Ep. 345: Spyros Makridakis Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio
Michael Covel's Trend Following
Michael Covel
4.6 • 732 Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2015
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My guest today is Spyros Makridakis, the Rector of the Neapolis University of Pafos NUP and an Emeritus Professor of Decision Sciences at INSEAD as well as the University of Piraeus and one of the world's leading experts on forecasting, with many journal articles and books on the subject. He is famous as the organizer of the Makridakis Competitions, known in the forecasting literature as the M-Competitions. His calling is to poke holes in the notion that we can forecast with accuracy.
The topic is his paper Why Forecasts Fail. What to Do Instead.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:
- Known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns
- The two main types of uncertainty–"subway" and "coconut"
- Jim Collins, one of the best-selling business book authors of all time, and why it might not have any use to us
- Medicine and chance
- The placebo effect
- Acceptance of an uncertain world
- The illusion of control
Jump in!
---
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. |
| 0:21.1 | I am your host, Michael Covel. |
| 0:24.0 | Not filtered, raw, honest. |
| 0:27.4 | That's my passion. |
| 0:32.8 | My guest today is Spiro Smokridakis. |
| 0:36.0 | He's the Emeritus Professor of Decision Sciences at Enciad. |
| 0:41.6 | Sparose's calling is to poke holes in the notion that we can forecast all of this accuracy. |
| 0:50.1 | And that dovetails also in with the idea that simple is better. |
| 0:56.5 | His classic paper from 1979, which essentially showed that moving averages are a far better predictor of tomorrow than all the most complex econometric models. |
| 1:11.4 | Well, let's just say the academic community did not exactly like him when he first put that research out. |
| 1:20.1 | His most recent book, Dance with Chance, highly recommended, go take a look at it for sure. |
| 1:26.8 | Also, as an extra in my write-up for sparrows's appearance on this |
| 1:31.5 | podcast he has sent me most graciously several white papers several pdf white papers take a look at |
| 1:38.6 | them i'm forever grateful to have the brightest minds on our planet come on my podcast. |
| 1:45.7 | I hope you enjoy this conversation with Sparrow's. |
| 1:55.2 | I'm preparing to talk to you today, and I can't help but come across this fairly famous passage from the former |
| 2:03.3 | defense secretary in America, Donald Rumsfeld. He gets the attribution often, but I think |
| 2:10.6 | Nassim Talib has also been stated to have said this. Can you talk some about the statement? I mean, we're talking about |
| 2:19.0 | known-knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Why don't you start from the top on your |
| 2:25.4 | influence and where you see that originally coming from? Well, I think he's right. There's also |
| 2:31.4 | another part. There's also the unknown knowns, okay, which |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Covel, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Michael Covel and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.