MINIMALISM IN TRADING: AN INTERVIEW WITH EVERETT BOGUE


As discussed in my previous post, I intend to delve into discussion of the Minimalist Movement and how it can benefit self-employed Traders in their on-going battle for trading and investment survival. So let’s get started!

Today, I’m happy to introduce Everett Bogue, the author of the fantastic website/blog Far Beyond the Stars, and the e-books The Art of Being Minimalist and Minimalist Business. Everett has developed his lifestyle to live with less and work from anywhere in the world (currently in Oakland). His writing has been featured on the top-25 blog Zen Habits (another fave of mine). In his past life, he lived in NYC and worked for New York Magazine. His goal with his blog is to teach you how you can apply minimalism to your life in order to live and work from anywhere.

It is my strong belief that tenants of minimalism can keep Traders focused on their goals by minimizing distractions caused by our #1 enemy, high overhead. With the help of Michael Bigger of Bigger Capital (@biggercapital), we engaged Everett in a discussion about his transition from a 9-to-5 ham-and-egger, to an inspirational figure on the web showing people ways to challenge old thoughts about the way you’re supposed to live, and instead reduce your overhead and expand your opportunities. While Everett is NOT a Trader and professes limited knowledge of the subject, his message has very universal themes that can apply to us. Follow our discussion:

Sean: Thanks again for agreeing to do this interview! As you know, I’m a Trader. I trade my own money and work from home. And there are a lot of people like me out there. Traders, in general, have a proclivity to want to live high on the hog as big spenders and big consumers. And far too many times I’ve seen their overhead (financial and emotional) completely kill their careers. Your brand of minimalism is something I think many small-time Traders (as well as some big-time hedge fund types) could greatly benefit from and should at least consider when structuring their businesses. The Trading lifestyle can certainly lend itself well to the location-independent individual who is free to live according to his own rules – much as you do.

Everett: Definitely! That’s pretty cool what you do. Its probably way more similar to what I do than we think. I trade ideas for money. You trade money for money. Let me first say… I know nothing about trading – as we’ve already talked about – but I hope I can address all of this without sounding completely ignorant.

Sean: True, you may not know much of our industry. But your message has many practical applications to Traders. And have no fear, there are plenty of operators in our business who have no clue as well ;)

One thing that draws me to being an Independent Trader is the ability to be “location independent”. You are a strong proponent of this lifestyle. Can you discuss the positives and negatives that you’ve experienced since becoming “location independent”?

Everett: Location independence really has been made possible by the radical expansion of the Internet over the last few years. Working from your laptop is pretty much what everyone in the information or trading business does these days, so why do it from one desk when you can do it from anywhere in the world?


Here’s what I’ve found that’s positive:


1. You can work from anywhere in the world. Yay! This has allowed me to live in a bunch of American cities over the last year, including Portland, Brooklyn, Chicago, and now Oakland.
2. Perspective. Moving around a lot has really made me aware of how EASY it is to move around a lot. Before I launched on this location independent journey, I was worried that life would come to an end if I ended up in a new place. Then I did it, and realized that there’s a great big world out there outside my doorstep. Why not explore it while you’re working instead of just a few weeks out of the year while on vacation?


The only real downside that I’ve found is that a lot of my friends are all over the place. I’m in touch with a whole crew of location independent rockstars at the moment, and that’s cool, but they’re all over the place. I can’t go get drinks with Colin Wright, because he’s in Thailand for example. This means that learning how to meet new people in new places is one of my #1 challenges, but it also is a very great skill to get good at, so maybe it isn’t a downside after all.

I would argue that the skill of being comfortable in new situations and meeting and forging friendships with new people is an amazing and essential skill to have!


You strongly believe in NOT wasting time and attempting to get all your work done in two hours per day (on average). Many Traders can benefit from this as well. Although equity markets around the world are typically open for about 7 hours a day (currencies trade 24 hrs/day), there are usually only a couple hours in each day where most of the opportunity exists (in fact, there was an article about this in today’s WSJ). What might you suggest a Trader do to focus in on the truly meaty opportunities and disregard the dull parts of each day?

Yeah, well… do you really need to trade all day? As I said previously, I don’t know anything about Trading, but take a moment and imagine this: What if you were to find a way to identify the hours of the day when you do your best trading? Maybe it’s after your first cup of coffee and before breakfast?


