High Performance Trading Coach with Steve Goldstein.
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Welcome to How to Trade It, the road to trading mastery. Join Casey Stubbs, a seasoned trader, as he guides you to become a profitable trader. Find actionable insights, real-life stories, and strategies to boost your trading skills.

Don't miss the journey to trading victory. Start listening now. Connect with us at podcast at tradingstrategyguides.com. Trading profits are just an episode away. Hello, everyone. This is Casey Stubbs, and I'm very excited for today's guest. I have Steve Goldstein. He's a high-performance trading coach. We'll do that over.

Is that your phone? I can't hear you now. Yeah, I'm muting it. Oh, okay. If it goes again, I'm muting it. Tell me when you're ready. Right. This is classic. Three, two, one, go. Okay. Hello, everyone. This is Casey Stubbs with the How to Trade It podcast. Today, I'm here with Steve Goldstein. He's a high-performance trading coach. He's the host of...

the alpha mind podcast and he's the author of the newly released book how to master the mental trading game the mental game of trading steve how are you today i'm good thank you very good all right well thanks for being on the show i really appreciate it pleasure absolute pleasure so uh

As a high-performance coach, what is the biggest thing that you see people have a problem with? What is the biggest thing that usually trips traders up? Other than the phone going off as I do a podcast. Your call cannot be taken at this moment. Sorry about this. I'm going to get a hammer and smash it. Check. Take four.

Right. One second. I'm going to tell my wife I'm disconnecting the phone. Okay. Just one second. She's gone out. She's here. She's here. One second. Is that your landline? Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember those? I haven't had a landline since I was like 20. Yeah. We have like two people that call us on it.

And that was one of them. And the other one, I've got no idea who that was. Salespeople sometimes. So really sorry about that. It's been disconnected now. You can start again. It's definitely not going to go off. Really sorry about that. No problem. No problem. Okay. No problem. Okay. Let's just start over from the beginning. Do you know what? I've done 121 podcasts.

from this seat and the phone has never gone off once in any single one of them. So that's like, it's gone off three times. I've had my cell phone. I always keep my cell phone here and I usually forget to turn it off. But today, today, when you made that, I turned mine off. Okay. Okay. Brilliant. But we're going to start over from, from scratch. This is going to make, this is going to be a legendary interview. Welcome everyone.

This is Casey Stubbs with the How to Trade It podcast and today I'm very excited to have Steve Goldstein. He is a high-performance trading coach and he is the host of the Alpha Mind podcast. He's also released a new book called Mastering the Mental Game of Trading. Stephen, welcome to the show. Thank you. Great to be here. Awesome. Now...

As a high-performance coach, you probably see a lot of different problems and things that cause traders to stumble. And we don't want to stumble. We want to be successful. But what is the biggest thing that holds traders up from being successful? The inability to let go.

Okay. The inability to let go. Does that mean that when they make a bad choice, they are in a losing trade, they won't close it? Well, that's one definition of it, but there's lots of definitions of it. In my book, I ultimately get to this point about letting go as being the number one factor that

between those who excel and those who struggle, which is nearly everyone. And there's a very small group that excel. And I consider them as masters of letting go. And that is just that ability to move on when a bad outcome happens, to just put it behind you, to just pretend it didn't happen. And no one doesn't get affected by what the market does to them.

But these people, they just, okay, that's done, that's gone, and they move on. And so much comes from that. Their ability to leverage size, their ability to take advantage of opportunities and ideas rather than being phased by what happened last time, their ability to stick to their process and adhere to their purpose, their ability to be present to what needs to be done to what they do.

And it all comes from this, what I call the number one skill of high performance, the ability to let go. And there's a lot they need to let go of. It's not one thing, but in summary, it's the ability to let go and move on. Okay. Well, I like the summary. I think keeping things short and sweet is important. However, I'm still not quite understanding the whole concept. So

letting go. Um, there's a lot, there's a lot possibly to explain before I get there. Um, yeah, yeah. Help me out a little bit because I, I'm just thinking of my own life. I'm trying to think of like, for me, I'm a very, um, motivated person and I try to be a high achiever. Uh, but sometimes I get, I get held up because, um,

I think failure is a real, real issue, right? Like, so looking at all your failures is sometimes difficult, you know, and it can definitely hold you back. It can. And you know what? We hear a lot of well-intended advice, don't we? Such as, you know, believe in yourself. I go back to my trading years and I was a trader for nearly 25 years and

And I worked at some of the top investment banks in the world. And I used to give a quote, keep a quote on a yellow sticky note on my screen, which was from Babe Ruth. And it was, never let fear of striking out keep you from playing the game. And that sat there on my desk as if that was meant to inspire me, which it was. But possibly the one thing I did was let the fear of striking out

keep me from playing my game because my game wasn't that complex. But my ability to monetize it and strike the ball in terms of trading and to hit out was just constantly compromised by that noise in the head, that fear of failure, that concern of how stupid I'm going to look if it all goes wrong, that over-focus on what bad things can happen.

which we all blow out. We all expand beyond anything. And it's that which keeps us off our process. The process is not that complex. Trading is not that complex. It's just our inability to execute the trading in the way that we'd like is what gets most of us and what holds us back. So it's that. If you can start finding out what those things are, okay, and then...

working towards letting go of them, okay, then you can start to do extraordinary stuff. You can start to achieve things in your trading. You start to believe in yourself. I'll give you an example. I was coaching a hedge fund manager earlier on this week.

Works for a large hedge fund. Brilliant PM, brilliant trader. And, you know, people think these guys in hedge funds, they're superstars that don't have all this stuff going on their head. They all do exactly the same. And I worked with him through last year. He had a really good year in 2022, 2023. He was struggling. He wasn't doing particularly well. And, you know, he feared giving it all back.

He feared returning all the money. So he wasn't playing to his process. He wasn't playing to his strengths. He was playing from a place of fear. Okay. And he wasn't believing in himself. See, that's a classic sign of not believing in yourself. If you think you're going to give money back, okay, and you start trading from a place of fear, you will not make the money that you can do, that your process says you can do and you should do. Okay. You kind of hide yourself.

Okay, so I had to work on letting him let go, letting him let go of that. Okay, and letting go is not easy. We use it like it's a throwaway line. It's the hardest thing to do. Okay, that's why it's a super skill, great trading. If it was easy, everyone would be able to do it. But there's a whole process to go through to let go. There's often decades of our life.

stuff that we've taken on in our head that just gets in the way that's built up so that's why this is as I say it is the super skill of high performance trading okay now with this hedge fund manager in particular he was concerned about giving the money back and

Now, and there was a fear there. Now, was that at all connected to his process that maybe the market had changed or maybe his process wasn't effective anymore? Or was it just 100% mental? And how do we know that it's not the process? You know, because that's sometimes my fear is that, OK, it's not working. Is it me or is it the process? So we in truth, we don't really know that.

OK, and I did explore this and discuss this with him. You know, are you self-selecting to not engage in the market as much because you haven't got as much conviction in what you're doing? So, you know, we don't, you know, my coaching is not an approach where I just sort of analyse someone and decide they need to do it this way.

It's a process of taking him through some of the tools and methods I use and seeing what falls out of that. And it was pretty clear, you know, to use his language, that he'd gone into hiding. You know, he'd had a really good year the year before. He'd made a lot of money and he feared giving it back. So instead of engaging with the market in the way he could have done, he went into hiding mode.

Which meant he left a lot of money on the table. So with your trading process then, are you trying to get the trader to really discover the key issue? Because maybe the issue is, like you said, letting go or fear.

But they don't know, A, they don't know exactly what the issue is, and B, they don't know how to get past it themselves. And so you're working with them to kind of help them get that awareness to find out what the issue is and then help them work through it.

