How to Trade When Traveling
Okay, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Line Your Own Pockets. Today, we're gonna talk a little bit about how to trade when you're on vacation, which or should you be trading, I guess, would be the first way to start when you're on vacation. This is spurred on from, lazy Dave here who actually took a couple weeks off. Me, never, never a week off.
Michael:Always here. Dave's out gallivanting all over the world trading. And why don't you well, why don't we start with that? Tell everyone a little bit about, you know, what you did while you're away. You know, for the audience, we just keep pumping out episodes to you, but we actually took a few weeks away from each other at this time as well.
Dave:Yeah. We'll go over the motivation for it. Then at the end, I thought really a lot about this. I came up with, I think, what is the best remote desktop solution for accessing and trading remotely. First, we'll go through the motivation for it and how that came about.
Dave:Then toward the end of the episode, want to go into that because I think it's really interesting and it's the first time I've really felt good about a remote desktop solution.
Michael:It's just for everyone else in the green room, he was talking about this remote desktop solution too. So I'm pumped to hear about it because I haven't, but I've never heard someone, this is probably the nerdiest thing ever, so excited find a remote desktop. So I'll be pumped to hear about the solution as well.
Dave:Yeah. So just to set the stage, I mean, you know, it's good to go on vacation. Mhmm. But it's also good to trade your strategies when you've got a lot of edge. So it becomes a real dilemma.
Dave:I mean, the There's the cost of going on vacation, but then there's the opportunity cost of not trading. If you've got a good enough edge, that could be a very expensive vacation. Knowing that and thinking about it over the years and trying to find a good trade off between taking time off, but also trading the edge I have. And it's, you know, when you go on vacation, it's my wife is very, very supportive. Sometimes I call her my secret weapon.
Dave:She's awesome. But it takes some convincing to say, Hey, Joan, I'm going to be trading every day on vacation. Help me figure out a way to do it in a way that makes sense and where we can feel like we're on vacation, but we can also be there when these trades happen that are very profitable. So she understands that. And like I said, she's very supportive.
Dave:But it does take some talking through that because you're on vacation, you don't want to be just strapped to your desk in some other place. Right? So go ahead.
Michael:Well, was gonna say, well, right off the bat, right, you talk about the benefits of being systematized and using bots for entries and things like that is that this conversation would go way different with the wife if you were discretionary trader and you're like, okay, need to do my pre market prep, and then I need to be sitting there all day and waiting for this or that thing to occur. Whereas, you know, as a systematic trader, you're basically saying there's generally clusters of time that you need focus and then long periods of time where you don't. So it's not like you mentioned, you don't have to be just glued to the desk watching every tick all the time. And then also the kind of mental side of things is you don't need to be hyper focused on everything for the entire time as well. So it's easier to find that balance.
Michael:It's not easy, but it's certainly easier to find some sort of balance between trading and working or trading and vacation in this kind of because you're systematic and because you use bots more or less for most of your trades.
Dave:Yeah. And you called me lazy earlier, which I take that label with pride. Good. You know, like any good programmer, there's pride with being quote unquote lazy. But, yeah, I mean, one way to think about it is systematic trading is you're kind of on vacation all the time.
Dave:I mean, you could think about it that way. You're sort of outsourcing a lot of the pointing and clicking that a lot of traders are doing to software and That frees up your time just normally to think about, to do other things. For systematic traders, it's not really a big leap to take this step. And it gives you a lot of freedom to go on vacation and continue to trade. Mean, you're right.
Dave:It's not even an option for discretionary traders, really. There's a lot of freedom that comes with this, but there's a lot of prep that goes into it also. You can't just snap your fingers and go on vacation and have your stuff trade. Really need to sort of build up and prepare for it. And I've done different things in the past.
Dave:I have gone on vacation and not traded at all. I would do that earlier in my career. I have gone on vacation and brought a laptop which had all my stuff running locally on the laptop. Oh. And that's
Michael:I I
Dave:of works.
Michael:I grimace. Can work. Said that. Yeah. But you're you're you're yolo ing your hotel or resorts or whatever Wi Fi on that pretty hard.
Dave:Yeah. So I've in fact, a couple of years ago, did exactly that. I had everything on a laptop. I bought a monitor when I got to where we were traveling to, which was Flagstaff. We spent a month in Flagstaff a couple of summers ago.
