Covel has had a long running grudge against Curtis Faith since the latter published the Original Turtle Trading Rules for free at a time when Covel was punting them out for $600 a shot. I still have a copy of Covel's scribblings. At the time Covel would not disclose his name and tried to keep the whole absurd thing a "secret".
Seems like this is what happened. Michael Covel made more money as a trainer rather than as a trader. This made the original turtles like Curtis Faith lose respect for Covel. What was truly unethical was to make money from revealing the secrets of a trading system that was passed down from someone else (Richard Dennis). If the turtles rules originated from Covel, fine. But it was not. It was an immoral thing to do. Curtis Faith did the moral thing to stop this unethical profiteering from revealing the secrets free of charge. Did I describe what happened correctly?
No, you didn't. There were never any "secrets" as you call them. No one stole the constitution. There are no buried treasures. No pirates. No Nicolas Cage. Richard Dennis published the trading rules many years ago. Part of what he wanted to show was that in fact, there are no secrets in trading hence why he revealed his rules. The point of his experiment was to see if traders could follow them. Most of them couldn't. Apparently Faith was one of the few that did and according to folklore was Dennis's best student.
According to Faith, most didn't follow the rules initially, but by the end the majority of the turtles were successful, although there seems to be no definitive list anywhere showing how much money each turtle made for Dennis. Some obviously made more than others. From what i read only a minority of the turtles were bad enough at trading the systems to get fired before the end of the programme.
Not entirely the full picture. Faith never liked Covel for using the Turtle 'Brand' name (eg TurtleTrader.com) without permission but i believe it was ex Turtle Russell Sands who first sold the rules and made them public as he was dropped/quit from the programme early. Also Faith was a bit hypocritical in that he himself used the turtle system rules to help sell his Trading Blox software in the early 2000s. But then again he only had a 10 year confidentially agreement with Dennis and Sands had already let the cat out of the bag in the mid 90s.
I think the real problem is that Covel is a salesman and not a trader or investor of any sort. He gets his interviews because people like Chris Harding at Winton like the extra publicity. When I had contact with Covel many years ago after buying his Turtle course it became very obvious indeed that he simply did not have the expertise of a trader, no the experience. He could not answer the questions. Perhaps he has learnt by now. Poor old Faith has his problems. But at least he has the genuine experience as a trader which Covel does not.
I'm surprised Covel is still in business to be honest. But I guess there is always a place for purveyors of impossible dreams. "Make millions in up and down markets".
Trading Blox was very good software. For one thing it enabled people to see just how outdated the original short term 20 day breakout really is. Faith and his partner and childhood friend did a very good job. Sadly, it looks like the Tradingblox forum is dead. There used o be some bright and interesting people there. My suspicion is that a lot of them got burnt by the lure of back testing. It is almost wholly impossible not to mislead yourself.
I think even Dennis did not have full faith in the 20 day breakout back in the 80s as they added a filter to it. The 20 day system was also an optional system for the turtles to trade, not all of them traded it. But the 55 day breakout system was mandatory and had no filter. Maybe, but the real problem with long term trend following is the multi year drawdowns, not many people can get through those and continue to pull the trigger. At some point they decide that they are better off trading something else.
Never thought any of Covel's books were any good. There are supposed to be about trend following but, all he does is put out stats on hedge funds results on trend following which a lot of them do! Now, I have paid for seminars, some better than others but, he comes across as a snake oil salesman. Never even throws you a bone. Credibility wise, he is low on the totem pole for me. There are others out there who probably, are better and atleast, show you they know how to trade by real examples and you do not even have to pay for the seminar to get it!