I think about this when I’m analyzing when I do my best writing. For example, I don’t do my best writing when I’m constantly on twitter or checking to see how many of my books have sold. It just doesn’t work that way, because I’m distracted. Maybe watching stock prices go up and down isn’t the best way to make your best trading decisions — which I think might have been one of the points of Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan (but again, trading ignorant.)


You might find that spending 30 minutes a day trading, with a specific plan of action, or by trusting your instincts can lead to a much more profitable business than spending 8 hours a day trying to make sense out of a lot of numbers that are going up and down.


A lot of people can benefit from pulling the plug on information overload, trusting that their decisions are right, measuring results, and then replicating successes. Spending all day a computer, in my experience, doesn’t accomplish that as well.

I agree with you 100%! In fact, a little while back I wrote a blog post discussing my attempts at slowing down in a trading world that is constantly speeding up. Humans can’t possibly compete with computers on speed. So the trick is to learn to play a different game that relies on your intuition and the big picture.


You’re a fan of “creative flow”. It would seem key to the above question is to establish good flow. Michael Bigger asks if you can recommend a good book or blog to learn about creative flow?

Creative flow rocks, and I’ve spent a good portion of my life trying to master it. The idea behind it is that you need to be working on something that challenges you, undistracted for a set period of time. Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us that came out earlier this year delved into the topic a bit, and of course Mihály Csíkszentmihályi pioneered the idea in his book Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness. Both great books!


You know what else started me thinking more about it? Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The actions you take before you know you’re taking them are usually smarter than the ones you think about taking.


Here’s what I’ve found. When I’m doing work, I don’t think about it. Like with this interview. I don’t stop, I just write and I trust the ideas are right without second guessing them.
Don’t make any big trades on my account. But maybe trusting what you’re going to do based on your instinct and not thinking too much might be more profitable.

Absolutely. Sometimes Traders get into the rut of trying to be perfect. As you’ve written before, “Perfect is overcoming the final 1%, and most people can’t do that”.  I’ve always repeated the mantra: “Perfect” is the mortal enemy of “good enough.”


In your free e-book “Introduction to Minimalist Workday” you write: “A hunter spots opportunities and greets them…this, above all else is the winning strategy for working less.” And you follow this up with: “Once you start to spot opportunities outside of everyone else’s assumed reality, you’ll begin to notice them everywhere.” This is very applicable to Traders of all stripes. Can you provide some examples from your experience in Minimalism where you’ve been able to uncover opportunities that you might have been blind to while you were grinding out the 9-to-5 at your job back in NYC?

I went through a significant portion of time last year, after I left my job, trying to figure out how to make money. I had these preconceived notions about how money was made that had really hindered my ability to bring about actual physical cash.


For example: time = money. Not true AT ALL! Creating great work = money. Leading = money. YES! you got it. There are a million and one ways to create cash flow, and 95% of the population think that it must come from having a job. This means that it’s so impossibly hard to get a good job because everyone is doing it and bosses have to sort through stacks of thousands of resumes to get at the people who are qualified.


One of the best exercises that I tried was this: how many different ways can I earn $10 in an hour? I’d spend eight hours trying to get $10 a couple different ways. I even worked for – god forbid – Demand Studios to see if that would work, it did, but it didn’t scale.


When you hunt for creative ways to come about making money, occasionally you’ll hit on a good one now and then. For instance, I started blogging about being minimalist and selling an e-book on being minimalist. This resulted in hundreds of dollars in income for me, and at that point it was the best way for me to get money. So I decided to scale it up into an empire.


I then wrote a book called the Art of Being Minimalist, and BAM enough income to live on and do anything I want, because I’m minimalist. Then I just built from there.


I wouldn’t have got to that point if I wasn’t searching for ways. If it hadn’t been this idea, it would have been the next. The point is to keep hunting, and do what other people AREN’T doing. Because almost everyone is doing the same thing – what they’re told to do.


Wait, I can’t stop – fllooowwwing.


Here’s one more example:


Recently a friend of mine emailed me in New York. She’s trying to be a photographer, but no one wants to buy her photos. I know for a fact (because I tried to be a photographer) that selling photos isn’t a profitable business. iStockphoto KILLED the stock industry with low margins.


So I said to her: “why not write a blog teaching people how to take photos like you?” You could do the same thing and start something about how to become a rockstar trader. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t a rockstar trader. Whatever. You’ll figure out how to become one while you’re writing it. The point is that there are round-about ways to come into possession of money that people don’t think about. You can still be a photographer and teach wannabe photographers how to be a photographer for a new amount of income.


