Steven Goldstein
30.8K posts
@AlphaMind101
Performance Coach for Financial Market Risk-Takers. Driving Performance Alpha through Behavioral Transformation. Author: Mastering the Mental Game of Trading.
There is a scene in @HBO's Chernobyl that most viewers miss. A scientist presents evidence of the disaster to a Belarusian party official. The official dismisses her expertise, then boasts that he used to run a shoe factory. It is not central to the plot, but it explains everything. The Soviet Union was governed by a snowball of incompetence - decades of nepotism where ministries were handed to people with no relevant knowledge, provided they had the right party connections. Pedigree was political, not professional. I grew up there. My parents were subject matter experts who spent their careers battling apparatchiks enforcing decisions they did not understand. That is why I flinch when I hear the same logic here in Britain. @UKLabour politicians celebrate the "right background" - the poorer, the more deprived, the better. Council house to government, presented as triumph. Progress and resilience deserve recognition. But in these jubilations, merit vanishes. And celebrating ascent without competence is not progress. It is the embryo of disaster. Look at the Labour Party's front bench. Britain's central challenge is wealth creation - economic growth. Yet these are former charity workers, public sector lifers, people who have always been on the receiving end of funds rather than generating them. They have never had to create value others willingly pay for. So they look to regulators for growth ideas. It is farcical. It is only possible in a culture where navigating party structures replaces proven ability. A friend told me recently his wife had to close her coffee shop - high traffic, real revenue, still unprofitable due to taxes and business rates. In his frustration he said something raw: he no longer cares if folks running the government are toolmakers' sons or landed gentry. He wants competence. He found himself saying he would rather be ruled by Old Etonians. Not because Eton College guarantees talent. It does not. But sheer competence - knowing your subject - has become so scarce in British governance that the impulse is understandable. We are not the Soviet Union. We are nowhere near collapse. But on the left of our politics, the distance is shrinking faster than we admit.
"If the British government is going to be completely dominated by the bond market, MPs might as well go home." Diane Abbott told Cathy Newman on Sky News that whoever replaces Keir Starmer as prime minister must go through a "properly organised selection process", regardless of any "hissy fit" made by the bond markets. When this provoked laughter from Newman and eye rolling from former Conservative cabinet minister Gillian Keegan, @HackneyAbbott argued that there's no point in having a parliament if the financial sector always has the final word.
5/1/2011 - This was how Manchester United was winning the league under Alex Ferguson when there was no social media. In 2026, their fans want to tell you how a foul on a goalkeeper shouldn’t be given against Westham 😂😂. Game was against Arsenal and Vidic used his hands to palm off a cross, the lineman just ignored 😭
Around 2010, while everyone else was arguing about whether smartphones were a fad, a small group of men inside a glass tower in Abu Dhabi started buying things that did not yet make sense. A nuclear power program that wouldn't deliver electricity for sixteen years. A semiconductor company that wouldn't matter for another decade. Renewable energy stakes before renewables were profitable. Diplomatic depth with India that nobody else in the Gulf bothered with. A relationship with Israel that nobody thought was possible. Chinese trade missions and American defense secretaries hosted in the same week, every week, for years. None of it made sense at the time. All of it makes sense now. The artificial intelligence race is no longer about software. The software is converging. The race is now about three things: the chips, the gigawatts of electricity to run them, and the political relationships to keep both flowing in a world where the United States is choking China's chip access and almost every country in between is being asked to pick a side. The country that put those three things together first, and quietly, is the United Arab Emirates. It is the only player on the board with all four foreign-policy arrows at once. Washington, where Stargate UAE is being built right now as the largest AI campus outside the continental United States. New Delhi, where G42 is building two gigawatts of compute capacity for the next billion users. Tel Aviv, where the Abraham Accords held through a war and the cross-border tech trade rose four hundred and thirty percent year over year. And Beijing, where one hundred billion dollars in non-oil trade and a working channel to the next ruler of Abu Dhabi remain intact, even after the AI side of the relationship was firewalled off. Saudi Arabia has the money but not the alliance breadth. Singapore has the neutrality but not the energy. Ireland has the legal scaffolding but froze its data center permits in 2022 because the grid couldn't carry it. Nobody else is even in the conversation. In December 2025, the UAE and Israel founded a framework called Pax Silica, a trusted-supply-chain agreement for advanced AI chips. The United States joined as senior partner. India signed in February of this year as the fourth founding signatory. That list is the four arrows of a fifteen-year strategy, no longer four separate bilateral relationships, now joined into a single working architecture for the most strategically important industry of the century. The UAE is the central routing node. The Western press is still asking whether the UAE belongs in the AI race at all; the question they should be asking is whether anyone running the AI race can afford not to route through them. The full briefing on how this was built, and what to watch in the next two years, is on my Power Pundit briefing: thepowerpundit.com/p/the-uaes-qui…
Learning to trade and learning to be a trader are not the same thing. Learning to trade? That's the easy part. A few courses, some charts, some rules. Largely transactional. Learning to be a trader? That's a completely different journey. It's about rewiring how you think about risk. Getting comfortable with uncertainty. Making peace with failure — not occasionally, but constantly. It means dropping the idea that trading is an intellectual pursuit, and accepting it for what it actually is: a performance activity. Like sport. Like music. Mastery comes through that lens, or not at all. It demands a total shift in mindset, attitude, philosophy, and identity. And here's the hard truth — > Most people who learn to trade never become traders. > Not because they lack knowledge. But because they can't, won't, or don't make that mindset shift. The market doesn't reward the smartest person in the room. It rewards the ones who can adapt to the reality of what trading is!!!🤯📈📈📈
