What do I have to do if I want to trade while wandering around small towns in Mexico? I figure a laptop and some kind of wireless deal, but I don't want to rack up high long distance charges. Only need to check and put in a few orders, no scalping or anything (yeah right)
I could be wrong but most wireless operations don't "see profit" in rural Mexico. Very expensive infrastructure. It might be available in coastal regions though.
There was an ad on ET once, somebody was selling an RV with a satellite hookup for trading from about anywhere.
Wi-Fi is nonexistant in rural Mexico, cell phone service is spotty at best and totally unavailable over most of the rural countryside, and even hard wired phone service is still largely unavailable in many rural areas. For example, one pretty good sized town we visit regularly in the Copper Canyon area has one public telephone, in the Post Office/Police Station, and it works most of the time, except after a really hard rain, or when it is otherwise broken (and no cell phone service). If you aren't too far out in the sticks, you could check in with your broker by pay phone from time to time, and it's not too expensive, but you aren't realistically going to be able to trade real-time, or anything of the sort unless you are in a city. If you are determined, renting a sat-phone is probably your best bet, but then you are looking at over $1/minute for pretty good (but not bombproof) reliability. Otherwise, why not close stuff out for a bit, take a real vacation, enjoy a beautiful country with exceptional hospitality, and relax for a bit! Good Trading, Jessie P.S. Where are you going?
You want to carry a laptop and trade while wandering around small towns in Mexico? Am I the only one who sees more than one problem here...
I don't know. Vera Cruz and points in between. My girlfriend is the brains of the operation. She wants to take 4 weeks off in Jan/Feb. An expensive time to be away from the mkt. Maybe I'll just go long and hope for the best.
around rural towns you will be probably pretty much out of luck. as a previous poster mentioned, one phone per so many blocks. i lived in merida, yucatan which is a pretty big city since it's the capital of that state, and it cost $200 to install the line, and about $20 a month for regular dialup service, and it took three weeks unless of course you bribed the installer. they had some satellite service for about $400 a month. this was three years ago so I dont know about now. your best bet would be to go to an internet cafe which even some of the rural towns have and try to get friendly with the owner/workers there to work out a deal. when i went there though, cafes would purchase two 56k lines and use internet sharing software to share among 5 computers! so it might be slow....
oh shit, I'm serious. I think I'll just go long. How bad can it be? Doesn't most of the time the stock market go up? If I go out on full margin, ib's computers will automatically stop me out, so I will be relatively safe. And if the mkt rallies, surely I will hear about it somewhere, and we can spend a few days looking for a phone that works, and I can close out half (of what's left) over the phone. Because I'm looking over my trading for the last 2 weeks, and I'm not really sure human intervention adds any value. Shoulda just stayed long and gone somewhere.
...a dozen cartons of Marlboros, a roll of twenties, a couple of .357's.... lessee, what else is on that list...