Abstract The low-rank matrix recovery is an important machine learning research topic with various scientific applications. Most existing low-rank matrix recovery methods relax the rank minimization problem via the trace norm minimization. However, such a relaxation makes the solution seriously deviate from the original one. Meanwhile, most matrix recovery methods minimize the squared prediction errors on the observed entries, which is sensitive to outliers. In this paper, we propose a new robust matrix recovery model to address the above two challenges. The joint capped trace norm and capped `1 -norm are used to tightly approximate the rank minimization and enhance the robustness to outliers. The evaluation experiments are performed on both synthetic data and real world applications in collaborative filtering and social network link prediction. All empirical results show our new method outperforms the existing matrix recovery methods.