{"id":59680,"date":"2018-03-28T07:00:22","date_gmt":"2018-03-28T12:00:22","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2025-02-08T11:50:50","modified_gmt":"2025-02-08T17:50:50","slug":"5-questions-with-denise-shull-ma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/28\/5-questions-with-denise-shull-ma\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Questions with Denise Shull, MA"},"content":{"rendered":"

We had a chance to hear Denise Shull on an episode of <\/span>Futures Radio Show<\/span><\/a> and were fascinated by her story and her job working with traders. So we decided to get with her one-on-one. <\/span><\/p>\n

As a decision coach and performance architect, Denise leverages her training in psychological science to solve the challenges of mental mistakes, confidence crises and slumps in Olympic athletes and Wall Street traders. Denise is known for her uncanny effectiveness in coaching, training and assessing for the X factor of human performance under pressure.<\/span><\/p>\n

Denise is the founder of <\/span>The ReThink Group<\/span><\/a>. Their mission is to solve the unsolvable mental blocks found in traders, investors, pro athletes and entertainers through a unique application of the neuroscience of perception and judgment and techniques borrowed from modern psychoanalysis. <\/span><\/p>\n

Follow Denise on Twitter at <\/span>@DeniseKShull<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

How did you get involved in trading, and what path took you to where you are now?<\/em> <\/b><\/p>\n

Denise:<\/strong> I always say some volleyball players at Chicago\u2019s East Bank Club got me into trading, and that\u2019s true\u2013it\u2019s just there is a little more to the story. In 1992, I began dating a floor trader. At the time, I literally knew nothing about trading. My dad had been a buy-and-hold investor. He didn\u2019t even know how to sell a share of stock. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cZAP,\u201d my friend, after knowing me for a year or so\u2013and calling me Mister cause he thought I wasn\u2019t such a girly girl\u2013started telling me I should buy a weather futures<\/a> seat, which sounded moderately insane. I mean, what the heck is a weather futures seat? <\/span><\/p>\n

A couple of years later, as I was finishing my Master\u2019s at The University of Chicago, ZAP told me he was \u201cgoing upstairs\u201d and and asked would I like to come. I thought \u201cgoing upstairs where?\u201d He explained it was going to trade on terminals because you could get real-time quotes on networks, and would I like to come and keep track of trades. If I did, he and his friends would teach me to trade. I had applied for some PhD programs, but wasn\u2019t really sure if I wanted to be a psychologist or researcher and had to finish writing my thesis, so I thought, \u201cwhy not?\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Fast forward a few months and I was indeed trading my own account. Bob Kanter ran Electronic Trading Group, and one day, he says, \u201cDenise, you have some of the best instincts I\u2019ve ever seen, and I didn\u2019t think a woman could trade.\u201d Thankfully, I really liked Bob, but nevertheless, I took the opportunity to go to Schonfeld because they were trading momentum, and ETG was more of a scalping shop. I was even lucky enough to sit next to the now legendary Dmitry Balyasny for a few months! Then Eddy Franco of Bright Trading offers me a job to help him run a day trading desk in NYC and I move. I actually end up at two other shops\u2014Sharpe Capital and W.J. Bonfanti, a $2 broker\u2014but we don\u2019t have enough words for those stories. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

All along, I poured over <\/span>Market Wizards<\/span><\/i>, Mark Douglas, Ari Kiev and Alexander Elder. I even hired Mark and Ari briefly to help me with my desks. Yet I had this nagging sense that something was missing, and in 2003, I inadvertently found the answer. The Mid-Manhattan Institute of Psychoanalysis, where I was casually studying for my PhD, asked to republish my master\u2019s thesis, and in order to not sound like an idiot, I rewrote it with updated science. And lo and behold, Antonio Damasio had shown that emotion was a necessary ingredient of decisions. If there is no emotion, there is no decision. WOW! In other words, every time \u201ctake the emotion out\u201d is uttered\u2013it\u2019s an impossible instruction. <\/span><\/p>\n

I happened to tell a friend\u2013 Chris Terry, who I didn\u2019t know worked with Linda Bradford Raschke\u2013and he said, \u201cYou have to write an article.\u201d I did, and the truth of the message resonated, and the approach took on a life of its own. <\/span><\/p>\n

Who is your greatest influence for getting into and learning about mental coaching skills and how that applies to traders?<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

Denise:\u00a0<\/strong>Honestly, Deborah Greene Bershatsky PhD, who was running the psychoanalytic institute. I figured if her tactics to address mental distortions could help dissociated personalities, they could help traders. After that, I did all of my own work\u2013because everyone else was about discipline and no emotion. I think the power came from me looking at the true trading experience and analyzing the actual emotion and decision-making research. <\/span><\/p>\n

Can you talk about your association with Wendy Rhoades of \u201cBillions\u201d?<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

Denise:\u00a0<\/strong>Andrew Ross Sorkin interviewed me about my book on CNBC\u2019s Squawk Box in 2012, so I can only assume that in the brainstorming, when they were discussing the fact that SAC had a performance coach, my name came up. In August of 2015, he asked me to help Maggie Siff, the actress who plays Dr. Wendy Rhoades, and she in turn asked me to help the other two creators. I gave them a bunch of war stories to illustrate the true emotional challenge of trading and market decisions made for other reasons, such as feeling guilt. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At the time, the marketing department also wanted me to do some promo, but honestly I was concerned about the whole dominatrix thing. David has asked me if Maggie could continue to work with me, and while I tried to be open-minded, I was very much of two minds. I was also \u00a0preoccupied with the Bloomberg Trader Brain Exercise based on my research. After the show began to air though, everyone kept telling me how much Wendy sounded like me, so I finally fessed up to what had happened <\/span><\/p>\n

Mindset is critical for traders.\u00a0Can you share a tip on how traders can attain and maintain a mental edge while trading?<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

Denise:\u00a0<\/strong>Learn to identify what you are feeling and why you are feeling it. Delve into what\u2019s frustrating and creating fear, and untangle it from your personal fractals\u2013your lifelong repetitive expectations and explanation. <\/span><\/p>\n

Then choose which sense, feeling or emotion you do or don\u2019t want to act on. Ask yourself, \u201cIf I take this action, how will I feel as it starts to develop?\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Becoming emotionally sophisticated, knowing how to differentiate your feelings and be granular in your language about them is an edge in and of itself. There is something special about the connection between language and feelings\u2013it\u2019s an edge to exploit.<\/span><\/p>\n

What are the similarities between competitive athletics and trading?<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

Denise:\u00a0<\/strong>They are really quite different. It\u2019s a mistake to apply typical sports psychology ideas to trading. You can\u2019t make anything happen, the game goes on forever, it\u2019s never really clear if you have won or lost. All of these facts make borrowing ideas of mental toughness a very dangerous strategy for trading. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We had a chance to hear Denise Shull on an episode of Futures Radio Show and were fascinated by her story and her job working with traders. So we decided to get with her one-on-one. As a decision coach and performance architect, Denise leverages her training in psychological science to solve the challenges of mental […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":59681,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[87],"class_list":["post-59680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-interviews"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}