The Truth About Travel Trading?
In this article, I’ll be sharing my honest thoughts on travel trading, what the pros and cons are, and the best trading strategies and actionable tips that are suitable for trading remote or trading part time. Whether you are currently traveling or not, this article will definitely provide you some insight into how you can improve your trading and how to focus on what's been making you profitable and push it to the next level.
Travel Trading Pros
Experiences
Let’s start with the pros of travel trading first. Obviously that would be all the experiences of going out you would otherwise never have had if you were just stuck at home all day trading. As many of you know, that was pretty much my most of my daily life, even before the pandemic hit. I’m a loner and didn't have much of a life.
Taking a vacation toTaiwan to get out of North America was an amazing break for my life. The food in Taiwan was a-aaaazming.
If there’s one thing you need to know about Taiwanese people, it’s that we love to eat. I know this isn’t a food or travel channel, but I just want to share these insights with you. I went to eat almost every day, I went on day trips and weekend trips with my family and traveled around the whole island. There was good food, good people, good culture and good scenery; you have it all there.
Mental Reset
The second pro to travel trading is that it provides you a mental reset and gets you away from focusing on the market 24/7, which was essentially what I was doing. I’d wake up to prepare premarket at 4AM local time in Vancouver, have the watchlist ready by 6AM, trade actively from open to 9AM, take an hour nap or so, go back to trading in the afternoon power hour till close, and then continue reading up on news, reviewing the market and helping other traders out in my own trading community on Discord.
I was living, breathing, and pretty much eating day trading all the time even before the pandemic. For the most part, this kind of hypr concentration and zoning in on the market was great for my trading performance, but I had lost a lot of humanity and human connections. My personal relationships suffered greatly. That vacation and travel trading has been great for my mental health.
Travel Trading Cons
Of course, travel trading is not without sacrifices and some setbacks. Let's move on to some pretty realistic cons of travel trading.
Lack of Focus
The first is the lack of focus and decreased mental concentration for your trading. First of all, you have to understand that trading is 90% a mental and psychological game. Like I've often talked about before, how you carry yourself in your daily lives will form a trickle down effect to your trading performance.
If your day to day life is hectic, your personal relationships are a mess, or if you are currently undergoing a lot of financial stress and are worried about how you’re going to pay rent or put food on the table for your family…
All those are extremely stressful and will affect your trading. You might not be able to wait patiently for your set up and get into trades too early, or you may not follow your stop losses when the trade is going against you. Losing any amount of money, however small while you’re financially stressed, is simply hard to accept. Unfortunately, holding on to losers and not cutting losses for too long is what will turn a small loser into big, unrecoverable damage.
While I was on vacation and going out and about with my family in Taiwan, my life was extremely hectic and busy. You can only imagine how much there was to take in mentally and physically for me.
Like I mentioned earlier, trading is very much a mental game and requires 110% concentration. I did find myself somewhat distracted coming back from a day out and about. Trying to sit down around 6:30PM or 7PM local time while trying to pull my mind back and refocus it to trading in the hopes of getting ready for the open at 9:30pm local time was nearly impossible.
I'm not sure if this is going to make sense, but I find my mind and thoughts to be like a wild stallion unleashed for the first time. If there's lots of things going on in my life, my thoughts are just running around bouncing from left to right, up and down processing all the information at the same time, and it's hard to calm it down.
Maybe that's why I talk so fast, and it's just literally impossible to slow me down. Seriously, the playback speed function for my Youtube videos is extremely useful. I just can’t slow down; I think it would kill me. Maybe I have a minor case of adhd. Who knows?
In trading, we need a calm and collected approach in order to trade well. Thankfully, I already knew about this inability to concentrate while traveling, so I took appropriate measures, which I'll share with you later on in the article.
On top of my own inability to calm down my mind after a day of going out, there’s also the distractions at home, which probably wouldn’t happen if you were traveling by yourself or living on your own in a hotel like I did for two weeks. After that was over, I ended up living at my parents home and there were some distractions to say the least.
