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: Bio-psychology Attachment theory Neurosciences Conviction as data Fractal emotions Efficient market theory Self blame as a positive