Podcast Transcript: Denise Shull on Emotions as a Dataset and Avoiding Investment Mistakes

This is an edited transcript of our podcast episode with Denise Shull, published 1 April 2022. Denise Shull is the Founder and CEO of ReThink. In that role, she uses neuroscience and modern psychoanalysis to help clients become successful in investing, trading, and leading teams. She has consulted on the development of Showtime’s BILLIONS, coached Olympic champions, and often appears on CNBC, Bloomberg and in the Wall Street Journal. Before ReThink, Denise worked in finance. She started at one of the first electronic trading firms in Chicago, then traded at Schonfeld Securities before she ran her own desk at Sharpe Capital. In the podcast, we discuss, the particular challenge of trading and investing in markets, how to incorporate emotions into your dataset, and much more. While we have tried to make the transcript as accurate as possible, if you do notice any errors, let me know by email.

Introduction

Bilal Hafeez

Welcome to Macro Hive Conversations with Bilal Hafeez. Macro Hive helps educate investors and provide investment insight to all markets, from crypto, to equities, to bonds. For our latest views, visit macrohive.com.

The US yield curve recently inverted, so all the talk is about a US recession. Earlier this year, we rolled out our own US recession prediction model based on the US yield curve, which you can track on the Macro Hive website. It recently began assigning a 50% chance of a US recession. And so, it’s well worth keeping an eye on the tracker in the coming few weeks. As for how to invest around US recessions, we published a note which looked at how markets behaved around past recessions. It’s a useful guide to navigating markets. We also published a series of notes around Europe’s energy problem. It’s worse than you think. And finally, we gave some projections on where Bitcoin prices could go in the coming few years. You would have to read the note to find out what they are.

To get access to all of these insights, simply become a member at macrohive.com. With membership, you can get access to all of our updates, webinars, transcripts, and our member Slack room, where you can interact with a Macro Hive research team and other members all hours of the day. Membership to Macro Hive costs the same as a few weekly cappuccinos, so go to macrohive.com to sign up now. If you’re a professional or institutional investor, we have a more high octane product that features all of my and the Macro Hive research teams views, our model portfolio, trade ideas and machine learning models, and much, much more. Hit me up on Bloomberg or email me on bilal@macrohive.com to find out more.

Now onto this episode’s guest, Denise Shull. Denise is the founder and CEO of ReThink. In that role, she uses neuroscience and modern psychoanalysis to help clients become successful in investing, trading, and leading teams. She’s also consulted on the development of Showtime’s Billions show, coached Olympic champions, and often appears on CNBC, Bloomberg, and in the Wall Street Journal. Before ReThink, Denise worked in finance. She started at one of the first electronic trading firms in Chicago, then traded at Schonfeld Securities, before running her own desk at Sharp Capital. Denise holds a masters from the University of Chicago and her thesis was cited in 2013 as one of the first papers written about neuropsychoanalysis. She’s also a 2009 alumni of Harvard’s Kennedy School Executive Education Programme, investment decisions and behavioural finance. Now onto our conversation.

Greetings and welcome, Denise. I’ve been really looking forward to our conversation.

Denise Shull

Thanks for having me.

Bilal Hafeez

Well, the first thing I like to do with all of my guests is to learn a bit more about the guest. I like to learn your origin story. I imagine you have quite an interesting one. Was it inevitable that you’d end up where you are today? It’d be good to know what you studied at university and then what your first job was, and what was your path to where you are now?

Denise Shull

Well, would you believe I majored in biology and nutrition? But it’s actually germane because it was about like, how are we who we are? That’s the common thread. But then I went to work for IBM because having a corporate job where you sold computers and they paid you in these big commission cheques seemed kind of cool and so I started doing that. I literally thought I would do that. Then I was supposed to go to Stanford and get my MBA. I was 27, I think I thought, “Oh my God, if I wake up when I’m 40 and I have to sell somebody a computer, I’m literally going to slit my wrist. Who cares?” And so, I’d actually gotten myself into therapy because I thought it sounded interesting. And I thought, “That’d be interesting to be a psychologist.” So I finagled my life. I quit IBM. I went to Aspen for the winter. Finagled my life into Chicago and got into this graduate programme with University of Chicago. It’s like a design your own, do whatever you want.

And so, I did, following on the biology, what was called bio psychology. In other words, how does our brain create our perception? How does our brain create our self image? Where does it come from? How do we have a personality that’s consistent? It has to be neurochemicals somehow, at least that’s what I said. People thought I was crazy. Anyway, I had been dating a former floor trader from the CBOE, the options exchange. He had told me that he thought I would be a good trader and that I should buy a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade. They had this weather futures seat and I was like, “What on earth are you talking about? Like weather future seat and wave my hands in coloured jackets? I don’t think I’m doing that.”

But then, as I was writing my master’s thesis, he got invited to go upstairs in one of the first upstairs trading rooms. And so, somehow I got swept along with that and ditched the PhD and became a trader and traded in prop firms and moved to New York to run my own desk. Yeah. And then all the bio psychology, which by that time was neuropsychanalysis, started to come back into the psychology of trading and investing.

Bilal Hafeez

Presumably, while you were trading, it became apparent to you that understanding psychology was important or how that was influencing you, because you took a detour into trading, you could have just stayed in trading and just worked at a fund and carried on happily in trading for the rest of your career.

Denise Shull

I mean, there’s two things. If I’d known there was such a thing as a hedge fund, which I didn’t know, but had I known, I think I would have set out to start my own. But I literally didn’t know. I did sit next to Dmitry Balyasny who obviously clearly came to know, and whether he knew at that time or not, I don’t know. But yeah. It was all like, what’s your process? What’s your trading plan? Create your process. Create your trading plan. Follow your process. Follow your plan. So I was being told that it was supposed to be this linear systematic thing, except I would notice that the people who were making the most money weren’t necessarily doing the linear systematic thing.

I was reading all the books that there were to read, Market Wizards, and Mark Douglas’s books. I was even hiring them. I hired Douglas a little bit. But I had the view that everyone else has, that it’s thinking, and then following your process. So it’s thinking and behaviour, and feelings and emotions were supposed to have nothing to do with it. And then I discovered, when someone wanted to publish my master’s thesis, it was like as a complete fluke out of left field. And I said, look, it’s got to be updated. It’s neuroscience, and it’s a decade old. And so when I updated it, there was starting to be research showing that we can’t make any decision without emotion. And I was like, wait, what? Like if we can’t make any decision without emotion, meaning if we didn’t have emotion, we couldn’t decision, which is what the original science showed. People who were devoid of emotion couldn’t decide what day to make a doctor appointment on. And they couldn’t decide which shirt to wear in the morning.

I was like, this changes everything. I literally was just talking to someone about it, and then they asked me to write an article. It was the craziest thing. And then I wrote the article which I had wanted to be a journalist at one point and my mother talked me out of it. So I thought writing an article in a magazine would be like really cool and that would be that would be that.

And then someone asked me to come talk about it and then someone else, and here we are basically 20 years later. When you want me to talk about it. It took on a life of it’s own.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it clearly shows that this was a part of your journey. I mean, you were thinking a lot about, well, let’s get meta, you we’re thinking about thinking, along the way. I mean, not everybody thinks in those ways. I mean, people, some people would’ve just said, okay, I’m going to stick to the process and I’m not going to stick my head up and look around and see what of people are doing. So there was something within you to look kind of a step above.

Why understanding perception, judgement and decision making matters

Denise Shull

Yeah. I know this sounds something, but I honestly now think I was meant to do this in this position, and literally my whole entire life has brought me into this position that I was interested in perception and judgement , that I was interested in emotion, that I was interested in a human unconscious. Like, why do we really do what we do? And then I became this trader and had this experience in the markets. And then the two came back together. Because all of those things, perception and judgement, emotion, confidence, conviction, we can just start with those emotions. And the fact that a lot of it’s unconscious, all are like absolutely germane to success in the market. And so I just happen to have these strands.

Bilal Hafeez

And, and your master’s thesis was the neurobiology of Freud’s repetition compulsion.

Denise Shull

Yeah. That’s it. I wrote that.

Bilal Hafeez

What was Freud’s repetition compulsion? What does that mean?

Denise Shull

Yes. There’s this great paragraph that I’m not going to be able to quote exactly, but it’s something like all of a man’s relationships, no matter how differently they start, end the same way. All of a man’s situations, no matter how positive they look at the beginning, have the same conclusion. And he basically identified that people have this tendency, which he believed was compulsion, to get themselves in repetitive circumstance. And I noticed me and my friends doing that in our dating relationships. And I was like, I think there’s something to this. So I’ve wanted to know, if we do that, there has to be a template of some sort, right? We have to be unconsciously reacting according to sort of some pre-programmed thing, because how else could it happen? I mean, this was my thought in 1995 at the University of Chicago. And so I’m like, well, what is it? How could that be? What would happen in the human brain that would allow us to date two completely different guys with completely different personalities and basically have the relationship take the same course and end in the same way. First of all, the individual’s doing something to make that happen, right?

But how could they be doing it in a way that’s repetitive? That’s what I wanted to know. That’s literally what that master thesis is about.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. Yeah. But it reads true. I mean, it sounds like that’s the story of our lives in some ways where we’re in this constant repetitive psycho drama with whatever, our relationships, it could be with our work, it could be with ourselves. And in some ways when you interact with another person or some institutional entity, in some ways it’s simply a mirror onto yourself. It’s really just telling you about yourself rather than the other.

Denise Shull

Yeah. I mean, as it turns out, we develop our view of who we are in the world and where we fit and what we should expect to get when we’re really little. And we develop that core self-image by how we’re treated by the people around us when we’re really little like, one, two, three, four. It also turns out there’s a well-known phenomenon in biology called critical period.

And so critical period is easiest to understand in birds. If a bird does not hear its song during like a certain few weeks of development, the bird can never sing its song.

That’s critical period. Well I surmised in my master’s thesis, that there really is a critical period, essentially for self image. And then, and if that’s true, then you expect an authority figure or you expect an intimate partner to treat you in a different way in accordance to whatever your self image is.

And so then you behave in ways that get you … you create it. Like, you know how if someone’s insecure and expects to be rejected and you can feel it.

You oftentimes sort of reject them, because it’s annoying. Whereas if they expect you to, someone expects you to treat them with respect and they’re self-confident and they’re not overly worried about your perception, then you treat them way.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. Yeah. That definitely feels true to my experience of myself and others. I mean that really feels true.

Denise Shull

I mean, what we have now, and we’re jumping way ahead, that we didn’t have then, is all kinds of neuroscience showing that everything about human perception and judgement is prediction, and it’s prediction based on past experience. So right now you don’t know it, but if we watched your brain in real time, we could show that you’re using the parts of brain associated with your knowledge of language and you’re actually anticipating the next word that’s going to come out of my mouth based on your knowledge of the subject, your knowledge of English language and really most importantly, you’re predicting how it’s going to make you feel.

So Freud noticing what people were doing, now we actually have the neuroscience to show like how the perception and judgement , this always predicting based on past experience is not something that was known when I wrote my original master’s thesis.

But it’s the mechanism.

Bilal Hafeez

And so you’ve mentioned perception and judgement a few times. Why do you focus on those?

Denise Shull

Because I think that’s everything. The human experience is perceiving the world around us. We should be perceiving ourselves, but let’s just go with like how people experience life day to day. You’re perceiving the world around you. You wake up, you feel groggy, you feel good, you feel hungover, you feel whatever. Okay, that’s a perception. Then you have a judgement, oh, I’m going to work out or not work out. I’m going to eat breakfast. I’m going to drink coffee. Life is a series of perceptions and judgement calls. It’s all it is.

Bilal Hafeez

And is there a difference between judgement and making a decision?

Denise Shull

No, not really. Not in the sense that we’re using them right now. A judgement call is a decision. You make an assessment and you decide you’re going to behave. I mean, behave is the third part. You perceive something, you make some assessment of it, some judgement –

Bilal Hafeez

And then you act.

Denise Shull

Make a decision about what you’re going to do and you do it. We just keep cycling through those things.