Dave:That solution wasn't terrible. You don't need a ton of monitors like you see a lot of pictures of trading rigs where people have so many monitors. Many do you have?
Michael:Got one and I'm running off a laptop. So I've got like the lid of the laptop open. Yeah. Some other stuff, but I've got one now. It's it's big.
Michael:It's like four thirty seven or something inches. But yeah, I just just the one I never there's never a time where I'm like, oh, I really need more screen real estate because there's just ways that you can virtual desktops and things like that. There's ways you can manage windows way easier than back in the day, for sure.
Dave:Yeah. So I've gone through several iterations of this. And I guess the first thing to discuss is you can plan when your vacation occurs, right? And you can look at the year, the trading year, and figure out optimal times to go on vacation where you know you're not likely to have as many trades. And then you do have some flexibility there to take off if you want to.
Dave:That's the first thing I would suggest. So first thing I would do is look at earnings season. Lot of trades probably come up during earnings season. Just plan your vacation for outside earnings season. That's one thing I suggest people do.
Dave:I would say
Michael:in a in a more normal market, maybe, but in the, let's just say the current administration, it seems like a tweet comes out in the whole So yeah, you can plan the best you can, but there could always be some type of, you know, it doesn't have to be, you know, the administration, but it could be some sort of outside source, right? COVID or something like that. It could be all kinds of things that beat you off that plan. So you have to be okay of here, I'm planning that this is the time I'm going to take vacation, but like a day before there could be some macro event, and now the markets, you know, the volatility has spiked in the markets, and now everything's moving again. So yeah, the best you can control for sure.
Dave:Yeah, so maybe a better way to look at it is here are the times where you definitely don't want to take vacation. And there's several periods throughout the year, depending on the strategy, where you definitely want to be in your seat and watching the market closely those days. So I would take a look at that and you could look at a back test and see. I mean, there's you could figure that out just to kinda get an educated guess. Gordon, like you said, it's not gonna be perfect, but I think it's worth looking at and worth thinking about.
Michael:Yeah, and. You know, makes sense to try to plan around that the best you can. The right life will obviously find a way, right? Kids or or, you know, maybe a wife that works and she only can get certain times off or or whatever. So let's say you've done that and you just can't figure out a way that there's a slow time.
Michael:So when it comes to Yeah. You gotta book when you gotta book and and say it's right smack dab in the middle of earning season. So so what's next, right, if you if you can't get around it?
Dave:Right. So and that's the that was the case this time. You know, we wanted to go away for a month in July. We went to Madison. I knew this trip was coming up.
Dave:It went fine the previous time trading from the laptop, but something about it just didn't feel right. And I wanted to get a little bit better about come up with a better plan. And the time to leave was bearing down on me, so I was sort of forced to start thinking about it. But I think one of the first things you can do is kind of do a dry run. Pretend or take your laptop and trade from it and figure out some theories about how you're going to trade, whether it's trading with a remote desktop or trading from a laptop, and then trade from the laptop that day from home with your main computer there as sort of a backup.
Dave:Sort of simulate what it's going to be like.
Michael:It was funny for me when you started saying that, was just thinking coffee shop, right? Just rip down to say, okay, today I'm going to go to Starbucks or, you know, pick your poison, whatever it is, and I'm going to bring whatever I need and make it close enough within a couple of minutes of where you are that if you realize that you absolutely need something else, can go back. But yeah, around your house, obviously first, you know, do a mental checklist, but that would be kind of the next baby step is, yeah, rip down to a coffee shop and say, I'm gonna Which I know a bunch of traders that that do that on purpose. They want to get out of the house to do that. So they go to a different coffee shop or park or whatever, and they bring it with them.
Michael:And that kind of forces you to say, Okay, well, I'm far enough away that I better have figured this out.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. And I can guarantee that you're going to learn a lot about your workflow or what you thought your workflow was when you do that, because there's going to be things you've forgotten or overlooked or could be better. And I suggest, go ahead and plan for that and take really good notes about what is happening, what you feel like you need, what you feel like you're missing when you're in that situation so that you don't forget and you can go back and learn. In fact, one of the traders I coached did this back when he went to Aspen.
