Anyone Traveling While Trading Remotely a La 4hourworkweek?

[Ed Goldstein 10]

I'm curious if anyone has any tips on trading remotely while globetrotting?

 

I've begun to be consistently profitable and I want to take the show on the road and wondered if anyone has suggestions on places to go or places to avoid other than warzones...

 

Some books talk about working remotely like 4 Hour Work Week, but as a trader I'm spending, by my own choice, much longer than four hours and would simply like a change of scenery..can anyone relate???

 

Thanks,

Ed

In the USA..for now

[brownsfan019 17]

My biggest concern when traveling while trading is a reliable internet connection. Without that, I won't bother opening the software up to begin with.

[daedalus 10]

tim ferriss's book has planted that same seed in my head... how great it would be to just travel the world and trade.... obviously reliable internet would be a requirement but I think you could find that pretty easily everywhere.

 

I'm also interested to see how new networks like sprints's 4G hold up.

[BlowFish 10]

Go to places with decent infrastructure. Internet, phone (fixed line and mobile). Stay in places that have those bases covered. Expect more issues than you would get at home regardless, there will always be a cleaner that unplugs the router to vacuum reception.

 

Get a broker who answers the phone on the first ring. Consider ones that have data centres in different parts of the world. A backup broker is never a bad idea wherever you are.

 

Make sure you use appropriate orders.e.g Market for entry (in case you get an outage with a resting limit order at the exchange). Have a resting limit order and stop for exit (same reason but for when you are in a trade).

 

Make sure your style is 'compatible' with the connections available. Some approaches are more robust. For example if you are entering based on an hourly bars close and holding for 3 day swings it probably wont trouble you too much if the internet is out for 10 minutes.

 

Get a nice laptop that can play games on too!

[ziebarf 10]

Nice advice Blowfish. I have been backpacking for a good while now and will say that South East Asia is not the place to travel-trade. I could barely get by with simming there let alone live trading. Although I did meet one guy trading forex in Cambodia... but it was pretty dicey.

 

I am in France now, and it seems totally feasible here. I suppose most of Europe is the same way. In my opinion the best way to do this would be to sublet apartments for a couple of weeks at a time. Relying on hotels and guest houses just won't cut it.

 

For shits and giggles, here are some "travel trades" I took today from my netbook (sim, mostly to keep me sharp). You should also look into freelance writing and some other online money making scheme. They won't require as robust technology.

[dmcwilliams 10]

When you set up in a new location, try to run a few ping tests on your internet connection and see what kind of response time you're getting. I'm not the most computer savvy person but what I've heard is that you should look for a response of 100 ms or less. Anything more than that is probably too slow and may be a good day to take a break from trading, or trade smaller size.

 

Some advice I heard elsewhere which I thought sounded wise:

-use hotels which have an ethernet port in the room.

-don't really want to trade on a public wireless network, for security reasons as well as ping.

-If you can't find a hotel with ethernet ports, use an internet cafe.

 

-Don't expect the same speed and reliability you get trading from home or from an office. -Have your brokers' support numbers in case his connection drops

-don't place lots of resting limit orders

-don't trade so much size that a 5 min disconnect would screw him over

-be careful trading news releases

 

I think a lot of us would like to hear about your experience of trading on the road

[Ed Goldstein 10]

Thanks for the feedback everyone! When I do hit the road I'll let you guys know for sure what I find!

I really like the idea of "currency arbitrage" in the realm of living expenses. Tim Ferriss talks about living in Argentina at a substantial discount in 2003-4 even when the dollar was 'weak.'

 

His gig is a little different: internet marketing and lifestyle design..but paying staff in rupees, living on pesos, and getting paid in dollars is the coolest.

 

I guess I'm coming to this after some malaise with focusing on trading to the detriment of what I had originally asked from this profession...freedom to live and pursue that which truly means life to me. I don't want to end up a divorced lonely trader-recluse:)

 

Trading to live, not living to trade,

 

Ed

[McKeen 10]

A solid and pretty reliable solution even in lower-standard countries is buying a prepaid sim-card (available in most non-war countries around the globe, including Middle east, Asia and parts of South America), using your cell-phone as a modem. If you look at the network providers homepage before visiting you can more often than not activate a datapackage-promotion for that sim-card, resulting in many hours of stable surfing, because theese days (nearly) all countries have stable 3G/HDSPA or other networks making it quick enough for the trading platform and also more stable than anything on the ground. To my experience it has been more frustrating, and especially more expensive, putting my trust in grounded or public connections when travelling than my cellphone. I just have to be sure there is enough money on the sim-card and if the coverage is too bad i just change hotel or public place or whatever. Storms has been the only threat for me so far, but they cause electric shutdowns on the ground anyways so there is no difference.

 

Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Brazil, Argentina, Jordan, Laos + all countries in Europe are some places this do work like a charm and pretty cheap too. In Thailand you get 50 hrs of 1Mbit+ (up to 3.6 Mbit) speed on your cellphone for only 212 Baht (approx 5-7$) with the biggest operator covering any place one would ever want to go. Sometimes you have to show your passport, sometimes not, and sometimes you have to charm a local and give them a few bucks to buy you one.

 

The no-can-do´s to this method so far has been Israel and Myanmar as the only places it couldn´t be solved withing the first day or two.

 

Good luck on your traveling and trading!

 

/ McKeen