May 19, 2017
Denise Shull is a performance and decision coach to traders and
athletes. She is well known for her effectiveness in assessing
performance under high pressure situations. Denise began her Wall
Street career in 1994 as trader and desk manager on the Chicago
Board Options Exchange. She was always fascinated by the psychology
side of trading from the outset of her trading career. In 2015 she
offered critical insight on how to put together one of the main
characters of the hit show “Billions” on Showtime.
Denise has counseled an extremely wide variety of traders with all
kinds of personalities and trading styles. However, at the end of
the day everyone is human and all traders have common psychological
threads which she points out. When Denise analyzes a client she
tries to understand a sequence of feelings that person is making
and what the patterns of their feelings are. At first it is just
about her figuring out how a clients brain works, and then she
helps them see the patterns.
What was the trigger for Denise to go down the path of studying the
mind and human behavior? Starting from a young age she enjoyed
observing and counseling friends. In her mid to late 20’s she
started looking at her friends relationships and seeing that the
people were all different but the scenarios were the same. A
teacher helped point out a theory of Freud’s. Freud believed there
is a critical period for attachment and self image when you are a
child. Denise gives examples of how human reactions stem from a
template made in the first 2-3 years of life.
Michael and Denise finish up talking fractals, psycho analytics,
efficient market theory and compare notes on Nobel Prize winner
Harry Markowitz.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio: