Performance Coach for Financial Market Risk-Takers. Driving Performance Alpha through Behavioral Transformation. Author: Mastering the Mental Game of Trading.
London, UK.
Joined March 2012
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Steven Goldstein retweeted
In 2010, Polish workers cleaned the houses of British professionals. Today, Poland's GDP per capita sits above $43,000 in purchasing power parity terms, level with Spain and closing fast on France. That reversal took roughly one generation. This was deliberate policy, not luck.
Poland ran a flat tax on business income, kept labor markets comparatively flexible, and spent the 1990s dismantling the Soviet pricing apparatus faster than almost any neighbor. Capital read those signals immediately. Volkswagen, Samsung, and hundreds of smaller manufacturers moved production east. Warsaw became a financial hub, not a branch office.
The EU structural funds helped, obviously, pouring +-160 billion euros into Polish infrastructure between 2004 and 2020. Funds alone don't explain the difference. Ukraine received aid too. Poland built what mattered around the money: enforceable contracts, a functioning court system, and a bureaucracy that didn't simply steal the paperwork.
Respect property, enforce contracts, keep inflation credible, and capital flows toward you. Poland did roughly that for thirty years while Germany and France were busy building regulations that made hiring someone feel like adopting them legally.
The housekeepers became engineers, then managers, then founders. Warsaw startup valuations crossed 50 billion euros in aggregate by 2024. Polish engineers now earn salaries that make relocating to London feel irrational rather than mandatory.
Wealth is produced where producers are left alone to produce it. Poland left them alone just enough.
Another 10 years of this and people from the UK will be cleaning the houses of professionals in Poland.
Steven Goldstein retweeted
Isn’t this funny? It also explains the lack of political will for long-overdue reforms in France. Only one in three French people works in the real economy, two-thirds live, one way or another, off other people’s taxes. They won’t vote for politicians who say France’s absurd pensions and overblown state spending are unsustainable, they vote for those who promise to lower the already low retirement age even further.
France is cooked. There will be no serious reforms. Higher interest spending will accelerate the rise in the debt/GDP ratio. France is heading into a debt crisis that will hit the entire eurozone. The ECB will, as always, bend the rules and its mandate and start printing money again, making savers and pensioners across Europe much poorer. The situation is so bad that no nice options remain.
Steven Goldstein retweeted
Back in 2014, there was a man who was already aware of the irregularities involving Manchester City. That man now runs FIFA. The infamous Gianni Infantino, then UEFA General Secretary, abused his authority, shared confidential documents and, in short, outmanoeuvred the Investigatory Chamber, doing everything in his power to ensure that both Manchester City and PSG would merely receive a fine, avoiding a deeper investigation that could have led to a Champions League ban. All of these details were also revealed through Football Leaks.
Given his actions as UEFA General Secretary and, more recently, as FIFA President, I can only say, in my humble opinion, that Gianni Infantino has become a cancer on football and should have no place in the future of the game.
Steven Goldstein retweeted
I know which one I am. I am a trend follower. I have speculated in small caps for 30-plus years on momentum, positive catalysts, and better financial statements.
I am not the house. I do not need a thousand tiny edges. I wait for the names where the story and the numbers can still lean my way, size them so one loss cannot take the book, and leave when the thesis is gone.
Most of the pain early on was acting like the player while pretending I was the house. Once the role was honest, the process got simpler.
Every trading method fits into one of two approaches.
You're either the house, making the game and banking small edges.
Or the player, waiting for the rare moment the odds tilt your way.
Most traders don't know which one they are. It costs them.
This week’s Mastering the Trading Game Newsletter on Substack explores this through the use of a BlackJack analogy.
Link in next thread 🧵
Steven Goldstein retweeted
Being right and surviving to be proven right are two different problems. @AlphaMind101 has seen traders with correct theses lose everything, fully invested with no liquidity plan.
Full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=nafsvW8D…
More at: johnsonrandall.com/
Steven Goldstein retweeted
99, 97, 92 points tallies.
Going toe-to-toe with a sell-to-buy policy against a sovereign state who broke all the rules and did what they wanted when they wanted to.
Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool are the greatest modern day PL team.
And he is the greatest modern day PL manager.
Steven Goldstein retweeted
Warren Buffett is stepping down as Berkshire Chairman at 96 years old.
In his goodbye letter, he says that “Father Time always wins. He has, however, been generous with me.”
His son Howard will take his place (“Howard has been a Berkshire Director for 33 years. That’s a longer apprenticeship than I served before taking the reins at the age of 34. Greg [Abel] runs the company. Howard will guard its culture and values.”)
Incredible 60+ year run. 🐐
Breaking: Warren Buffett is stepping down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway on.wsj.com/4iBwAaC
Steven Goldstein retweeted
This is REALLY bad news, retail traders
There are a ton of research studies -- academia, regulatory agencies, exchanges, brokerage firms -- that document the near absolute failure of retail traders (especially in futures) to really exceed
The chance that a retail trader with even a couple years of experience can average 35% per year for the next five years with only one losing year is something along the order of 3 in 1,000
What makes you so sure you are among the three amigos? Most of you who think you are among the 3 have been conned by the false promises of the markets
Especially futures markets. Unlike stocks, futures are a ZERO sum game. There is a short for every long. If someone buys 10 contracts, it means someone else sold 10 contracts. If someone makes $10,000, it means that someone else lost it
If you want to be among the few, there are a few things you need to do
Admit and OWN the fact that you have no idea where some market is going to go
Rid yourself of any and all pride and false hopes
Learn to love small losses
Stop thinking in narratives
Become asset class agnostic
Stop being conned by false hope
Admit that your success, if it comes, has little to do with your brains, ambitions and hard work. I think traders are born -- but they still mostly need to survive five years to even have some knowledge they can make trading a career
Steven Goldstein retweeted
🇪🇪 Massive respect to Estonian side Paide Linnameeskond, who conceded after just 14 seconds - without the opposition even touching the ball. 👏🤣🤣
Steven Goldstein retweeted
Como ocurre cada 1 de septiembre, se puede ver esto en la estación de King's Cross. Simplemente maravilloso.
