This is Trend Following Radio, where great thinking comes alive.

Nobel Prize winners, legendary traders, bestselling authors, and the pros that know what drive us irrational human beings.

I am your host, Michael Covel, not filtered, raw, honest.

That's my passion. So today on the show I have Michael Gibbons. Michael runs a firm called Gibbons Trading. He is a market timer, otherwise known as a trend following trader. He's been at this for a long time.

He is somebody who I've had the chance to sit down and have lunch with. He is also a guy who I've

looked to put his interesting quotes in my books over the years.

He's got some very, what I like to call the classic, not one-liners, but the classic kind of parable thing where you read it, you're like, ah, makes perfect sense.

Michael, thanks for joining me today.

Thank you very much for having me.

So listen, let me jump right in and let me, let me go to something

very basic that I don't think I've discussed out of the gate exactly with somebody, because I

think sometimes it makes good sense to just get right back to the basics. And most of,

for the United States of America, probably most of the world, is predicated on

the idea that if you buy a mutual fund and you hold on at some point in the future,

Shangri-law will happen and, you know, and unicorns will appear and dust and and you'll feel great and life will be

wonderful and let's face it regardless of how much you and i might discuss things like trend

following the vast majority of market participants are still at a buy-in-hole mentality would that be

a fair assessment absolutely so what's why don why do you why do you kind of give

a buy and hold critique? Well the premise of buy and hold is based on essentially backfitting of

data. People looked at data, Jeremy Siegel, for example,

and found that if you simply bought stocks going back to say even the 1920s and held them,

eventually this would be a profitable strategy. But like everything that's backed fit, it also left out

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