‘Trust Your Gut’ Might Actually Be Profitable Advice on Wall Street, Study Says (Published 2016)

The study revealed two striking results. First, traders with greater sensitivity to the inner life of their bodies had made significantly more money in the previous year. Second, the more years a trader had been working, the greater his interoception, as though the trading floor were selecting for that trait. Coates’s research demonstrates that wha

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This advice may sound familiar; it lies at the heart of books like Blink and Gary Klein’s The Power of Intuition, which promise to help readers harness their gut feelings. But for executives taught to methodically frame problems, consider alternatives, collect data, weigh the options, and then decide, cultivating emotional self-awareness may seem l... See more

Possessing agility helps you make good judgments in real time. The neuroscientist John Coates used to be a financial trader. During the bull-market surges that preceded big crashes, Coates noticed that the traders who went on to suffer huge losses had gotten overconfident in ways that were physically observable. They flexed their muscles and even w... See more

Simons and his researchers didn’t believe in spending much time proposing and testing their own intuitive trade ideas. They let the data point them to the anomalies signaling opportunity. They also didn’t think it made sense to worry about why these phenomena existed. All that mattered was that they happened frequently enough to include in their up

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“Gut reactions are usually very wrong or very right.

They tend to be wrong when they are based purely on emotion and in domains where you lack experience. They tend to be right when they are rooted in deep understanding and well-developed taste.

Trust your gut when you have the experience to back it up.”