How your unconscious affects your decision making

Bilal Hafeez

And then the perception is linked to your unconscious then as well. So we think our perception is conscious and we’re fully aware, but in reality, what you’re saying is there’s a layer beneath, which is the unconscious that is often driving that. And so two different people could observe the same scene and perceive it differently or you yourself could perceive it differently depending time of day. It could be the same thing. Time of day, mood. There’s research, by the way, just, you made that so clear. You did such a good job of that. There was research done, I think it was at Columbia and this has been like 15 years ago or so where they set up this scenario that an interviewee was coming in and, all the details don’t matter, but basically they were handed a hot cup of coffee or iced coffee. Like they had this thing where the intern dropped the books and they said, oh, can you hold my coffee? But anyway, the person being interviewed was handed either really hot coffee or really cold coffee. And then afterwards they were asked to assess the interviewer.

And there was a correlation between was the interviewer warm and friendly and interesting to talk to and hot coffee or was the interviewer rude and cold and hard to talk to and cold coffee. So the physical experience of hot or cold modified the person’s perception somewhat slightly. Yeah. So what kind of mood you’re in matters. A long way of agreeing with that.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. And then the unconscious, how do you become conscious of your unconscious? How do you become aware of your unconscious?

Denise Shull

You know what the gargantuan step one is, is be willing. Just decide you want to know because many of us have defence mechanisms against really knowing. And so if you’re willing, so like it’s, self-awareness at the end of the day, right? If you’re willing to be as self-aware as possible, and you want to be, you’ll start to become more. Now, there’s lots of things you can do and lots of help you can get. But for the general listener, I will just say that, be willing.

Bilal Hafeez

And why would somebody not be willing to?

Denise Shull

There are things they don’t want to see. There are things they don’t want to see about themselves, or they don’t want to see, typically about the family they grew up in. It’s usually not so much what they don’t want to see in the here and now. I mean, there’ll be a repetition in the here and now that is a repetition of something that happened to them. But they don’t want to see what happened to them. We also, as children, when bad things happen, children are naturally narcissistic. Right? And so one really effective coping mechanism for a child is to believe that something bad that happened is partly their fault. Now why that’s, for the child, it gives the child a sense of control.

Their parents are getting divorced. And they have nothing, they’re sad and they’re scared and they’re hurt and they have no control over it, right? But if they say, well, they’re getting divorced because I was bad, then they can think, well, if I’m good, maybe they’ll get back together. Now it’s a fantasy. Of course. But it gives the child a sense of agency. So it’s functional. We’re supposed to lose that inaccurate self blame as we become adults and actually have agency. Not all people do, and the self criticism actually ironically functions as giving them a sense of control. So a hyper self-critical person, while it may sort of hurt them, let’s say in a professional sense where they’re being too hard on themselves or too anxious or whatever. Ironically, it’s giving them sense of safety. But it’s the kind of thing they’re afraid to see because this self blame kept them safe originally. So that’s just a good example of how someone, we develop these mechanisms of coping that work. And we’re a little reluctant to lose them because we don’t know what’ll happen with us.

Bilal Hafeez

And what’s a benefit then of becoming aware of the unconscious?

Denise Shull

Oh you get to know who you really are and you get to access all your capacity or a lot more of your capacity. Like you’re holding yourself back. When you’re functioning out of a defence mechanism that was artificially created to give you a sense of control. You really can’t access all your intelligence and skills and abilities. You don’t ever get to become what you’re capable of becoming.

Bilal Hafeez

And, and would it make your perceptions more accurate or is there such thing as an accurate perception or not or is that impossible?

Denise Shull

I think there are more and less accurate perceptions. Yes. So, here’s one that a lot of people relate to. People are generally a little bit self conscious, and a little bit self-critical but the truth is everybody’s a little bit self-conscious and a little bit self-critical. So when one person thinks that the other person are thinking about them and criticising, they’re generally not, they’re thinking about themselves. If everybody was realising that everybody’s thinking about themselves and not criticising them and how they said that or what they wore, whatever, there’d sort of be less anxiety in the world. Less anxiety, just take one small social situation.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s interesting the way you are talking about the unconscious, because over the years I’ve done a lot of self-reflection and work with therapists and so on. A few things that I’ve become aware of, one is that, there’s four children in my family, two older sisters then me and brother. But my father used to always say, you’re my right hand man, to me. And so I’ve always had this thing where I always want to be like the advisor, the right hand man, the trusted other, the trusted left tenant. And so through my career, I’ve always kind of effect sort of consciously or not, I guess unconsciously, ended up pursuing that role, kind of this like trusted advisory, right hand man, the guy you can rely on, on the one hand. And then the other thing I’ve become aware of is that one of the ways would get recognition from my parents was through getting good grades academically. And I find that in my job is to make market predictions. So, I think, okay, oil is going to go up or down or stocks are going to up or down. And if it goes up, I feel great. If it goes down, I feel really bad, it’s almost like I’m getting a bad grade.

Denise Shull

Yeah, totally.

Bilal Hafeez

And it’s like this evaluation-

Denise Shull

You are getting a bad grade.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. It kind of goes back to my kind of self-esteem. At the same time rationally, I know markets are at some level just completely random and arbitrary. So why, why do I think I can always get this thing right or not, and then you end up in these kind of paradoxes, but certainly we’re listening to you, the stories about myself come up, and I can quite easily relate to what you’re saying.

Denise Shull

And when it’s all said and done, that’s actually why you’re talking to me, because as I started to talk about the human experience, the real human experience of perception and judgement in markets or careers, people started to relate to it and people started to say, wait a minute, that makes sense to me. Just like you just did. And I just, to tag this back to my back, I literally was just in this unusual confluence of circumstances where I was interested in this and didn’t let anyone talk me out of it. That was probably, and so I kept pursuing what seemed to be a more truthful explanation essentially of why we do what we do. Why do humans do what they do, and why they do what they do in the market is like a particularly interesting problem, but why do we do what we do in general.

The particular challenge of trading and investing in markets

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. So if you bring it to market, I mean, do you find that there’s something about the market that makes people behave differently to other settings? Or is it similar to other settings, it’s just that there’s a certain language we use in markets is a certain domain kind of knowledge you have to have to relate to people. Or is there something about markets that changes things a bit in terms of how you think about decision making?

Denise Shull

Well, first of all, it’s the hardest game on the planet. It’s completely uncertain and it’s completely ambiguous. It never ends. You can’t make anything happen. So it’s totally unlike sports, any sports analogy doesn’t apply. And ultimately you’re only predicting other people’s perception. Forget that we have all these mathematical ways to do it, but your objective is to predict how other people are going to value oil next month or next year or whatever. Yeah. So people bring their own personality, their own social emotional makeup to this thing that is effectively a social emotional game disguised as some sort of probability game, and that you can use probabilities to play it, but it’s not the answer. Just the clue to the mystery. And that’s what, I started talking about, you have to have emotion to make a decision when I discovered it.