Hello, this is Casey and I wanted to take a minute to tell you about my new book that just came out. It's called Complete Trading System. This is my 25 years of trading experience sharing everything that I have learned in how to make a profit from the markets. You're going to learn about how to find the right instruments to trade.

how to find a trend, how to get started as beginners. You're going to learn about how to get the right mindset and you're going to be able to put it all together to create a trading system of your own that will work for you

I highly recommend that you try it out. Just click the link right now. It's called Complete Trading System. It's available on Amazon. Thank you. Go ahead and check it out. I think you're going to love it. I've described my process. When someone comes to me and says, look, I'm curious about your coaching. Could it help me? Could it be useful?

I obviously first need to have some background and context about who they are, what they're doing. In my opinion, is what I do going to help them?

So, for example, if someone comes to me and they've only been trading two years, I don't usually think I can help them because I think what they need at that stage of their journey is a greater focus on learning the technicals of trading. And I don't mean the technicals in terms of technical analysis. I mean what the job is, how to sort of get on board with the system or a form of analysis or a form of finding value,

and to construct that into a system and to get that working. A lot of people don't make it that far. I believe that there's this, you know, it's a good four or five, even a 10-year journey to graduate to becoming a trader who can make money consistently. Now, there are exceptions to that, and I could touch upon that, but I think generally it's a four or five, maybe even a 10-year journey.

The first two or three years is learning that basic technical aspect of trading. But after that, it often comes about, it's something in the head, something in the mind going on that's stopping them break through some sort of ceiling. So I say what we're going to do is we're going to explore everything about you and your trading. We're going to look holistically at your context. We're going to build, it's like we're going to take a cross-section of

out of you and your work as a trader. Okay. I'm not going to work on your technical system, your, you know, whatever system you use, you use, that's fine. Okay. But we're going to explore you. We're going to explore your process. We're going to explore how you are. And it's like, we're going to take a cross section and through our conversations and through the models I use and some of the psychometric tools I use,

We're going to examine that together and build up a picture of who you are, what you're doing, how you're doing it and what's going on there. And then from that, we can talk together and explore exactly what it is in your work that maybe you can address or maybe you can adjust or maybe you can transform or maybe you can become more conscious of. And I went through a process once.

a very similar process when I was a trader. So if we go back to the year 2000, I was working as a trader at a bank in London, in the foreign exchange rates, fixed income markets. But I was struggling at this point. I'd been more successful earlier in my career, but I'd kind of hit a wall

And I suppose I was going backwards. You know, I was maybe a little bit gripped by fear that I was going to lose everything that I was doing. And that process that I went through with a coach who used a similar methodology on me really started to show me who I was. And about 10 years later, I went back to him.

And I explained to him that, you know, I've got to tell you, I said to him, the 10 years since we worked together has just been completely different to the previous 15 years of my career. I've been far more successful. I've been far more sustainably successful. I put a lot more risk on. I've been more consistent.

You know, I've had my periods where it wasn't going well. I wouldn't say it became less stressful because, you know, this is a job that comes with an awful lot of stress and I don't think that ever goes. But I became a lot more successful after that. And I told him that and he said, well, what was it that changed for you? What did I do for you?

And I was a little bit surprised by that. But I said to him, well, you held up a mirror to me. I saw myself, warts and all, in a way I'd never seen myself before. I saw who I was. I saw how I was. I saw how I did the job. And I became really conscious of some of my flaws. I became really conscious of some of my strengths I wasn't fully using.

I became really conscious of how I engaged with the market, how I engaged with risk in ways that I wasn't before. It was almost like he shone a light on my trading. And from that, I was then able to take it forward and make it far more effective. So that's what I do with people now. And that coach actually wrote the foreword to my book. But it's making people more aware, more conscious, more

of what they do and who they are, and then giving them some tools, giving them some self-awareness, enabling them to think about it. And when I go back and I look back on that, on that period, I often think, you know, what was it that I really changed? What was it that I did differently?

