Denise Shull is a performance coach who uses neuroeconomics and modern psychoanalysis in her work with hedge funds and professional athletes. She is also the founder of The ReThink Group. Shull focuses on the positive contribution of feelings and emotion in high-pressure decisions. She is the author of Market Mind Games which explains how Wall Street traders act out Freudian transferences in reaction to market moves. Shull postulates that human perception contains fractal elements in the same manner as the fractal geometry of nature.
Shull graduated from Kennedy's executive program in "Investment Decisions and Behavioral Finance" in 2009. She holds a Master of Arts from The University of Chicago. Her thesis research, "The Neurobiology of Freud’s Theory of the Repetition Compulsion" was published in 2003 in the Annals of Modern Psychoanalysis and was cited in 2013 as one of the first papers ever written in the emerging field of neuro-psychoanalysis.
2003–present Founder, CEO and Lead Performance Coach at The ReThink Group
Shull began working as a short-term trader and trading desk manager in 1994 at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, and later began trading futures as a member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. During this period Shull began to formulate her application of neuropsychology to investment and trading at banks, hedge funds, and proprietary funds, working in the budding interdisciplinary field of neuroeconomics. In 2003, Shull created The ReThink Group to address the challenges of slumps, repetitive mistakes and confidence crises in portfolio managers and traders. In 2016, ReThink added Olympians, pro poker players and professional athletes to their roster. She filed a copyright claim against Showtime Networks in 2018, claiming their show Billions plagiarized her 2012 book Market Mind Games. Her claim was updated in October 2019 to include a claim of false endorsement.
Publications
Shull's book Market Mind Games: a Radical Psychology of Investing, Trading and Risk was translated into Chinese in 2013. She served as the lead author of the chapter on trading psychology in Investor Behavior: The Psychology of Financial Planning and Investing. Shull's first article "Freud's Path to Profits" was published in SFO magazine in 2004, and she has since written articles for Psychology Today, Hedge-Fund Intelligence, Thomson Reuters, CME Group, All About Alpha, and many hedge fund sites as well as her own blog.
Media appearances
Shull's work has been profiled by the New York Times, Forbes Magazine, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, University of Chicago Magazine, Business Insider, Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, New York Observer, The Globe and Mail, The New York Times' Dealbook, New York Post and The Huffington Post amongst others. With the popularity of Billions, Shull has also been covered by Fortune, and has appeared on Fox Business News with Liz Claman. CNBC's Squawk Box has featured Shull in both the United States and Asia. She has also appeared on Bloomberg TV, Cavuto, PBS, CNBC, Discovery Channel and CNBC's Halftime Report where she analyzed the trading team's implicit motivations.
