My Creative Ecosystem

This post was largely inspired from Michael Bigger’s book How Traders Achieve Creative Flow, specifically chapter 11 on what Michael calls Building Your Creative Ecosystem.

To get a better understanding of what this is, Michael tells us a creative ecosystem is how “to use the habits of creative traders to build an ecosystem (turbine) to interpret information better and generate more utility out of your trading activites” (How Traders Achieve Creative Flow).

With social media being at the center of our daily lives and a large part of trading these days, it is important to look at what our ecosystem is telling us, and exactly what type of information we are receiving.

I think a lot of traders don’t even realize that they are being constantly bombarded with worthless information that has no value whatsoever, but there are specific ways we can harness the intelligent energy of the internet to benefit us in so many ways.

So, I decided to share with everyone how I view my ecosystem and what I do to specifically make sure I receive quality information while filtering out the noise.

Home Base/Blog: This is my home base, speculatethemarkets.com, and I believe that every trader should have a blog to share their ideas, interact with other like minded people, and eventually build a community. There is no better place to get feedback as to whether your ideas are any good than to post them to your blog and let other smart people collaborate on them.  Check out this video of Seth Godin and Tom Peters talking about blogging then read this awesome post by Chris Brogan on blogging seriously.

Listening Stations: I primarily use two methods to receive quality information from top financial bloggers: Google Reader and Tweetdeck. I find people who align with my ideas and thinking and subscribe there info into my Google Reader, each time they put out new information I am alerted.

My next way of interacting with creative traders is through Tweetdeck. I think more traders should be using this free service. I personally use it to filter out all the noise associated with twitter. I go through my favorite people who post valuable and thought provoking content to twitter, make a list of those people, and put that list on my tweetdeck dashboard. That way I only see tweets from people who I think are worth noticing. All the other stuff on twitter is just noise.

Broadcast Station: This is where I actually go out and interact with traders commenting on blogs, retweet awesome tweets, and email them directly. You can’t expect people to come to you, you have to take action and go to them. This is where you, as Michael Bigger puts it, “promote greatness wherever you see it”. (Speaking of promoting greatness, go buy How Trader’s Achieve Creative Flow. Seriously, do it!)

Quick note: I would advise staying away from trading forums in general. Most of the time it is filled with people who are spammers, scammers, or just don’t know what they are talking about. Very rarely do I ever find anything of value in a trading forum, but there are the exceptions. Any forum that is meant for sharing open source code I think has value, but so far that’s about the only benefit to public forums I’ve found.

Business: This is the part of the ecosystem that pays the bills: making money. Find ways to harvest profits out of the market, create new trading strategies, create trading “recipes“. Take other traders ideas and make them your own. Use solid money management skills and always have a framework to base your trading decisions from.

So, as you can see it is very important to see what our trading ecosystem is telling us. Now, go create your own ecosystem for maximum information optimization!