And I look back and I think, well, up till then, for the first 15 years of my career as a trader, I was looking out there outward thinking, I just need a system. I just need a new tool. I just need some sort of method. I'm good enough, but I just need to find that thing in the market, that fix, that hack,

And then I'll, you know, that one piece of news or data that no one else is seeing. And I just need to lean into it. So I thought the answers were out there. And this, for the first time, turned it back on me and made me realize that, no, I'm not perfect, that it's within me, that I already know what I need to do. I just need to be able to do it. And that's what that changed for me. And that's what I try and change now as a coach. And that's largely where the book goes as well.

It gets people to reflect on who they are and what they do and how they're doing it. Well, I'm going to get a copy of the book. I haven't done that yet. I got to admit, but immediately after this interview, I'm going to purchase it because it sounds amazing. And I recommend that other people do it as well. It's called mastering the mental game of trading. I'll put the link in the description. Okay. Yeah.

I need some help, though. Yeah. And I basically interviewed you so I could get a free coaching session. So that whole external thing, because that is a big, big one, right? And I don't know. It's how do you, if I came to you and we're talking and I'm like, oh, I tried this system.

Didn't work. And now I'm trying in this system and, and I saw this other system over there. This, I know that this new system is a $10,000 price. I got to buy this system. As soon as I get the money for this system, it's going to work. The last five systems I bought were terrible. Like if that's what I said to you, like, what would you say to me if that was a conversation we had? Do you know, I've had a lot of, a lot of conversations with people about systems and,

I'll give you an example. I worked with a trader. He's a brilliant trader. He was doing well, but he felt he could do a lot better. And he told me a story of how he followed this guy in America, a very well-known trader in America. And he loved his system. It was a very simple system, ridiculously simple. Sometimes the simple ones are the best.

And he got into a lot of conversations with this guy. And he said, look, is there any chance I could come and sit with you for a couple of weeks? I pay you, of course, to allow me to sit with you. And watch you trade and watch how you use the system. And maybe you can explain some more nuances of the system to me.

And the guy went, look, I'm not going to charge you if you want to come and sit with me. It'd be nice to have someone sitting with me. And you can buy me dinner if you want a couple of times. And I'll sit here and I'll tell you what I do. But he said, it's really not complex. He said, there's nothing more I think you will get from sitting with me than what you already know about my system. Because he was trying to use his own version of that system. And he said, yeah, this particular trader that I was coaching thought he was just trying to fob him off a little bit.

And he said, no, no, no. I'd like to come along and see it, you know, up close for myself. So he sat with this guy for a couple of weeks. He flew over from England to America. And he said that the guy was genuine. There was nothing about what he did and the way he did it that he hadn't already told this guy. Okay. So he went back to London and he thought, I've sat with a guy. This guy's the king. I'm going to trade exactly like he did.

And he said, for the next six months, his trading stunk. And this guy's trading went really well. And he said to me, he said, I was using exactly the same system. I promise you I was taking the same signals the same way he did. So what was the difference? And he then said something to me, he said, or I said to him, well, the problem is you're not that person. You're not him. His system is everyone's system is built for them.

OK, and there are going to be things he does that he's not even aware of or even conscious of that he does automatically that you won't know about. And he wouldn't have been able to tell you because he's not aware of them himself. And he then said to me, so that's really interesting you said that, because when I questioned why I wasn't making the money he was, he said, look, he said, look, you're not me. We're all different.

And, you know, I may nuance my trading in some way that you can't do it. And it's subtle. So he said exactly, he said, that's what it is. And that's one of the problems with systems. Most people make a system for themselves.

