Ep. 38: Brad Rathe Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio
Michael Covel's Trend Following
Michael Covel
4.6 • 732 Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2012
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My guest today is Brad Rathe, a trader, and programmer. Rathe allocates funds to other traders, as well as operates his own global macro fund. Rathe has worked at such firms as EMC (original Turtle), Northbourne, and Rotella. Rathe moved to Chicago the day he graduated college and immersed himself in the pits of the Chicago Board of Trade, initially working in the "meats" pit (pork bellies, live cattle, live hogs, and feeder cattle).
The topic is Trend Following.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:
- Practical/physical factors involved in the futures pit in the late 80's/early 90's
- The move to screen-based exchanges (computer trading) replacing floor trading
- Working at Globex
- How the CTA business grew under the Turtles
- The importance of programming
- Tweaking and changing your trend following system
- MF Global, Madoff, Wasendorf and other cheaters
- The importance of being unemotional during a big blowup
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
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| 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. |
| 0:33.3 | So today on the show I have Brad Rathie, and Brad is a fund of funds manager, meaning he has a fund where he allocates to other traders, many of them in the systematic trend following space, and also runs his own global macro fund. |
| 0:50.6 | Brad, thank you for joining me today. |
| 0:52.5 | Ah, it's great to be here. |
| 0:57.3 | So you have got an interesting connection here. It's Jonathan that connected us, right? Yes, yes. He actually was an intern for me |
| 1:03.8 | maybe five years ago when he was still in college. And Jonathan is a Facebook friend. I've |
| 1:10.4 | not met Jonathan in person, but he was like, |
| 1:12.2 | hey, you got to talk to my buddy Brad, and I was unfamiliar with your career. And I, and I didn't, |
| 1:18.4 | I looked at some of the bullets. I was like, well, that's, that's interesting. There's, there's some, |
| 1:22.1 | there's some people, some experiences in your world that I think will make for interesting fodder. And I'm sure you can |
| 1:28.4 | enlighten us on some things. But why don't you go ahead and lay this out? Did you grow up in Chicago? |
| 1:35.5 | I did not. I actually grew up on a farm in Iowa and then moved to Minneapolis when I was |
| 1:42.1 | like 13 and then went back to Iowa and went to Iowa State University. |
| 1:48.0 | And then the day I graduated college, I moved to Chicago to try to work on the floors. |
| 1:53.2 | That's what you did. |
| 1:53.8 | That was when your first steps, right? |
| 1:54.9 | You were down in the pits. |
| 1:56.5 | How do you tell me the path of you, you know, right out of college, date the year. |
| 2:02.7 | What year are we talking? |
... |
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