When Denise Shull earned her Masters in Neuroscience from the University of Chicago in 1995, she didn’t imagine she would become a go-to consultant and coach for world-class traders ten years later, much less for Olympic athletes this year.

But that’s what has transpired in her career as someone deeply interested in human emotion and decision-making. In this episode of Mind Over Money, I invited Denise to discuss her work and her recent joint venture with Bloomberg Tradebook to train trader brains.

Based on her many years of research on how traders make decisions and deal with emotional responses – including several years as a professional trader herself – Shull and her team at The ReThink Group developed trader training software that she’s inviting anyone to try at https://traderbrainexercise.com/

Trader’s “Gut” in a World at “Max Algo”

Shull’s insights about how we can tap into subconscious pattern recognition and cognitive-emotional “intuition” are powerful in a field that for decades has told traders to remove their emotions from trading.

She has been a lone voice teaching traders that it’s not only impossible to separate emotion from decision-making, but that we actually make better decisions when we are conscious of our feelings. And her hedge fund clients now recognize that the death of the high-performing trader has been greatly exaggerated in a world she believes has reached “max algorithm.”

Be sure to listen to my full interview with Denise to learn about her training and coaching work with top trading firms and with the US Snowboarding Team. She tells a great story about “emotional” snowboarders being some of the top performers of the bunch.

Kevin Cook is a Senior Stock Strategist with Zacks Investment Research where he runs the Tactical Trader portfolio.