And even if they do make a system for themselves, they may not be able to trade it because it's theoretical. And I had that as a trader many years ago. I created a system and the performance of it was absolutely brilliant. This was in the 90s. This was in the real early days of computers. But then I just sat there and I did a walkthrough of the system as if I was trading it over the entire 10 years. And I suddenly thought,

there is no way I can trade this. There's no way I could sit there with a drawdown on the system that I've created on a daily basis. It just doesn't suit me. Or there is no way I could sit there because it was a moving average crossover system. There's no way I could sit there and not take the profit when it's well in the money. I'd be fearing what it's going to give back. So I'd created a system based on my analysis.

of the markets. But I realised that even I could not trade my own system. And this is the problem with systems. They are really hard to trade. They're really hard to stick to. You have to build something that is...

perfectly aligned with who you are. And this is one of the concepts I talk about in the book, by the way, alignment. We have to be aligned psychologically, spiritually, philosophically. It's not even a word to say. It's easy philosophically with the way we are aligned to the market. I talk about two different trading approaches in the books, in the book. I'm not going to go into it now, but for me, every type of trading fits one approach or the other.

Okay. And we have to work with the approach that suits us best. And then we have to trade in that way. So there's a lot of elements with systems that, you know, just aren't made for you or just don't gel with you in some way. Yeah, that opens up a lot of additional thoughts. Yeah.

I hope I'm not rambling on too much, by the way. No, I mean, I honestly don't even know what to say about that because, you know, the fact that the trader said that you're not me, I mean, that's like, how do you get to that level? I mean, there's really nothing you can do except for just keep working at it.

Well, you just keep working, keep working, keep working. You've got to find who you are. One of the things I do with a lot of people I work is I do psychometric analysis and I have a tool which identifies their risk type. And quite often I find that people are not trading in alignment with their risk type. And when they do that, they're struggling. They're fighting themselves. That's the problem.

Once they start trading in alignment with their risk personality, things get a lot easier. And I'll give you a really extreme example of this. A few years ago, one of my colleagues asked me if I could do a risk personality assessment with the tool I use on one of his clients. This was 2016. So I did the risk personality. I didn't know anything about the client.

And it came out that this individual was possibly the most risk averse personality that trader that I tested to that point. It was like super risk averse. And my sense was that he was going to be someone who was very anxious when he was trading. And I went back to the coach and I said, look, I don't know who this guy is, but he's

My God, is he risk averse? You know, how does he trade? What's he like when he's trading? Is he anxious? Is he nervous? He said, yeah, he's possibly one of the most anxious and nervous individuals you'll ever meet. I said, okay. I said, well, he said, but last year he made $100 million for his hedge fund. I'm like, wow, how does that happen? He went, he's just found a way of working that

which is perfectly aligned with who he is. He's been doing this job for over 20 years. He doesn't trade. He trades intraday for an exchange in very large size in the markets he's familiar with. But he goes home with no overnight risk because he hates overnight risk. And he doesn't trade after one o'clock in the afternoon because he's burnt out by then.

But between 7 o'clock and 1 o'clock, he's hitting the market only in the big G10 currencies because the emerging markets don't suit him. Okay. He's hitting it in big size using the signals and methods that he's got. But if those signals and methods were to give him a buy or sell recommendation in the afternoon, he won't take it because even though he could, he knows himself that

that he's probably going to screw it up in the afternoon. So he's perfectly aligned who he is, his trading style, his trading approach, his trading method, his trading personality. And I can tell you that year was a particularly good year. Okay, 100 million. He averages 50 million per year ever since. Wow. Now, that's pretty insightful. Would you say that someone that is risk adverse is a better trader than someone that

is more of a risk taker? Nope, nope. I wouldn't say one's better than the other. What I would say is if someone's risk averse and finds a style and method that suits them, that suits their risk averse nature, they can be brilliant and they can do really well. If someone's really risk seeking and really risk tolerant and they use a method or approach and a style that aligns with who they are as a risk averse person,

They can be brilliant. Normally what happens, in fact, the risk tolerant ones, we have a strange thing. We believe any personality can trade as long as they work in a style or approach that matches their personality. What we do tend to see is probably less risk tolerant or highly risk seeking people make it in trading because they get taken out, cleaned out in the early days.