What I didn’t realise way back then, 2003, was that the Freudian repetition, the self image expectation, wasn’t going to play itself out vis a vis, this Rorschach blot, ink blot of the market and that people would trade, get bigger or smaller, in early, out early, or doubt their judgement , then that was just an application of their self image. So they have their process and their lens, whatever that is, fundamental, global, macro, whatever it is, but it gets applied through their self-image. With this implacable authority figure that is never going to pay attention to your personal, emotional needs. But you’re going to misinterpret its behaviour. And what you should do through these expectations about who you are and what you deserve and what the world will give you. These kind of fundamental self-image things. Now there’s a second layer to that you were very clear about just now where you literally re-experience the same experience you had. So I mean, you’re saying, my dad always viewers right hand man, and you were expected to get good grades. So you provide research to people, that’s like being their right hand, man giving them the information and getting the good grades is getting it right. I mean you’re literally doing what you were essentially groomed to do, or shaped to do.

I had a client last week, who was the youngest of four. His next older brother was five years older and he’s like, you know, my biggest problem is I sometimes I just way too often I get overwhelmed with the fear of missing out, and so I either don’t get out of my position when I should, or I get in too early because I just am like literally overwhelmed with it. Well, when you’re the younger brother of a brother five years older than you, your entire childhood experience is missing out. Right? You’re two, they’re seven, you’re four they’re nine, you’re eight, they’re 13. Your entire childhood experience is you can’t keep up with them. So you get into the market and your entire emotional experience, your repetition is the same as your past experience. I have thousands of examples of that, but that one was really clear.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. Yeah. No, that absolutely makes sense. And what you said earlier about the ink blot of the market or this judgement sort of figure, I’ve always had this kind of notion that the market is kind of there to make you humble, because every time you have this winning streak, whether you’re a researcher or trader, whoever, invariably, the market will come back to punish you and you’ll lose that winning streak. It’s just impossible to be this perfect prediction sort of machine. There’s this like constant chipping away at your ego at some sort of level. It’s kind of this interplay between the super ego and the ego and, or in theological terms it’s like God and man, and you’re trying to become a God yourself, but then God reminds you that there’s only one God, and you are going to be punished and my smite will come upon you or something, you know? So there’s all of these things I’ve always felt when I’ve been engaged with markets.

Denise Shull

It’s definitely a tick-by-tick assault on your ego. Or can be when it’s not going well. It’s not, right? But it feels as if it is.

The role of emotions and why we can’t ignore them

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. And you’ve mentioned emotion a few times, the link between emotion decision making or emotion rationality, and as you said, the science is fairly clear on this, but it doesn’t seem to make intuitive sense. It’s almost like emotions getting in the way of your rationality. It’s almost like the ideal rational machine is someone who’s extremely autistic or who’s like a robot who doesn’t have any emotions. I mean, how do you kind of reconcile the link between emotion and rationality?

Denise Shull

Well, I think latest neuroscience says there is no separation, that the way to be most rational is to understand the actual data set of your feelings and emotions. Now let me say a couple things. There is some research that showed that, I don’t exactly remember if it was exactly on the spectrum, but it was a group of people who had perception and judgement that was devoid of normal emotion. And they did have some success. So there is that. So there’s that. I’m going to say a couple different things and then we’ll try to pull them back together. The other, there’s like a wild misunderstanding. It’s not the emotion that causes the problem. It’s the decision, right? It’s the choice. So it’s like really not to control your emotions, it’s control your choices. Control your behaviour. Like there’s a literal illogical fallacy there, which by the way, when I first started trading, I couldn’t understand it. The guy in the office who made the most money who traded a risk-arb strategy, which was of course to me as a brand new trader, damn complicated. He was also by far the most emotional. Jumping up and down screaming, this, that, and the other thing, yet, he printed money like in this complicated strategy. And I was always like, take the emotion out of it, Steve. This doesn’t add up. But at anyway, so we think we make decisions based on our analysis. We think we make decisions based on how we’ve learned to understand the market and then we do this analysis and we make this prediction. That’s actually not what we make the decision on. We make the decision on our confidence in that analysis. And if we don’t, for example, like if you are three quarters of the way through an analysis and you think you know the answer, you probably, for the most part, don’t stop, or you do a little bit more work because why? You want to develop more confidence in the thing you’re saying. So your answer drops out of whatever your lens is about the market. And then you have a feeling about the viability of that answer. And it’s that feeling that caused you to do something. It’s that feeling that it caused you to recommend. It’s the lack of that feeling or the opposite, let’s say, and concern, doubt, anxiety, fear, panic, that might cause you to hold back and go get some more information.

In the hedge fund world we will call that feeling conviction. Which basically what is it? How much do we believe our analysis? So that’s what matters. And I could, if I had my slide set in front of me, I literally can give you a hundred quotes from science in the last 20 years saying how emotion is the clue to being rational, emotion is the clue to good decisions, emotions are required for complete analysis. It goes on and on and on and on and on. And it really is just this logical fallacy that emotions are conflated with behaviour. Like if you feel something you have to do it. No. You don’t. You get this energy that kind of urges you to do something usually, and they really mean control the urge. Don’t act impulsively. And what we now know is that there’s enormous amount of information in our senses feelings and emotions, which are only degrees of intensity of the same physical experience. You get knowledge out of your body, a sense, a feeling, an emotion. Some information in a sense of feeling and emotion.

The trick is to learn to see that as a data set and to actually analyse it in an organised way, which can be done once you understand how that system’s really working. So it’s just, I mean, the original guy who science I discovered in 2003 was Antonio Damasio who wrote a book called Descartes’ Error. Descartes the philosopher said, I think, therefore I am. Damasio wrote this just said, no, it’s I feel, therefore I am. And in the interim 20 years, I mean the amount of research that’s gone into emotion, judgement , decision making, like there were 50 papers in 2000, 5,000 papers in 2005, 5,000 papers in 2010, I recently found a chart that showed the increased dollar amount that’s gone to the study of emotion in the past 20 years. I mean, it’s, jaw dropping. We literally just didn’t know. We just didn’t know. We misunderstand our own mechanism of perception of judgement. Since you asked.

