Fortunes Won and Lost

You picked up this book because you love markets and markets have humbled you. Maybe you bought the top of a stock that everyone swore could only rise and sold near the bottom when fear made staying look foolish. Maybe you run a small account and watch 5% moves erase 3 months of gains. Or you have a disciplined system that works until a headline makes you break every rule you wrote. Whatever brought you here, you know that prices move people before people move prices, and you want the psychology first, the numbers second.
This book is not a hot stock list that will be obsolete in 90 days, and it is not a lecture that tells you to buy an index and never think again. What you actually need is a history lab, a mind lab, and a practical workflow in 1 volume, so you can recognize which stage of a bubble you are in, name the bias running you that Tuesday afternoon, and execute a plan that survives it. The pages that follow walk from tulip bulbs in the 1630s to AI stocks today, then inside the fast brain that creates fear of missing out, then into checklists and sizing.
Inside, you'll discover:
• The 7-stage anatomy of a bubble, from displacement to collapse, with usable markers
• Crowd psychology, contagion, and echo chambers that make independent judgment rare
• The tulip, South Sea, Mississippi, railroad, 1929, 1987, 2000, and 2008 panics side by side
• The machinery of greed and fear, dopamine, loss aversion, and decision fatigue
• 12 biases that ruin fortunes, from overconfidence to sunk cost and availability
• A speculator's toolkit and workflow, from multi-timeframe charts to journals and prompts
• Risk, sizing, and the Kelly fraction, plus contrarian timing and staged entries
Fortunes are not made by predicting tops. They are made by seeing the stage, sizing so you can be 6 months early and still solvent, and staying in the game until cash meets despair.