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Trading Stocks for Trend Followers

Michael Covel (March 28, 2005)

Some people become confused. They mistakenly believe trend following is for commodities or futures only. They miss the big picture point. Jerry Parker has correctly offered:

I think another mistake we made was defining ourselves as managed futures, where we immediately limit our universe. Is our expertise in that, or is our expertise in systematic trend following, or model development. So maybe we trend follow with Chinese porcelain. Maybe we trend follow with gold and silver, or stock futures, or whatever the client needs. It's called managed futures because that was the profit center at the FCMs. We're trading these great systems, and testing, and making sure what we do has worked in the past. And being disciplined, and unemotional, and applying our methods to the futures markets. But limiting our trading to this one group of markets. We need to look at the investment world globally and communicate our expertise of systematic trading. You have Big Blue beating the world chess champion, and everybody saying yeah, that makes sense, I can understand that. We've not been able to maximize our opportunities with systematic trading. People look at systematic and computerized trading with too much skepticism. But a day will come when people will see that systematic trend following is one of the best ways to limit risk, and create a portfolio that has some reasonable expectation of making money. We've got to be there and ready to take advantage of the opportunity.

Jerry Parker

Trend following is correctly applied over many types of financial instruments across the globe. The strategy is designed to exploit trends for profit. Whether stocks, futures, leaps, FX, etc. -- don't let the instrument choice become the debate. The debate is how to trade trends.

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  • Market Wizards Ken Tropin

    The basic trading strategy that all trend followers try to systematize is to "cut losses" and "let profits run". (Read more)

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