I have a very similar Pythonic solution to pivot (https://open.kattis.com/problems/pivot) by traversing the lists twice. Adding the candidates when going left to right then removing the candidates right to left (as shown below). The complexity is O(2N) but should round up to O(N). However, my solution failed with "TLE" message.

Is your solution able to successful pass the time limit on Kattis?

_ = int(input())
listy = [int(x) for x in input().split()]

max_left = -2147483647 # smallest 32-bit signed integers
min_right = 2147483647 # largest 32-bit signed integers
pivots = []

for left_iter in listy:
    if left_iter > max_left:
        pivots.append(left_iter)
    if left_iter > max_left:
        max_left = left_iter

        
for right_iter in listy[::-1]:
    if right_iter > min_right and right_iter in pivots:
        pivots.remove(right_iter)
    if right_iter < min_right:
        min_right = right_iter

print(len(pivots))

On kattis problem : Bank
Test case :
5 4
1200 1
2500 3
2000 2
2500 3
1400 4
your code outputs 8200, where it should output 8400 :
t = 0 , pick 1400
t = 1 , pick 2000
t = 2 , pick 2500
t = 3 , pick 2500