Steven Goldstein retweeted
The least remarkable thing about Market Wizard Kristjan Qullamaggie is his position sizing.
@Qullamaggie: 0.2 to 0.5 in most trades
@PeterLBrandt: 0.8 at most, usually less
@Upticken: 0.5 at most
@CFlanders7: 0.25 to 0.5
@theEquilibrium: 0.25 to 0.5
@RyanPierpont: 0.25 to 0.5
@martinlukkt: 0.5 (but sizes bigger)
@EBoboch: 0.3 to 0.5
@TeCLaro: 1 to 2
@TedHZhang: 0.15 to 0.25 on the initial entry
@PradeepBonde: around 1, down to 0.25
@jfsrev: 0.15 to 0.25, ramped to 0.35
@1charts6: 0.2 to 0.5
@stamatoudism: 0.25 to 0.4
@Clement_Ang17: 0.3 to 0.5 (but sizes bigger)
@alphatrends: 0.3 to 1, but can size up
@markminervini: 0.15 to 1
Steven Goldstein retweeted
How to succeed at trading a small account:
Accept that the faster you try to double the account, the more likely you’ll never win.
Steven Goldstein retweeted
The word tolerance has been weaponized against you. The weapon was forged in 1965. You should know who forged it and why.
Before there was the French Theory — before Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze made deconstruction elegant and exportable — there was the Frankfurt School. And the Frankfurt School was worse, because it was deliberate. Foucault played with ideas he never expected to have consequences. Herbert Marcuse knew exactly what he was building.
These were not fringe academics. The Institute for Social Research relocated from Frankfurt to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. Funded, positioned, and deliberate, they spent the next decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for the dismantling of the civilization that had given them refuge. This is not ingratitude – it is the logic of the project. It was universal – it applied to every Western civilization equally.
Marcuse — godfather of the New Left — published Repressive Tolerance in 1965. The most influential political document most people have never read. Its argument: tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance requires the suppression of intolerant ideas. Tolerating everything is repressive. Suppressing the wrong things is liberating. The argument is circular by design – it puts the conclusion inside the premise and dares you to find the exit.
The practical implication was stated explicitly: withdrawal of tolerance from movements that are regressive, from speech that reinforces existing hierarchies. The left decides which movements are regressive. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance but in its name. The most sophisticated justification for censorship ever produced, dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.
The French Theory picked up the tools and made them elegant. Foucault made the Frankfurt critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity aesthetic. What had been a political program became a cultural sensibility – which is why it spread further and faster than the original. You can argue with a political program. A cultural sensibility is in the air you breathe.
The generation that read Marcuse went on to run the universities, the media, the foundations, the NGOs, the content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They did not implement his argument cynically – they implemented it sincerely, because they had been taught it as philosophy.
This is why cancel culture does not feel like censorship to the people practicing it. The journalist who demands a speaker be deplatformed genuinely believes she is defending free speech. The HR department that fires the employee for the wrong opinion genuinely believes it is creating an inclusive environment. They have been taught that this is what tolerance means. Marcuse taught them.
Musk has been fighting Marcuse’s argument for four years probably even without knowing Marcuse’s name. Every content moderation policy, every advertiser boycott, every regulatory assault – these are Repressive Tolerance, institutionalized. The DSA is Repressive Tolerance with a legal budget. The fact-checking organization is Repressive Tolerance.
The good news: the argument fails on contact with a free platform – because the suppression becomes visible, the mechanism becomes nameable, and a named mechanism loses half its power. This is why the Counter-Reformation moves so fast against X. Not because X is dangerous. Because X is where Repressive Tolerance gets named.
You are reading this now – which is precisely what Repressive Tolerance was designed to prevent.
Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).
Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident.
Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité.
Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison.
Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme.
Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable.
Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion.
C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part.
Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes.
Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre.
Alors pardon. Et au travail.
Steven Goldstein retweeted
Spanish Olympic skateboarder Danny León timed a mid-air trick to a solar eclipse, calling it "the move of his life."
Steven Goldstein retweeted
Stephen Kotkin explains the real reason Marxism keeps attracting intellectuals and young people, even after the body count.
It is not because the theory works. It is because it offers something far more seductive: total, rapid transformation and a special role for the intellectual class.
In a market system, ordinary people make their own decisions. Under Marxism-Leninism, the intellectuals get to make the decisions for everyone. They become the engineers of society. Workers and peasants are treated as people with “false consciousness” who need to be led.
The ideology flatters the people who believe they are smarter than the rest of society. That is why the blood does not put them off. The power is worth the cost.
Steven Goldstein retweeted
Join us tomorrow with the best in performance coaching and trading psychology @AlphaMind101. Come ready to polish your mental capital to enable you to become a better trader. Register to attend via this link:us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi…
Steven Goldstein retweeted
Here is something I wrote in 2010, reflecting what I had learned about trading psychology from @VicNiederhoffer. Markets are always changing and our emotional reactions to those changes are valuable pieces of information that can help us adapt: traderfeed.blogspot.com/2026…