Dave:We spent some time preparing for how he was going to actually trade remotely. He went to Aspen and he took a bunch of notes. I have some of those here that I think are really pretty insightful and probably a lot of the listeners will pick up from. But he had a whole laundry list of stuff to do once he got back.
Michael:Of and so sorry, just to reiterate, this was things he went, he did his thing, he wrote down like barriers and problems that and things that he could do better. And then he came back and made that which again is perfect. That's what we were talking about with like little mini trips, right? If you could go, you know, maybe after your coffee shop, maybe you just go away for a night and take the wife and go to a hotel a little bit and just try just branch out. But you know, this guy took the plunge and he's got some notes.
Michael:Let's just start going through those.
Dave:All right, so he's got six things that he wrote down here and. I mean, you'll see that some of these things seem like they would be obvious and they are kind of in retrospect, but it just takes you pulling the band aid and doing it and taking really good notes about what you're missing. Let's go over these. First thing he says is So these are sort of notes to himself when he gets back. So he says, Okay, make sure to set an alarm to account for the time change.
Dave:The very first day, he missed trading the open because of the time change. It sounds like a simple thing. Gosh, how could you miss that? But hey, you've flown across the country. Everything is different.
Dave:You have different pressures. You're there maybe with friends. Your spouse is making demands of you to not work on this vacation. So the first thing he says is set up some sort of alarm when this occurs, like when you should be in your seat or preparing for the trading day. That's the first thing.
Michael:Have to again, as someone who traveled a lot, especially pre pandemic, like I think the 2019 I went on 20 some odd flights, so two a month almost. Yeah, definitely did that. Wake up in New York and then the next day you're in California and then you're just completely and some of the your phone changes time and whatever. But if you don't have that already set super easy, especially that kind of east to west thing to sleep through that open and then you wake up and it's noon New York time, but it's still early, early you are.
Dave:Yeah. All right, so let's go to number two. Try to do everything possible to make it easy on your mind. List steps you can mindlessly follow, set alarms, reminders, etcetera. So I really like this one because what he's alluding to there is something I do for basically every part of my process.
Dave:And I call these standard operating procedures, SOPs, have a list of steps that you've documented that you can mindlessly follow. For example, when we start this podcast, I have a list of probably a dozen things that are not hard to remember, but I know that I've got this list that I follow and I don't have to remember all the steps. I turn my lights on, I lock my door and close the door and lock it so my wife doesn't come in. Close the blind, put the sound boards on the floor so the sound is better. Silence my phone.
Dave:So there's a whole bunch of steps that go into that, and none of them are really hard to remember, but I know I don't have to remember anything. I'm just consulting this standard operating procedure for what I do before the podcast.
Michael:Well, and that
Dave:was going
Michael:to be you read that, was like, probably just do that anyway. And that's it's funny. I've got a lot of the same thing for different thing where I have two young kids. So I don't know if I'm sleeping at night. Like I have no idea, but tomorrow I got to wake up and there's a handful of things I have to get ready for the trading day and the service I run and things like that.
Michael:And right, I could have a beautiful ten hour night sleep where I could get two and I have no idea which one it is. So yeah, that prep of as soon as if I can just sit there and just follow this list, then even if I'm near brain dead, I should be able to get at least past the finish line with as little mistakes as possible. So that's that's just a good one for life in general, I think.
Dave:Yeah. And I like the real power with that is let's say you wanna make a change to your process. Like, I wanna add another step for I don't know, something for preparing for the podcast. All it's it's a matter of just editing a text file. And I know I'm already referencing this list every time.
Dave:It's very easy to do that and I know I will reliably do that if I modify that file. It's a really nice way to do it. We're talking about podcast here, but I've got those for every part of my trading business and it's just super valuable to have that in place.
Michael:Really, really good book for if anyone hasn't read it, it's called The Checklist Manifesto. It's an awesome, awesome book. And yeah, the guy just long story short was he was trying to figure out why hospital deaths due to surgery didn't seem to be correlated with the wealth of the country. So, you know, so there were some countries that were poor and there was not a lot of surgery, like kind of accidental related deaths. Then a lot of rich countries like The US included was really, really high.
Michael:And he went through all of these countries and he did it with planes and a whole bunch of other things. And he found it was just the how good their checklist was and and whether or not Yeah. They had a system in place to say, right, did you take the sponge out of the patient? Did you check to see if your watch is there? Like, just a very basic things.