Okay, they go too big, too quickly, and they lose their account. They blow their account. That's me, by the way. That's my profile. Okay. Whereas the risk-tolerant one, sorry, the risk-averse one, he's going to survive the learning journey. His problem is he may not make enough because he doesn't put enough risk on. So it's the opposite problem. Okay? Yeah. So it's between those two.

But we've got some super risk-tolerant people who make a lot of money. Their biggest problem is they lack the risk management focus that they need. Yeah. You know, that's really interesting because I had a guest on a couple months ago, Lincoln Holbrook.

And he's a coach as well. And that was the approach he took is trying to get people to get their risk tolerance, get their profile aligned with their strategy. So that's, that's useful. That's very useful for traders. What's the best way? And then I'll let this be your last question, but what's the best way for someone to really find their risk risk profile? Yeah.

Well, I guess in a way it's very difficult without a wrist psychometric. I use a tool called the wrist type compass. Okay. And you have to go to someone who's, who's practiced in using that because simply you can't go on, you can't go on the, and use it yourself. I did an episode on the wrist type compass a couple of years ago on my podcast with the creator of it.

So it's worth looking at that. I'll find that episode and link to it for people that are interested. But other than that, you know, I often ask people to guess what their risk profile is. And most people aren't very good at it. Most people, what they see, I'm guessing that I'm very risk. I'm guessing that I would, I'm a high risk person, but yeah, most people are really bad at guessing their risk personality. Um,

Interesting. That's interesting. That tells me that we don't have a good self-awareness. What a lot of people do is they like to identify who they'd like to be rather than who they are. And that often becomes a problem. Okay. This is why extreme self-awareness is so valuable. Yeah. Wow.

Well, Steve, I appreciate it. Tell, this has been a fantastic interview. I've really enjoyed it. Tell the audience where they can find you, your podcast and how they can get their hands on the book. I am going to have all the links in the description too.

Right. Okay. So the podcast is the Alpha Mind podcast. It's on Spotify. It's on iTunes. It's on YouTube. We only record our voice because we don't have faces for YouTube. But we have a lot of guests on there going back.

five years and we just discuss really the psychological aspects and the mindset aspects of trading. We don't go into systems and technicals and methods. We have a newsletter, the Alphamind newsletter. People can find me on Twitter at Alphamind101. People can find me on LinkedIn and that's pretty much it. I've got

I've got a couple of websites where I just describe a little bit about my work, alpha r cubed, alpha the letter r, and then the word cubed.com or alpha-mind.net. And that's it really. And the book is available at all major book retailers as far as I know, Amazon and Amazon.com and Amazon UK. And that's it.

Hopefully. Do you need anything else? No, that's it. And you know what? I said I was buying the book. I'm actually buying it right now as we're chatting. So I am going to get it and I'm going to read it and...

Take a lot of benefit from it. And just thanks a lot for being on the show. Really appreciate it. And if you're listening, go check out the podcast. Go get the book. You know, this stuff is really important. And most traders are not successful. And it's because there's so many obstacles along the way. But we really got to do the work.

It's not easy, but go do the work and review some of Stephen's materials. Well, thank you, Steve. I appreciate you being on the show. It's an absolute pleasure, Casey. And I'm going to wait a few months, but I think we'll get you back on ours if you're open to that. Oh, I'd love it. I would absolutely love it. And by that time, I would have read your book. Okay. And you'll be making a lot of money by then.

Awesome. Okay. Well, that's it. And thanks again. Absolute pleasure. Take care. Thanks for tuning in to another insightful episode of How to Trade It with Casey Stubbs. We hope you found today's discussion valuable and inspiring.

Remember, the road to trading mastery is a continuous one, and your commitment to learning and growing as a trader is the key to your success. If you have any questions, comments, or topics you'd like us to cover in future episodes, please reach out to us at podcast at tradingstrategyguides.com. Keep listening, keep learning, and keep trading your way to victory.

Until next time.