Trading from the beach or the swimming pool?

Traffic, packed trains or subways, all the different boring shades of office, everyone will get tired or bored by their job for one reason or the other, at one point in their working life. People go through the standard process of getting good grades during their studies, hoping to land a good job with a decent salary after graduating and then when they land that job, thinking: Is this it?
As traders we have the option to work from home or even remotely in any place in the world. Both are interesting and tempting options. In this article we'll go over the pros and cons of trading (and living) remotely. 

You still need to put in effort

I might as well start off with the hard truth. There's no free loading. To master trading you still need to put in work and then you still need to maintain it. It still beats the reality of a normal job in which you are grinding 50+ hours, with stress, no purpose, no satisfaction en no energy or time left to do things you actually like.
In this day and age however, we have the opportunity to leave all that and take on something in which we can define our own hours and work for ourselves...and even from where we want.

My office...erm...the whole world...?

It may seem daunting to suddenly have the whole world as an optional location to live and work from. And frankly, it is. Initially it's probably best to select one place that's easy to start from and stay there for a while. A while is at least a few weeks. Your body needs some time to adapt, and each location is probably worth it to really get to know and that just takes a bit of time.
So don't start to race across the globe, but take it one place at a time at a pace that you can digest and that doesn't interfere with your trading performance. That last part is probably the key factor that decides if this life style works for you or not. Your work/trading structure needs to slightly adapt to each new location. If you work in an office now, note how different work is when you change desk or device. So you can imagine how it will be when you change time zone, housing and all-round environment quite often.

So which places are good?

Try to focus on locations that are politically stable, offer good internet connections, affordable accommodation and where the visa policy is good for you. It might help if you like the food too!
Generally you'll see that most of the places that you'll come across are already hot spots for Digital Nomads (as independent remotely working people are also known).
https://nomadlist.com/ is also a website that is useful to look for locations. You can adjust some filters to what is important to you personally.
It's of course also fun to meet other people who work online and perhaps even a few traders.

The social aspect

That brings me to the next thing. When no longer working in an office a big aspect of working life will change. No more colleagues you see the entire day. While you may be happy to not have to talk to some of your current colleagues, there is the risk of feeling lonely when completely working alone. So even though you could be in a beautiful location in the world, it is still nice to connect to people.

There are plenty of options to connect with other digital nomad (traders) or even locals or other travelers in general. One of those ways is through online groups for remote workers. Another is to join a traveling community of remote workers. There are a few companies who offer this service and who arrange the locations, accommodations and sometimes even the visas and flights.
You can also find co-working spaces around the world or even co-living spaces.
However, whichever of the above you prefer, the most important thing will still be that you have to do what works best for you and your trading performance.

Online administrative stuff

Make sure you have as many things as you can arranged and accessible online. It would be pretty annoying if you are working from some location 15 hours from home and then you have to visit your bank in person to arrange something.
Also make sure you have a physical post address somewhere. This could be at friends or family, and there are also companies who arrange this for you. They will open your mail, scan it and then email it to you.

The visa stuff

It's one of those necessary things that is not fun, but still has to be arranged. This needs to be checked for each country you plan to visit and a lot is based on which passport you have. Sometimes you don't have to arrange anything for certain countries and for other countries you have to fill out half a dozen forms to get a short term visa.

Carry more than one credit and/or debit card

It will happen that some country won't accept your card or one of your cards gets blocked for some reason. So always make sure you carry more than one card. You don't want to have to rely on you country's embassy to help you out.

Other things you need to carry

A reliable laptop or tablet. Depending on how many charts you like to see all at once, you will need one or more screens.
You need to bring motivation, discipline (it's so tempting to just lie on the beach instead of working) and responsibility. You are in charge of your own success, because there is no one to tell you to get off your ass and do the work required.
You also need to make sure you have some sort of travel insurance and another insurance that covers any medical expenses. This depends a bit on how things are arranged in your home country though.

Let me know which one of you is considering to go remote and who already is (and where)!