For example, Art of Being Minimalist is only around 25% of my income now (which is more than enough for me to live on). Minimalist Business (a book I wrote about creating digital businesses with zero-overhead) and affiliate marketing is the rest. I’m launching a new e-course soon that will quickly become 90% of my income, because the price-point is so high and it will help people accomplish what I did with one-on-one attention by me.


Maybe not all Trades or Traders are equal, only some can really rock out. Maybe teaching people to be Traders is where the money in trading actually is?

Much of what you just said can be translated in the Trader’s world as the hunt for profitable trading ideas and strategies. Not every strategy or idea will be be profitable. In fact, most won’t. The Traders who limit the losses when they are wrong, learn the lesson from the experience, then consistently and persistently move on to the next opportunity are the Traders who live another day. And the longer you last, the better your odds of achieving success. And as you said, there are many profitable opportunities in the trading arena that aren’t limited to actual trading (as many charlatans have discovered over the ages).


You talk about keeping low-to-zero overhead (both business and personal). For independent Traders, I can’t stress the importance of this enough. To us, cash in our inventory. Like a 7-eleven operator, if we’re out of inventory, we’re out of business. Discuss the psychological and social impacts/changes you’ve had to go through to learn to live with less? And how has that paradoxically given you more?

If you’re worried about starving, you can’t make good business decisions. I know this, because I’ve been at the starvation point for a moment or two throughout my life here and there.


The #1 easiest way to have a lot of money and also be starving is to have high overhead.


This is what most people do when they get a lot of money: they go and spend it on fancy new stuff right away because that’s what they think they should do. I say NO! Don’t do that. It’s actually a really dumb idea.


When your overhead is low. Like under $1,000. You can focus on generating much more revenue faster and easier than if you’re frantically trying to get money together for your Hummer and mortgage payment every month. I say opt-out of dumb big expenses in order to focus on creating profit to live a freedom lifestyle.


You can’t do that if you’re psychologically starving at the same time that you have $5,000 a month coming in. That’s where most people are.

Absolutely! Changing gears a little…You’ve said that you’ve made a point of aligning yourself with a crowd of extraordinary individuals in an effort to amplify your message to the world. Who do you admire in the blogosphere who is not on most people’s radars whose insights could be useful for Traders?

There are a lot of people out there inspiring people to do incredible things. One up-and-comer I really enjoy reading is Tyler Tervooren ofAdvanced Riskology. He’s not a trader, but his blog is all about overcoming the idea of risk in order to do great things. One part of that is having low overhead.

I’ve been reading and enjoying Tyler’s blog for a while now. I think you may have been the one who turned me on to him. Thanks! Can you think of and recommend a non-trader on twitter who’s insights could be helpful for Traders?

Corbett Barr of Think Traffic is someone who’s really been helping me think about growing my blog/profits lately. I’d say check him out on Twitter: @corbettbarr.

And finally, Michael Bigger asks the question that many are probably asking themselves right now: How do you reconcile capitalism with minimalism?

I think minimalism is a great tool to use to interact with a capitalist system. When I was in college I used to hate on capitalism a lot, but then I realized that there’s no point in that. It works really well, doesn’t it? The people who get screwed by capitalism are people who don’t understand how it works.


Just because you CAN buy everything doesn’t mean you should. Yes, the TV wants you to have a new car. Yes you could buy 1000 DVDs on Amazon at the blink of an eye. But will that really help you? Nope. The smartest Capitalists are the ones who realize that if they make decisive choices with their money, life is a lot easier to live. Freedom comes easy when you don’t feel like it’s your capitalist obligation to spend more money than you make on stuff you don’t need.

Amazing! Thank you Everett for sharing your insight with my readers. It has been a pleasure following your journey and I hope many people who are learning of you for the first time will take a peak at Far Beyond The Stars and join you on your path to freedom. Next time your location independence has you traveling through Chicago, beers are on me!

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A HUGE thank you to Michael Bigger for not only contributing to this piece, but also for making the twitter introduction between me and Everett several months ago. Just another example of how StockTwits is adding immeasurably tremendous value to the trading universe!

If any of you are interested in purchasing any of Everett Bogue’s great e-books, please follow this link. I’ll earn a commission :)

Stay tuned for more insight on how Minimalism can benefit the art of Trading and please help me share on twitter, facebook, stumbleupon, etc. Thanks!


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The information in this blog post represents my own opinions and does not contain a recommendation for any particular security or investment. I or my affiliates may hold positions or other interests in securities mentioned in the Blog, please see my Disclaimer page for my full disclaimer.

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