Lack of Screen Real Estate
Now the second con of travel trading is that you’d be trading on a lightweight mobile trading station, which is usually subpar in comparison to trading on a home set up. That also means the lack of screen real estate.
I have made a video on both my home trading set up, as well as my travel trading computer set up. I have to say, my desktop PC trading station is so much better. I have an extremely fast PC gaming tower at home, which is connected to 4 full size monitors, and a full size RGB mechanical gaming keyboard optimized with all the hotkeys.
My travel setup is decent. My gaming laptop nitro 5 is a beast, and I’ve never had speed or processing issues. Like I said, though, the lack of screen real estate is an issue. Even with 2 mobile monitors, all the three screens are still only 15 inches. I could only observe up to 5 or 6 stocks at any given time, whereas at home I could watch up to 20.
As I’ve mentioned many times before, 90% of the trading is simply observing and waiting, rather than clicking buttons. Since I could only watch 5 to 6 stocks, that affected my trading drastically.
For example, on that trip, I was trading 4 stocks around the same time that were showing amazing setups. I could really have used full sized monitors to manage those positions.
Two of those stocks were MRNA and NVAX that turned out to be really big winners, but unfortunately the other two NKLA and IMRN did not. NKLA ended up being a small winner which was fine, but IMRN turned out to be a big loss.
I'm not trying to make any excuses, and I did the best I could. I followed my risk and managed the positions. However, I really shouldn’t have been trading all those positions at the same time while trading remotely, but if I had bigger monitors and more screens, I would have been more equipped to take full advantage of all of those set ups that were presented to me.
On top of that, I got so sick of trading in a cramped space. When I was in the quarantine hotel for the first 2 weeks, I did have a table, but it was barely enough for me to fit two laptops. Similarly, my very important lamborghini cardboard box took up a huge amount of space.
Sickness
The third con to travel trading was more specific to the pandemic situation. I did get a lot of comments in my travel trading set up video, asking why I would fly during that time. That’s true, flying 13 hours from Vancouver to Taipei was not fun, especially with all the personal wear protection. I had a full N95 mask, a pair of glasses and another full facial mask in front of me as well as a full protection suit.
To travel during that time, you essentially had to give up breathing during the flight and be willing to quarantine for 2 weeks in isolation in a hotel room by yourself. I was perfectly fine doing that, but most people can’t or understandably don’t want to. I also have a full video on a day of my life in the quarantine hotel, including how I was living, eating and trading if you’re interested in checking that out.
Key Takeaways
Here are some key takeaways from my travel trading experience and some actionable tips for you if you ever decide to take off traveling the world for a few months while continuing to trade.
High Probability Setups
First, I would focus one just 1 to 2 high probability setups that you have traded time and again in the past while ignoring all the B and C set ups. By focusing on your bread and butter set ups and stocks that you know inside out, you’ll be able to trade more effectively and most likely save yourself a major headache.
At the same time, it won’t require as much mental energy. Like I said before, you’ll most likely be distracted, and the focus just won’t be 110% like if you were trading back home.
Downsize Your Shares
Second, I would downsize your share sizes by at least 30% to 50%, if not even more. Again, this goes back to reducing stress and the amount of full focus you’ll need. If you’re on vacation or traveling, you don’t want your trading to affect your mood. Sure, that might mean less profits at the end of the day, but trust me, you don’t want your trading, whether green or red, to have a huge psychological impact on your ability to enjoy your trip.
It was following these two rules, that I was still able to enjoy my time with family during the days in Taiwan and come back and trade the market at night after 7PM. Despite the fact that a month of travel trading means a lot less profit due to the fact that I'm making fewer trades with a lot less size, I was still able to maintain a really positive month with very few red days. I also still got to enjoy time with my family with relatively little stress, which is all I could ever ask for.
Anyways, I really hope this article gives you some insight to some very real problems with travel trading. It's not always sunshine and roses when you go chill on the Eiffel Tower and come back to bank lamborghinis. Real life doesn’t work like that.
