Michael Covel talks about shaking up the establishment, referring to Trump and the presidential race. He sees hope that the political establishment could take a hit and just maybe a dent in the political health of America could happen. He isn’t saying that he would get great legislation through, or solve world peace, but he might shake up the political arena and detour the agendas of some special interest groups.Next, Michael leads into discussion of the lottery, banks, and government. The lottery has become one of the biggest cons by government directed at the lower to middle class. They have convinced people that playing the lottery is a form of investing for their retirement. Michael plays a clip from the Virginia state lottery. They found a Jim Cramer look alike to get people to think of investing as they talk about playing the lottery and saving for the future.Michael moves into reading an article by Barry Ritholtz that was written in January of 2016 when the Powerball prize was around 1.5 billion dollars. He makes the point that Americans spend 70 billion dollars a year on the lottery which is more than they spent on sports tickets, books, video games, movie tickets, and music plus all types of apps, games and programs bought from Apple’s iTunes app store combined last year. Barry then asks the question, “Is investing gambling?” His short answer, “Your goal as an investor should be to eliminate as much of the element of chance from your process and like the house, stack the odds in your favor… How do you become the house? You understand the nature of risk, are comfortable with the idea of uncertainty, rely on long-term measures of valuation, use mean reversion as a guideline to unknown future outcomes, allow time to work in your favor, understand the impact of leverage, recognize the folly of relying on forecasts, consider all possible outcomes; including extremely rare black-swan events, and accept that some losses are inevitable.” Above all, he makes the point that even though you have full control over how you invest, you do not have complete control over the outcome.Michael ends with the nonsensical idea of government achievement. He says that we need someone who leads by example rather than telling us what the next government hand out will be.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio:

Trump as President
Lottery and Powerball
Changing American politics
Getting something for nothing