Michael:But, yeah, as soon as those countries adopted this kind of checklist style, yes, it's a whole whole book about checklists. Highly highly recommend that one.
Dave:Yeah. I've heard I haven't read it, but I've heard good things about it. You know, we should put that in the show notes. It's very good. Love it.
Dave:Alright. So the next thing All right. Number three from his list. My trading setup operates on a Windows virtual machine on a desktop running Ubuntu. Now, first of all, you have to understand, I wouldn't recommend this setup for any trader, but if you know this guy, he's a very technical guy and you know that he is well versed in this whole.
Dave:There are very good reasons for him to set it up this way. But just caveat, I would not recommend this for everybody. So to continue here, if my computer would have gone down, I would not have been able to trade. This was a good dry run for later. A week later, my electrical panel is being worked on at my house, and I had to not trade.
Dave:So it's it's just another thing that he's thinking about, like what could happen when I'm gone and away from my computer if I'm connected to it remotely? What could happen and how would I handle that situation? It's not like you're going be able to go upstairs and reboot your computer if something happens to it. So it's really good to be thinking about this and like, what would you do in this situation?
Michael:So that's interesting. So he wasn't running the local virtual machine on the laptop he brought with him. He had another machine at home that he was piping into, which is funny. That's the setup that I have as well. So I'll be interested to see kind of ways about that because I do the exact same thing.
Michael:Have a Mac for life, right? It runs all the business stuff and emails and the stream and editing videos and all of that. And then I have a dedicated PC and that runs some of the PC only problems or programs like real test and things like this. So I'm kind of in the same boat there and I get that. And it's actually to the point where I the wife knows that if I call her, know, how to do it, what machine it is, how to get it back up and running because, yeah, I'd be stuck just like that.
Dave:So another trader that I work with took a long trip to India earlier this year. And we'll get to the remote desktop solution that He was actually the one that turned me on to this particular solution. But he had a way to remotely flip the switch on his computer to turn it on and off. That's how much he thought about this situation and how important it is to him.
Michael:So in these cases, right, because what I've done sometimes, and I ended up just getting the local computer because the costs of cloud computers for the power that I need, specifically the RAM I need, get get pretty insane. But that's another thing for people to look at is I think it's called Windows three sixty five. They have their own Microsoft has their own solution for cloud computing and obviously Amazon workspaces and places like this. There are places that you can host a remote computer. And I know there are some that are trading dedicated and the supposed to be the advantage there is they hosted in New Jersey, whereas like where the exchange servers are So just another option.
Michael:Gets the the price gets up there for sure, especially if you need a beast, so I know a lot of traders and they have their their testing machine, their machine that's doing all of the the hard computational work is a local machine. And then trading, they just get by something very light because it's running like interactive brokers and maybe a small app for a bot or or something like and that's all it's doing.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's actually his next point here. Number four. Like, so because of the situation he realized with number three, the previous one, he's looking at renting a virtual machine to run his Windows instance.
Dave:And he says, I think it might be a good idea for all production trading strategies that he has, but and even before you think you need it. So I think that's true. Don't do this for for some of the reasons you mentioned. The other thing is most of the time I'm not on vacation. Most of the time I am in front of a computer.
Dave:And so it feels like a little bit of a waste to use a virtual machine three hundred days of the year or two hundred trading days in the year. And just for the purposes of being comfortable on vacation for your however many days a year that you're on vacation. So I I think it's worth thinking about. It's there are some situations where it does make a lot of sense to do it. But I think me, I've never gotten over that hump.
Dave:I'm always more comfortable with the computer I have, which I actually will probably talk about on the next episode, the exact setup I have, which
Michael:I mean, it
Dave:has been a long story in itself as you remember over the past few months.
Michael:Yes, I've been. I've been part and parcel to the the bug fixes and the the back and forth with the computers to try to get something that we had to cancel a couple recording sessions. And, yeah, it was a whole it's a whole event. But yeah. And and I get it.
Michael:You know, the the cloud computing, again, definitely has a lot of its benefits, you know, for, you know, people like Linux users generally have, like, aversions to Microsoft in general. So like offsetting that that could help. But yeah, there's just a lot of and like you mentioned is that nine times out of 10, you're you're always going to be better sitting in front of a actual physical machine. Or if you're remoting the way I do is I'm remoting within my house from wired Ethernet to wired Ethernet. So it's it's near seamless anyway.