Understanding conviction levels

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah, yeah, of course. And then how does one go about understanding one’s emotional, recognising emotions. It needs to be like I presume a vocabulary, you need to have some kind of awareness of what to look for or how do you go about instructing people?

Denise Shull

Well, again, I’m going to say first is be willing. There is research that shows that vocabulary makes a huge difference. And so like I start out workshops, and I’m going to do one next week where I literally have people write down every word they can think of for a feeling or emotion of trading and investing, see how many there are, because the research shows that the more words you have for these physical experiences, the more you can get the information out of them and the more you’re likely to not act impulsively. So I always summarise this into the question of what am I feeling and why? It’s an easy question to ask. You basically know what I mean when I say, what am I feeling and why? Answering it accurately though, is like a whole other skillset. And the value of answering it accurately is almost indescribable, both in a general perception and judgement, but particularly in a market perception and judgement. So you have to undertake the process of learning how to build your dictionary on yourself. That helps you accurately answer, what am I feeling and why? So I’ll start with people with all these words, and then I’ll kind of boil it down to the words related to conviction or confidence. And I help people of build like spectrums so that they have a tool that they can kind of figure out on a daily, or last week I had a client who literally sent me his fundamental process and for each data point in his fundamental process, he had ranked his level of belief, according to this culled list of feelings around in confidence. Because what you end up being able to do is pull out your true intuition, your actual expertise, because expertise starts to exist as a feeling. It starts out as this linear conscious thing and the better you get at something, the more it goes into your body. The more what you’re feeling and why you get to start to pull out your true pattern recognition based on all your years in the market and separate that from whatever the self-image reputation is or expectation is, repetition was the word I really meant. Self-image repetition. So you start to know, you know what, my sense of these four things that are going to happen with oil in the next four months, I’m really convicted. I mean, I’m convicted in three of them. One, I’m not so sure about, I could maybe get more information. Okay, you got that, you got that feeling. Then you also have the feeling of, but I do have to get an A and I do need to be right, and that’s some sort of anxiety, right? Well, you start to be able to untangle that. So you can just tolerate the anxiety of being pressured to get an A and believe the intuition that’s your expertise and you know kind of which feeling is which. It’s like learning the new sport, I admit. It’s like picking up a golf club or putting on a set of skis the first time. You’re not going to do it just right, and it’s going to take effort, mental and physical effort, but it works. It works. People are able to separate their integral versus their incidental.

So there’s a woman at Harvard, Jennifer Learner, who’s done a lot of research in risk and emotion, and she categorises all of our emotions as integral, meaning they matter to the situation or incidental, meaning they don’t. I think in investing, you can summarise that as informational or irrelevant, intuition, true pattern recognition, or impulse, and people can do it. And here’s the really amazing thing about it, because you’re starting to work with your own human and perception and judgement more the way it actually works, it actually starts to get easier. You’re not fighting yourself. As much, you’re not having to say follow my process, follow my process. Don’t listen to the fact that there’s a little voice telling me, because this is what always happens. Right? Follow the process. Follow the process. Don’t listen to that little voice. Six months later, I knew it. I should have listened to the voice. But there was no point in your process that you could listen to the voice because you’re not allowed to. But if you start doing this from the much more accurate understanding now of perception, judgement, decision making, you can put a part in your process for the voice, then you can undertake skill development to analyse the voice. And you’re not going to get it right a hundred percent of the time, but you’re going to get it right more of the time than you did before you were doing that.

Differences between emotions and impulse

Bilal Hafeez

And so is there a certain, from a practical perspective then, I mean, are there certain ways people can bring this into their process or their routines? I mean, is it you journal at the end of each day, is it when you feel imbalance in some way, at that point, you start to write down, what you think your feeling is and kind of what it’s linked to and separating the impulse from the intuition?

Denise Shull

Putting feelings into words, whether it’s you and a computer screen or you and a piece of paper or you and another person, like, is this the feeling? Why is that the feeling? No, it’s really kind of this feeling. Okay. Where did that come from? Well, it’s really kind of this feeling based on that. Untangling the spaghetti ball of that subjective experience via language, in an ideal world, probably with someone who knows how to talk to you about it, but since there aren’t even enough people in the world to provide that service to everybody, you can do it somewhat for yourself through journaling or through just writing, or if you’re really lucky, if you have a person who gets it, that you can actually talk to, what I mean is gets the value of you sorting through what you really feel.

Because most of us in this world of cognition is superior and you shouldn’t be anxious or worried or not confident or whatever. It’s hard to find people who can listen to someone talk through their concern or worry or doubt without judging the concern, worry or doubt. Without like trying to emphasise the analytical piece of it. And what happens is when someone can, whether you do it for yourself typing, and there is research, by the way, that even with athletes and if they make a mistake that they process the mistake and recover from it more quickly if they write about it. Which is a little bit ironic, also in a positive thinking world because it’s supposed to be shake it off, be confident, be positive, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everybody knows that stuff. And everybody knows that it only sort of doesn’t work, but then they don’t want to tell anybody it doesn’t work because then they feel more like something’s wrong with me.

I digress, as usual. Words, you were right, words. That’s actually the called and emotion differentiation and emotion granularity. So differentiation is like knowing the difference between fear, frustration and disappointment, let’s say. Granularity is knowing, okay, how many different kinds of fear are there? How many different kinds of frustration are there? How many different kinds of disappointment. Fear and frustration are a lot easier than disappointment. Disappointment’s hard to get super granular with. But I mean like fear, you can be mildly concerned or you can be terrified. Frustrated, you could be annoyed or enraged, right? It’s granular. So there’s research that shows that the more granular a portfolio manager is with their negative emotions, the more money they make in well analysed situations. They did the work, but they can be granular like and they have an expectation, they have some conviction. They could be granular about why they’re worried about it. The person who’s able to do that is going to be able to execute better on their analysis than the person who doesn’t.

Bilal Hafeez

And how important is your body in all of this?

