The AlphaMind Podcast - Denise Shull: Developing Visceral Intelligence to Enhance Trading Performance & Improve Trading Expertise.

Visceral intelligence is the literal feeling that you get in your body that correlates with a decision you're trying to make or an experience you are going through. Visceral intelligence is the 'Elephant in the Room' of trading. We all have it, we all use it, we all benefit by being better at it, yet people refuse to recognise it even exists. 

In this week’s AlphaMind podcast we are delighted to welcome back the wonderful Denise Shull to talk about Visceral Intelligence and Trading. 

Denise is making her second appearance as a guest on the AlphaMind podcast. As one of the leading performance coaches in the trading and investment world, Denise has specialised in applying neuroeconomics and modern psychoanalysis in her work with hedge fund portfolio managers and high performance professional athletes. She is also the author of one of the best-selling books on trader mindset – ‘Market Mind Games’.

In this episode we explore Visceral Intelligence and how we spend so much time up in our heads ruminating over the past and stressing about the future, that we miss out on vital clues and insights which our body and its feelings reveal and provide. This is why visceral intelligence and connecting with your body is so important.

This episode covers a range of themes of interest to new and seasoned traders alike, including:

• How emotions, insight, intuition come to impact our trading practices. 
• Keeping a track of your emotions to help make better trading decisions going forward. 
• How we can use knowledge of emotions to make better trading decisions. 
• Useful analogies to compare to trading to improve how we manage ourselves as we navigate our way through the markets.
• Developing visceral intelligence by naming our feelings and recognising how we can use these. 
• Emotions, risk-decisions and recognising what is important and what is not. 
• How cognitive and emotional intelligence combine and how ‘the body keeps the score’.
• How our trading systems are unique to each individual and how this makes learning other people’s systems so challenging.
• Improving your learning through greater knowledge of yourself. 
• Categorising your emotions and listening to your body’s feeling without judgement.
• The challenge and benefits of learning these elements when we have a resistance to honest self-reflection.
• The dangers of cutting yourself off from your feelings. 

You can find out more about Denise and her work at:

The Rethink Group website: 

You can follow Denise on Twitter 

Denise’s book is ‘Market Mind Games: A Radical Psychology of Investing, Trading and Risk’.

Episode Links: 

🎧 Podcast: https://link.chtbl.com/DeniseShull2021

📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/d1pVBTpXmAE

 
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Book review of 'Market Mind Games' by Denise Shull..

There is a popular misconception amongst many traders that they would be better off if they could just somehow shed their emotions and become emotionless androids. Whilst of course this is unfeasible, this sentiment is ignorant of the fact that emotions lie at the very core of our ability to make good decisions. In this book, Denise Shull contends that if one could learn to observe their emotions and develop their ability to read them, then they could learn to use them constructively to the huge benefit of their trading performance.

'Market Mind Games’ is a superb addition to the ever increasing body of work on the psychological aspects of trading and investing: Denise is brilliantly able to bring in aspects of psychology, finance, neuroscience and philosophy and combine them into a coherent set of observations and theories, whilst intertwining these with real insights from Denise’s own experiences from her many years at the cutting edge of trading.

The central theme running through the book regarding emotions is based on the concept that actions and behaviours stem from thoughts and cognitions, and that the inputs for these come from one’s emotions and feelings. The book also delves beyond this and explores how people reproduce self-similar patterns of behaviour in their psyche from earlier periods of their lives, and how these patterns can reappear when trading, often to wreak havoc on their trading performance. Throughout the book Denise is able to intertwine her theories with a fictional sub-plot which helps draw out and crystallize aspects of her theory in a trading context, she also provides some useful trading insights from her own past.

The book makes some bold attempt to introduce some concepts and ideas which are rarely touched upon in the trading literature. Many people have written about the psychological aspects of trading and investing, however few have made what I consider a worthwhile effort to get to the nub of the issues. Previously, only Mark Douglas and Brett Steenbarger have, in my humble opinion, really made a telling contribution to the subject of trading psychology at the personal level. And only Steenbarger has actually tackled the inner-mind aspects of trading in any meaningful way. I believe this book is a worthy addition to the works of Douglas and Steenbarger, and segues well with some of Steenbarger’s excellent work.

I am particularly drawn to the element of the book where Denise talks about self-similar patterns in the psyche, which she terms, rather controversially as it would seem, ‘Fractal’. As a former trader, now working with traders as a coach, I often see similarities between people’s trading behaviours and experiences from previous periods of their life and past relationships. The legendary trader Ed Seykota was famously quoted in Jack Schwager’s Market Wizards as saying “Everybody gets what they want out of the market”, a comment which has been argued and debated about for many years. In ‘Market Mind Games’ I believe Denise implicitly goes some way to exploring why this may be.

In summary this book is both original and bold; Denise brings some new ideas to the table, some of which have not been without controversy. Denise herself terms her ideas as radical, and it is hard to argue against that. If I was to have any concerns about the book I think at times it veers between appealing to the broader trader community the narrower academic audience, and thus at times can be a challenging read, requiring a second or even a third examination of certain sections. These are however small criticisms in what is a very worthwhile effort which I believe makes a valuable contribution to the subject of trading and investment psychology.