Michael:But if I'm remoting into something and I'm using that frequently, it's just the little annoyance of you're talking milliseconds, but you you move your mouse or you click on something and then it takes a half a second and then it happens. That just over and over and over again, millions of times can just be a nightmare.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. You're right. Alright. Let's go on to number five, which I think is really probably the most interesting point here.
Dave:Alright. So number five, trading on vacation calls me to really think about what are the least number of steps I need to do to trade every day and start coming up with a list. I would like the list to be as small as possible because even on days when I'm not on vacation, small repetitive tasks will distract me from the energy I would like to spend building additional trading systems and doing other things. I love this one. I think that's exactly the right way to think about it.
Dave:It leads right into what we were talking about before with standard operating procedures. If you've got those SOPs for how to set up your what the steps you need to do to arm your trading software to trade for the day. When you have that set up in an SOP, you can look at it. You can think about that outside of market hours and take a broad look at it and figure out what steps you can eliminate. It's not all about how many steps can you fit into it.
Dave:It's really about what are the minimum number of steps you can take to actually do this? What are the real vital things that are required? And think about maybe you can get rid of several things on the list.
Michael:Yeah. And again, I love that. And I think that's one of those just like the other one that it's that's just good for life is to to have that because same, so I had a, you know, sick kid recently and that just kind of knocked me out for a couple days because I'm trying to look after the sick kid and right, we were in the hospital overnight, my brain's fried or whatever. So it's very much a like every week we've talked about this a bit, but we'll probably go over it again soon, how you, you know, managing task lists and things that you have to do. So I'm, you know, one of the things I did is when I went home while on, I manage all this through just Apple notes.
Michael:I have these are the things that I have to do listed, and then I have the other things that are things that I wanted to do, maybe, you know, test a new system or build something or make some content or whatever it is. And I can just copy all those and I can just paste them to the next week and then they're out of your brain. So when you have it all listed like that, you can say, you can just go down the list and say, is something I absolutely have to do. This is something that, you know, maybe I can push off until after my vacation or, you know, when I'm less sick or whatever it is. And just by having those, yeah, it's just absolutely just vital to say this is this is what I need to do day to day in order to have the trading business function.
Michael:And then this is stuff that will hopefully make my trading better in the long run. And by understanding the bare minimum that you have to do in order to get by, it just frees it up because, hey, if you can get rid of repetitive tasks, it's not going to help you anyway. Why wouldn't you? That's more time to think of more systems or build something or just do something else with your life.
Dave:For sure. Yeah. And and the one tool that I use that I was thinking of as you were mentioning this, I'm sure I've mentioned it before on the podcast. It's a tool called AutoHotKey. I love it.
Dave:It is the one piece of software, the very first piece of software I install on any new machine. It's basically a way to automate certain tasks, automate certain things in the GUI, automate everything about things. So it's a very valuable piece of software and a lot of the SOPs that I have, I've turned into hot keys. Like right before I'm getting ready to trade the close, I have a hot key that says X Close. I type that, it brings up all the windows that I need to have open when I'm trading the close.
Dave:So it's a really valuable piece of software.
Michael:Yeah, that's something that's next on the list because I've been starting to build a bit of my own list like that and just saying here's 10 buttons that I would press and you know, probably another conversation for another podcast, but I've been given access to the, they're calling it the Comet browser, which is ChatGP or no perplexities come out with like a Chromium browser and you can just tell it
Dave:to
Michael:do stuff. Like the examples it gave was, you know, I'm going camping, right? Go to Walmart, put everything I should need for camping and then and then build a cart and I'll go from there. So I'm starting to think about that as well. Something that again, people can start to think about is that we're now if these agents start to get better and better it could come to the point where you're just like hey watch me set up for the open and now every day I just want you to do it and I'll just sit back and watch but yeah the more that you can offset there's a couple of the others, a bunch of these which I love, which aren't just prepping for vacation.
Michael:It's just things to make your trading business and your trading life just better overall.
Dave:Yeah. Yep. So let's go to number six and this is where I'm gonna we'll lead into the discussion about remote desktop software and what I found is the best one. We can talk through a bit about that. So this will lead from this number six.
Michael:Mhmm.