Denise Shull

It’s huge because I mean, literally in a research institution, this is called visceral intelligence. Visceral is referring to your viscera, your body. The information is there. I was talking to some quants, very mathematical, a few weeks ago, and we’re definitely talking about their educated ability to choose a model or an algorithm. And I’m like, look, let’s suppose I had some new complicated problem and I explained the problem to you knowing that you’re going to apply math to the problem in a way that I, Denise Shull, couldn’t do. But knowing you are an expert, what’s the first thing that you’re going to do? You’re going to think to yourself, such and such, whatever, drawn from calculus is like the way to think about this, and how are you going to feel? And they’re like I said, you’re going to have a sense of what the right math is to apply. And they were like, well, yeah, of course. I’m like, you’re going to have a sense, a bodily reaction as to the appropriate math to apply to whatever this problem is. That’s like an intuition. That’s a bodily piece of information. And even though you’re a math guy, and even though you’re a tele quant guy and you think you don’t use said stuff at all, presented with a new problem, you have a physical bodily sense of what’s the right thing to do. That’s expertise. And that’s where it exists, in your body.

Bilal Hafeez

And are there certain parts of your body that those emotions show up first? Is it like your stomach, would you say, or your shoulders or something, or does it just vary too much between people?

Denise Shull

Yeah, there probably is some research around that, but I don’t know it. And I don’t, I think it’s kind of more individualised. I’m going to say something tangential that is there’s actual research that shows the more you can detect your own heart rate, just like sitting here, can you feel your heartbeat? That’s called interoception, meaning you can perceive your internals, and it’s the basis of sense feeling and emotion. It’s like awareness of your body. So while I don’t necessarily think, like I hold tension right here, but, yeah, a lot of us hold tension right there. That’s why we get shoulder massages. But I don’t think we really know for sure, but I wanted to mention the heart rate thing because I think the converse is true. You can practise just trying to hear your heart rate and so that you can start to practise knowing a little bit more of what you’re sensing and feeling. And again, then you’re willing, you’re dropping some of the defences and you start to learn to trust yourself. You start to find out that little voice is often right.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one thing I found, I’m not sure if there’s any research or you found this as well, is when I think about my breathing, my breath kind of reveals a lot about how I’m feeling. So in my case, I might hold my breath when I’m tense. And then as soon as I become aware of that, I know, okay, I’m holding something and so I need to look into what that is and my breathing pattern, if my out breath is very shallow versus my in breath or things like that, which I guess are related to the heart rate, but I find the breathing is something I use at least personally, it’s been a useful indicator of my sort of feelings.

Denise Shull

Yeah. I mean, I’ll say it again. Anybody can think about any realm and when they first learn to do that thing that now they’re somewhat of an expert in. I don’t care if it’s research or math or skiing or golf or whatever, like you first learned it step by step. You were introduced to it, it made some sense, you amalgamated it in your head and then you became really knowledgeable it, and at which point you didn’t do it consciously, linearly, you did it out of a sense. And we all want, we can all be better at whatever our craft is by learning how to navigate and interpret those senses better than we were taught, particularly given that we were taught to ignore them. And there’s still enormous amounts of information in finance and behavioural finance.

Traits of successful traders

Bilal Hafeez

And I mean, one thing that does sort of standout is at least a cultural image of successful traders or hedge fund managers seem to be these, it’s hard to imagine them being very self-aware. They seem to be these kind of very macho type sort of people. I mean, that’s the cultural representation of them. Now obviously you’ve worked with lots of very successful traders and I mean, do you find that they are that self-aware and they have that willingness to look inside of themselves?

Denise Shull

Well, first of all, people who call me by definition have some level of willingness, or they wouldn’t call. So I do have a selection bias, so my data set is skewed. But there’s a couple things, real brain research says those that those who are best at predicting markets are predicting other people and they’re using more people prediction and social skills. So because why? All that matters is what everyone else is going to think down the road, and whatever factors you analyse is to get to that answer. So some people who are really talented in markets have that innately, people prediction. If you think about studying economics, it’s largely about how are the groups going to react? And then what are the … and certain people were either born with more, it’s called theory of mind, born with more theory of mind or use more theory of mind.

And then they also might be fairly good at knowing when they’re confident or not confident. Knowing like despite what people tell them, trusting their intuition. They might not be completely self-aware as to the moments that they get afraid of future regret and double down on a position and blow months worth of work. And they could get better by knowing that level, but they might come to the job with greater theory of mind and natural sort of conviction, intuition, trust, and skill, if you will, and so they might lack like the complete level of, to use the Olympic athlete I work with, she uses the term mental awareness. They might not have the complete mental awareness, but there isn’t anyone that I could not listen to if they describe their market process, and they may be describing their market processes, like completely devoid of emotion and be completely process driven. And I’d be able to go there, there, there, and there, there was something discretionary, something that you basically made a decision on some sort of confidence spectrum, or we’ll use the word instincts.

Somehow instincts are okay, but intuition is bad. Like come on. But having said that, everybody’s got their pattern, right? Like, I’m sorry, everybody gets too big, too quick, too small, too fast, in too early, out. Everybody in the market’s got some version of that, I don’t care how successful. You want to solve that? Get to know what you’re really feeling and why, because there’s a unconscious emotional driver for why you get too big, too quick or in too early or out too early or whatever it is, or why you double down at the worst possible moments or why you give up on a position right before it works. There is a past emotional narrative that you experienced that you are unconsciously applying to your perception judgement in the market. And those things, if someone’s willing, can be found and can be untangled. Maybe not solved a hundred percent sometime, but untangled such that you’re not controlled by this thing you don’t understand that seems like you just have to control the emotion. You just have to control yourself and follow the process.

Bilal Hafeez

Okay. Yeah. So I hear you there. So people may come to you know, they might sort of say, look, I can’t handle losses or I’m getting to position too early, too late or whatever the reason is they come, ultimately the path for them to improve is to have this recognition of how the unconscious, their past, how that’s affecting their emotions and their perception and hence their judgement and their actions thereafter.

Denise Shull

I think that’s the biggest lever. I think someone can start to be more organised about intuition in like more okay with using intuition in kind of recognising it and ranking it, and get better about recognising and ranking conviction. That’s really like, what do I really think and how much do I believe it? Before they get into their unconscious, like in doing those two pieces will help. Because they’re honouring that piece of the judgement decision, but if they really want to be the best they can be, or they really want to solve a pattern that they see, like let’s go deeper into, I mean, fear of missing out kind of everybody has, but it’s really future regrets if you really unpack it. And then what’s that regret about, and where’s it coming from? And then that’s where you start to get into what does it mean to me personally?

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. And you’ve obviously been doing this for a number of years now, how have you changed your approach over that period of time?

