STA Blog

A presentation by Denise Shull herself on The Shull Method for STA members on Tuesday the 14th September 2021. She started off in finance in 1994 in Chicago at Schonfeld Securities subsequently moving to Sharpe Capital in New York. In 2003 published her MA thesis for the University of Chicago: The Neurobiology of Freud’s Repetition Compulsion. Her 2012 book ‘Marked Mind Games. A Radical Psychology of Investing, Trading and Risk’ underlines the area she’s coming from, and along the way she founded the Rethink Group.  As a Social Psychology graduate, I was keen to hear her speak.

She came across as confident and well-rehearsed, her concise (30 minute) Power Point presentation was probably one she had covered on many occasions. Parts of it included slightly terrifying vocabulary like: affectivism; metacognition; limbic system; interoception. Then in other sections she was tremendously down to earth: ‘’everything you do is driven by a feeling’’, you are ‘’always predicting your own safety’’.

Her key words are: Integral; Incidental; Information; Irrelevant; Intuition; Impulse. She believes it’s very important to ‘‘parse your feelings’’ because this is the way you will make money and that looking at charts is integral to emotion. ‘’Managing risk is incidental emotion’’.

To become better at this, one should consider ‘’all the things we fail to notice’’ and ‘’become willing’’. She suggests verbalising one’s fears, get the right word and strangely enough, especially if you speak other languages. A new one for multi-lingual me. This is because by ‘’naming the feeling, you feel a little better’’.

STA members can watch her video on www.technicalanalysts.com, and hear her interviews on the Alpha Mind podcast.