Dave:Number six, I use so I'm reading from him, his notes here. I use Google remote desktop to connect to my Windows virtual machine. Of all the remote desktop connection features, I found it to be very robust, simple to use, and works every time. My only issue with it is the lack of ability to adjust the screen resolution on the virtual machine to match that on my laptop. So I have tried Google Remote Desktop, and I run into this same thing where it's really hard to get the display settings exactly like you want to see them.
Dave:So you might want to consider using the software, but that's a big hurdle to get over. I've And it was too big of a hurdle for me. So I don't suggest doing that. But so so maybe we should step back here and talk about all the the common remote desktop softwares out there that people try to trade with. The first one that most people try to use is TeamViewer.
Dave:Yeah. It's been around a long time. There's a constant nag screen there for having you pay. They're getting more and more vigilant with it. So you basically have to pay for that.
Dave:And again, you're paying for something that you're only going to be using twenty days a year or how many days you're actually going go on vacation during the year. For that reason, it might be good, but I would think about it's worth thinking about every software that you have available, and that's one of the the downsides of it. Have you looked at TeamViewer?
Michael:I have and some benefit I had of TeamViewer was and most traders would never have this, but we were just doing a fun experience is that more than one person can log in at once. Again, most people won't really care about that, but that's an interesting part of it that, but yeah, I found the same thing is that it would just like kick people off periodically and, you know, start yelling at you to pay more and it was just a bit of and I don't think it's what it's naturally for anyway. It's mainly for, you know, you've got some uncle who screwed up his computer and the ease of getting into a TeamViewer thing is it just gives you a code, you can go in. That's fairly simple. And I think that's mostly what it's for is, you know, people who are at an office or something and they screwed up their computer and the IT guy remotes it and fixes it.
Michael:But yeah, it's not really designed for that. And I agree, I've used the Chrome one as well and not a fan of that one either.
Dave:Yeah. All right, so the other one people use is Windows Remote Desktop. You might see it referred to as the RDP protocol. There's a whole protocol for this. I remember when this came out, I was in the support business back in AT and T years ago when I started my career.
Dave:And it was sort of a breakthrough in remote desktop thing. I remember the software reason before is something called PC Anywhere. Oh boy, it was rough using that. And Windows Remote Desktop made it seamless. I would definitely look at using this.
Dave:The one thing that it does that is annoying is when you connect to it, you get your own desktop that's different than the one running on the console. So it's not really a remote desktop. It's like a remote It's made for businesses who want to give people access to and have their own environment running on another server.
Michael:Yeah, and a bit of a pain too, I notice if you leave your house because I'm actually connected via that right now. I've got I've got it open and that's the way it's connected and it works great on the same network. But when you're leaving, you have to open up a bunch of ports and do some port forwarding nonsense. For people like me, And that's a little bit I've heard some problems with potential security too when you're opening up random ports on your network. So that's another thing to keep in mind.
Dave:Michael, you're leading me right into my solution, which is that is like perfect. It's funny that you we didn't talk about this, so that's awesome. You're asking all the right questions. So the next piece of software that a lot of people use is and I almost got this before I went on vacation. It I believe it's called AnyDesk.
Michael:Mhmm.
Dave:And I almost got it because it appeared when I at first glance, I thought you could pay for it by month. So I was like, okay, I'm just going to get this for a month. That'll be perfect. But it turns out you can't. It makes it seem like it's a monthly plan, but it's an annual plan.
Dave:You have to pay per year. So that turned me off a bit that there was this I felt like it was a bit of a bait and switch. I'm like, Okay, I'm not using that. That doesn't seem right to me. So here's the solution that I found.
Michael:I'm going to spoil
Dave:Go ahead.
Michael:Anything. If you're a Windows nerd, that was all your solutions. If you're a Mac nerd, I highly recommend checking out Jump. It's called Jump Desktop, and it's specifically from, I believe, Mac or iPad. That's one of the things I like about it's got an iPad thing to Windows.
Michael:And I paid for it once, like five, six years ago. And that was it. It was like $10 at the time. And it works completely seamlessly. You don't have to do any weird port forwarding or anything like that.
Michael:Not the greatest thing in the world, but again, I like the fact it's got an iPhone, it's got a Mac, it's got whatever. So in a pinch, I could pick up my phone and, right, navigate around the best you can, that kind of stuff. So I I would check that out. That's one that I use when I travel. Maybe Dave will win me over to a cooler one here, but that's what I use currently is it's yes.