Denise Shull

I’ve refined it. I mean, a couple things have happened. I’ve had way more science to build on. So I literally didn’t have this, we’re always predicting and we’re particularly predicting a future emotion. It’s called anticipatory affect, and the guy that’s done the most work is Brian Newton at Stanford. But like now I can say to somebody, with sun rises in the east kind of certainty, there’s a future emotion being predicted in this situation, let’s figure out what it’s. Now I knew that from the psychoanalyst, but I couldn’t be quite as declarative about it as I can be now. I used to think of it completely as, well, maybe not completely, but largely as a psychoanalyst would think of it. Now I can do the whole job, but almost without even bringing the psychoanalyst into it. Because the science says we’re always predicting based on past experience. The science says that, like the cutting edge of neuroscience says that. So that’s all I have to say. I don’t have to bring Freud or more importantly, the modern psychoanalyst, which is actually my angle on it.

How to set up a hedge fund

Bilal Hafeez

Okay. And I know you’ve consulted on the show, Billions, and you’ve kind of associated with that. But for me, the interesting thing about that idea is that the hedge fund has a coach or therapist within the hedge fund sort of set up. So leaving the specifics of that aside, if you were to sort of set up a hedge fund and you wanted to create the right culture to manifest what we’ve been talking about, I mean, how would you set the fund up? I mean, what types of things would you try to do to make sure that it would be the right environment for this?

Denise Shull

The first thing I would do is make people’s physical health an absolute priority, meaning this aura ring. I don’t know if you heard of oura ring. Yeah. Literally, no one will ever do this, but the hedge fund that has a really nice nap room that allows people to take a nap without any cultural pushback will make more money, period. Sleep deprived skews our judgement . When we are sleep deprived, we misperceive risk. So not being sleep deprived means we would more accurately foresee risk. And what would be the result of a whole hedge fund more accurately perceiving risk? Not overemphasising it and not under. They would make more money. But people put nap rooms in, I worked in hedge fund for three years that had a nap room. It became a storage room. It was full of boxes. But you can’t actually go in there and take a nap and it be okay. So that would be my first, because you decide on conviction, it’s a physical experience. You need to know what it is. That physical experience is informed by your literal physical experience by your actual bodily energy. So let’s optimise the bodily energy. Your perception of judgement will be better. It’s as simple as that.

Now, I mean, I, of course would do all of the things that I do in terms of building conviction spectrums, and getting people to pitch their stocks or pitch their ideas or pitch their position expansion or contraction, vis a vis the lens of conviction. I would be a global macro momentum kind of person if I had my own hedge fund, because that’s more of my background. But I would just get the whole psychological capital right. And actually, if we go back to my book, speaking of my process not being terribly different, because sometimes I’ll pick up my book and go, wow, I said that 12 years ago? But in there I have a hedge fund and in there the hedge fund prioritises psychological capital. That’s what I would do. I mean, obviously I’d get people who know what they’re doing. You got to know how to hit the ball. You got to know the basics of playing the game. Some people sometimes will mistake what I say for saying, you can just do what I say and make money in the market. I’m never saying that. I’m saying you have some way to play the game, whether it’s fundamental or technical or global macro, whatever, but your results are a joint probability of the accuracy of your lens for the market and your ability to execute it. There is a tonne of things we can do to get closer to optimising our ability to execute on our expertise that we don’t do, or most people don’t do.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. Yep. That all makes a lot of sense. I don’t think I’ve ever worked in a place that has a nap room. I did work at one place that did have a kind of meditation room, and so people would use that to meditate or pray or whatever. But then I went there once to have a look at what was happening there. And I noticed there were two, three people sleeping on the floor. They were using it as a nap room, interestingly enough. Which is interesting, but I absolutely, what you say about sleep I think is very, very true.

Denise Shull

Some of that research again is Jennifer Learner out of Harvard, which last I knew she was consulting for the Navy. She’d taken like a leave of absence. She’s done some insane work showing how sleep deprived skews your risk perception. You literally don’t see it. So, you know those time where you look back and you go, how did I miss that? What was I thinking? I used to ask my clients, if they showed up with a, my God yesterday, I like totally blew it, I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ll be like, how much sleep did you get? Then half the time they’d say, well, the new baby was awake and my wife was sick and you know, like sure enough, not to dilute the complexity of my job to sleep, but it’s an important factor. Yeah. It’s the football player has his expertise, and then he has how much energy does he have to play the game? We don’t question it in athletics. We don’t question sleep and diet in athletics because we know the expertise is delivered through the body. We misunderstand how much of our market expertise is delivered through the body.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. And you know, speaking to a few kind of almost non-market related questions that have come to my mind, one is, what do you make of midlife crises that people often have? Well, men in particular in finance that, is that such a thing and why does it happen? You often see it, I’m not sure if it’s more prevalent in finance or not, but you see a lot of it.

Denise Shull

Oh, there’s definitely such things. I was talking to a new client on Monday, person’s 52, kids are grown, they’ve made a tonne of money and they’re sort of like, I don’t care about money. I like the game. I like the intellectual pursuit of the answer, but I don’t actually care about the money. So what should I do now? Like, and we figured out they were okay caring about the money while they had kids to raise and put through college. I want to give my kids a nice life, right? So I’m going to go make this money. Now that’s all done they’re like, I got enough money, I don’t care. So that one you’ll have to get back to me, because we’ll just see what happens with that person. I have a stunning number of clients who are men between like 38 and 45 with three children.

Denise Shull

The next time, I just got a client a few weeks ago who was in that category, 40 and wife was pregnant with the fourth and I was like, wow, somebody has four kids. So my point is, most of my clients are sort of pre midlife crisis. So I don’t know how much more intelligence I can have.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. And then the other one is we just had the Oscars recently and there was something happened during the Oscars, Will Smith heard a joke from Chris rock and went on stage and struck Chris rock. I mean, what do you make of that? Will Smith is Mr. down to earth, super composed, and he did that.

Denise Shull

I haven’t thought about it that much, to be honest. At first I was like, was it real? So I guess I think it was real, but I got to tell you, my intuition still isn’t sure it was real despite the subsequent apology. And just, I don’t know.

Bilal Hafeez

Lots of videos. I’ve seen lots of videos where experts have slowed the video down and apparently it’s like an actor’s type of slap, where there’s like a, it looks like a slap, there may not be a slap or something.

