that I think will give us a nice
1:28.3	conversation.
1:29.2	And this is from your book, The Playbook.
1:31.1	Quote, we spend too much time in the trader blogosphere discussing why traders fail.
1:36.2	With a thousand theses abounding, I'm told, anecdotally, there is way too much wasted
1:41.7	negativity about this across trading forums. Pro traders tell me these forms are disproportionately visited by failed traders or frustrated wannabe traders who mostly leave an oasis of misinformation about trader development. But did they really fail or just learn that trading was not their passion? That's a great, I love that piece of writing.
2:03.2	I think that's just, and we could probably apply that to a lot of areas of life, couldn't we?
2:07.4	We could.
2:09.1	We could.
2:09.8	And at the end of the playbook, I talk about trading's real reward, the real lesson you learn from becoming a successful trader.
2:22.5	And that reward doesn't necessarily have to do with profits.
	...

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