Michael:It's called jump desktop. I was just looking at it.
Dave:Okay. Yeah. That's interesting. I've not tried that one. But, yeah, I think you're gonna like this this solution that I came up with.
Dave:So It actually involves two pieces of software and they're both awesome. I guess I should go over the remote desktop part first. So the remote desktop software is called RustDesk. RustDesk, so R U S T Desk. Okay.
Dave:The nice thing about it is it's free.
Michael:Oh, open source. Yeah.
Dave:Now the software that Most of these softwares have remote desktop things. You have to be able to connect to it remotely and you have to be able to do that securely. So they typically have this like a directory where when you have the software running, you punch in a code, references their server and it knows that your machine is connecting with that code, and then it joins you to your machine that way. This software has another mode where you can connect by IP address. So, because of this, you can use another software which I love.
Dave:It's called Tailscale. It's basically your own personal VPN. You can it's free. You can run. It it runs as a service on Windows, Mac, Linux.
Dave:And when you run it and add a new machine to your tail scale, you're able to connect to it just like it's on your LAN, just like it's on your local network. So it's secure, it's easy to set up. It's a really awesome piece of software. There's lots of stuff you can do with it. But these two softwares work together is really, I think, a very good solution because what you can do is bring up Rust desk, connect to a private IP address that's on your tail scale and connect directly over the internet securely to that machine.
Dave:Nobody else can connect to it unless they get into your tail scale, which it's a very secure environment. The other awesome thing about it is you can run this on your iPhone. You can run the client on your iPhone. You can run the client for Tailscale on your iPhone. So I was connecting from my laptop, using Rust desk, using a local IP address, and connecting to my remote computer when I was in Madison.
Dave:When I went to New York last week, I was connecting on my iPhone securely in my own little tail scale, my own VPN, and looking at my trading computer from my iPhone. I tested this pretty thoroughly before I left because I wanted to make sure that if my, you know, if my trading computer rebooted, was it gonna come up and was I still gonna be able to connect? So I tested that. I tested this, can I connect from my iPhone? I got all those kinks worked out and I set this up.
Dave:And I think I love the way it uses Tailscale. I think it's the only one where you can set it up that way or it's the only one I found. And man, I really like the way this worked. It was very reliable, very secure. And I just the the whole architecture of it, I just really liked.
Michael:The yeah. So I I like this. I'm up on the site now anyway, and just a couple of things. One is the whole VPN thing. Man, if you're traveling, please just get it.
Michael:It's they're free or very cheap for your laptop, your computer. Just get a VPN before you go on the hotel Wi Fi or the airport Wi Fi. I did some work with a cybersecurity firm and they caught me not doing it once and almost beat me up in the most nerdy way. And I love them on this Rustx website, just massive banner at the top. You may be getting scammed and just talking about like, you know, people calling you and trying to remote into your computer.
Michael:So that's great. So I'm going to give this one a shot. I noticed they've got macOS and Linux access to So all that as I'm going give that a shot. But it's awesome that we live in, again, this world because if, like you mentioned, you go back to when you started trading, I remember the remote desktop offerings were pretty garbage, right? And and be able to do it within a LAN or within a network was fine, but the second you left that became really, really So the ability to connect outside of that is great.
Michael:And I like the phone app. I think that's just kind of needed, especially if you're traveling, you're probably doing a lot of stuff even away from your hotel room. It'd be nice just to be able to, you know, take a peek when no one's looking and see and have it zoomed into where your blotter is and just, you know, keep an eye on whatever's going on. Also, think to add to that, if you're going to do that should be a hot key somewhere that you can click that like liquidate, like shut everything down just in case. But these type of things, think not only for just what we're talking about when it comes to traveling, think they're just good for life as well, right?
Michael:What if you go to the grocery store midday and you know, something ends up happening in the market and you didn't have something like this set up that you could just quickly pop back. Or hopefully you're not spending your entire day sitting at your desk. You're doing something physical. You're going outside or whatever and having that wherewithal of saying, I could get back to it if I want to, I think a really big, really big plus for all of that because freedom, right? The sooner you can get back to it, the more you can kind of get away from it.