Denise Shull

Well, they are actors.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Denise Shull

But let’s suppose it were real. It’s bizarre because first of all, these comedians say insulting, offensive jokes all the time. Now, a man for his wife, maybe it really becomes about him, which is a problem, not about her, you know? And if it was real, first of all, it’s just not acceptable, but I think it’s a reflection of our culture where like you’re allowed to act out anger now with impunity more. And then as a woman, you get into the whole, well, how about you defend herself? So I don’t really know what I think other than I’m not even sure it’s real still. That’s my intuition, like if it were gun to my head bet I’d have to go with not real because I have learned to trust that voice. I could be wrong, but …

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. Well, I guess we’ll find out, at some point it’ll come out and they’re probably going to co-present the Oscars next year together as best friends or something. Okay. Now I did want to ask a few sort of personal questions. One was, what’s the best investment advice you’ve ever received?

Denise Shull

I saw that on the list. I don’t know. I literally don’t know, the truth is.

Bilal Hafeez

Okay. Okay. Interesting. And then more importantly, do you have a kind of a system or some kind of productivity approach to kind of keep on top of everything because obviously there’s a lot of academic literature coming out in your area. I mean, you’re managing lots of clients, you’re managing a business as well. I mean, how do you do it all?

Denise Shull

I’m not particularly into astrology, but I am a Virgo and I’m by nature very organised. And so like a to-do list that works. And for us, it has now finally after years and years and years and years and years become Microsoft Teams, they have a tasks thing. And I am finally happy with my to-do list in tasks in Teams, even though it’s Microsoft and it’s clunky. The other thing though, is put things on the calendar. So I’ll know that as the business owner, I got to deal with the taxes or the insurance, or the fact that there was some weird $800 charge on my credit card, and those are the kinds of things can disrupt you and you waste a bunch of time and you get distracted and you don’t get the most important stuff done. Because that’s the flip side, what’s everything you have to get done and what are the most important things? And so put most of your energy into the most important things, but there are real things like taxes and bringing insurance and all that stuff you have to take care of. Put it on the calendar. Next week I’m going to spend 90 minutes with my assistant and we’re going to go over every one of these tedious paperwork financial business running things. And then you do it, then you don’t worry about it when something comes across your desk and then you do focus on it, put on a calendar. I mean, I even put remember to call. Like in a 15 minute thing on my calendar. And then I do actually remember to call because I put the phone number right there. So comprehensive to-do list that work for you. And then there’s a thousand kinds, right? Monday.com. I mean, there’s a million of them. My clients are always talking to me about them, but for us now tasks by Team, by Microsoft and putting things on the calendar. Priorities.

Books that influenced Denise

Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (Feldman Barret), and The Drama of the Gifted Child (Miller) 

Bilal Hafeez

Priorities, yeah absolutely. And then books, are there some books that’ve really influenced you or perhaps books recently that you think have been very good?

Denise Shull

Well, I’ll tell you a great one. It didn’t so much influence me, but I sort of knew, but it crystallised, I it’s called Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barry. It’s short and it basically tells you what I told you. You’re always predicting everything. The Drama of the Gifted Child, which is a long, complicated, dense, intense, overwhelming book written, I think in the 1980s. But it really does, if you can wade your way through it and I’ve had plenty of clients who’ve waded their way through it. It does help you see how like you had this experience as a child and it caused you to think certain ways about yourself and maybe they’re true or not true. Chances are they’re not true. Right? The things happen caused you to think certain things that maybe are irrelevant.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. No, no, no, great recommendations there. And then finally, if people wanted to follow you, get in touch with you, see you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Denise Shull

So, my consulting company is called the ReThink Group, like rethink thinking, that whole meta cognition, you said. It’s ReThinkgroup.net. I’m on Twitter @DeniseKShull. And I think that’s basically it. The best way if someone wants to actually contact us, like send a note through the website because it turns out it’s the only way we manage, and then your name goes into that tasks on Teams. So we don’t forget about you.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. We’ve seen, you’ve described how the sausage is made, so that’s good to know. Okay. Well that was a really eye opening and such a great experience speaking to you. And I feel as though we could speak for much, much, much longer, but I’m cognizant that I have to respect you at your time, but at least from my side, it is fantastic speaking to you.

Denise Shull

Thank you so much for having me. Fun to speak to you too.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You’re great, by the way. I mean, I love speaking to you. I mean, you’re a wise person.

Denise Shull

Oh, thank you. Literally, it really, I mean, on some level it was that I had emotions and people would tell me, oh, smile, you’ll feel better or stand up straight, you’ll feel better. And I be like, nah, not working like that. And I just refused to sort of give up and then I, you know, landed into bizarre master’s programme, I don’t know, like just these weird threads of life.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also I think the finance sector is in need of your services or people like because I think there’s a lot of stereotypes and stigmas that hold people back. I think the way you frame it in terms of people should see their body or their emotions as a data set, I mean, that type of language I think is quite powerful for people in finance because then suddenly it allows them to kind of put it into the boxes, they like to put things into boxes. And it’s almost like a challenge.

Denise Shull

It also happens to be true. Like it literally, it functions as a data set. For us. We were told we weren’t supposed to have it and we need to ignore it, and we need to shove it, you know? So like literally we’re losing access to the critical data set, it’s insane. Started with Descartes, I guess. And this misunderstanding that became, it’s control your actions, it’s not control your emotions.

Bilal Hafeez

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a very powerful way of expressing it. Yeah, describing it. Yeah. Well, it’s great to speak to you.

Denise Shull

Likewise.

Bilal Hafeez

Good stuff. Okay. And see you then.

Bilal Hafeez

Thanks for listening to the episode. Please subscribe to the podcast show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Leave a five star rating, a nice comment, and let other people know about the show. We’d be super, super grateful. Finally, sign up to become a member of Macro Hive and macrohive.com. We’ll be back soon, so tune in then.

Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Editor of Macro Hive. He spent over twenty years doing research at big banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, where he had various “Global Head” roles and did FX, rates and cross-markets research.

(The commentary contained in the above article does not constitute an offer or a solicitation, or a recommendation to implement or liquidate an investment or to carry out any other transaction. It should not be used as a basis for any investment decision or other decision. Any investment decision should be based on appropriate professional advice specific to your needs.)