Dave:Yeah, totally. And you mentioned the hotel thing. I don't use this, but Tailscale does have the ability to mark one of the nodes as your outbound router. So when you set that up, you can literally, when you're in the hotel, you can have all your traffic going through your tail scale from your computer at home and none of it is going out through the hotel network, the insecure hotel network. So lots of different things you can do with it, this is just one or a couple really nice things that come to mind.
Dave:But yeah, for tech geeks like us, there's lots of things you could do with it. It's a software that I forget how I got turned on to it, but man, there's lots of different things you can do with it that are great.
Michael:Well, and to get, again, super nerdy with it is now if you are using your remote desktop on your mobile machine for the trading side of things, then it actually opens up quite a bit what your mobile machine could look like. Like I remember going to trading conferences and people bringing giant massive laptops that the battery dies in like five seconds because they needed the laptop to be powerful enough to run all the things that they're looking for. But if you're remote remoting in, then you can probably prioritize something even like, I don't know, Chromebook or something, right? Something thin and light and the battery will last forever. And that opens up way more mobile trading because now you're not carrying this giant kind of unit with you.
Michael:You're just carrying something that can run relatively light, relatively thin and still get the job done because it's all it's doing is kind of a headless machine back to back to your main machine in order to make that work.
Dave:Yeah. Like I mentioned, I've spent many years trying to come up with a solution for trading on vacation that I like. Yeah, I feel really good about this one. I've gone on two trips now where good, it it felt reliable, and I comfortable. I'm very comfortable trading remotely with this solution.
Dave:So yeah, I'd recommend it.
Michael:And again, something you can only do if you're offloading, right? I just could not imagine. I tried to once or twice when I was a more discretionary trader, you know, carrying like multiple of those portable monitors and having like three monitor setups and then trying to, and then you're, you know, you're jet lagged from the trip and you're trying to someone's trying to pull you somewhere and you're trying to super focus in where as a systematic trader, like we mentioned, you should just have a checklist. You could be very hungover and very tired and just going through that checklist. And once everything's set up, then you're just doing your normal watching the bot, you're not clicking the buttons to buy and sell.
Michael:And again, something you just could not do if you're the other side and, you know, sorry to burst anyone's bubble who's still falling for the classic, oh, I just trade from my computer from the beach kind of thing. It's like, that's possible if you're systematic and you have robots to do that kind of stuff. And if you're doing it manually, absolutely good luck. But also I think we should say let's take a vacation every now and then. Like just every now and then, you know, it's nice that we are, like we mentioned, in a state where we're not doing the day to day kind of work.
Michael:We have robots for that. And but still every now and then, even if it's not very long, couple days, go clear your mind and kind of get away from it and just be okay that you probably left some money on the table. I think it's probably a good thing.
Dave:Yep.
Michael:So learn anything else while you're on vacation there, or is that once you got the tech set up, that was all you needed?
Dave:Yeah, I think that was that was my big takeaway. On my New York trip, I was invited to speak on S and B's Bionic Trader show, so that was really fun. Met with Garrett up there who I often meet with when I go to New York, so that was good. There'll be some things that come out of that. I'd like to have him on the podcast at some point, we're talking about that too.
Michael:Nice.
Dave:Yeah, Good trip.
Michael:Oh, and and get out there too, especially if you're if you're making trading more and more of of something that you want to do, like full time and as a thing. We talk about the whole trader community thing quite a bit. And I think that's way better if you can do it in real life than do it virtually. If you can actually meet with people like I know our buddy that both me and Dave know Sean has like a meetup at a pub in Colorado once a week or once a month or whatever like these physical meetings. So once you're set and you're Okay to be able to travel, if there's an event near you that's got a bunch of traders at it, you know, go make some friends.
Michael:Maybe you'll find some like minded people that are trading kind of like you and and you can expand that out and yeah, get out of your house for a little bit. It's it's good.
Dave:Yeah, absolutely.
Michael:All right guys. Well, that was a good one. I'm actually, I've got, I've been opening up tabs while Dave was talking. So I've got a tab for both of those tail scale and what the rust, the rust desks. So I'm gonna give those a try.
Michael:Maybe we'll talk about how that went for me on a future episode. But as always, I'm Michael Noss.
Dave:And I'm Dave May. We'll talk to you next week on Line Your Own Pockets.
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