“It’s a bad word,” said one client. Likewise, other clients tell me that while they do absolutely leverage “gut-feelings,” they definitely do not tell their investors because they will hear the criticism, “That’s not repeatable.”
Contrast those perspectives with this:
“One of the biggest mental shifts that your work has given me is how I understand intuition. It stopped feeling mystical or vague and became a real internal compass. I really started to see intuition as lived experience, emotional ‘data’, pattern recognition, and self-awareness integrating in real time.
Paradoxically…this has made me calmer rather than more impulsive. I tend to trust myself more, take better risks, and stay aligned with my process more consistently.”
Toby Donovan, CITI, Director, Commodities Trading
His experience exemplifies what the founder of a large hedge fund said on Thursday. “Your brain is picking something up. Are you in touch with that internal conversation?“
Academic researchers also describe the value of intuition.
Valerie Reyna, Professor of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell University, the Director of the Human Neuroscience Institute, and the co-director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research, directly links intuition to probability, and risk judgment, saying that “intuitive reasoning contributes to performance in hard, fast-paced probability tasks.”
In her fuzzy trace theory, gist-based intuition provides an advanced form of cognition that often outperforms verbatim, analytical processing. She shows how reliance on intuition can grow and yield better decisions than strict adherence to probability calculus, especially when the key is extracting the bottom-line meaning.
Gerd Gigerenzer, who wrote The Intelligence of Intuition, and who is the director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, and the director emeritus of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, makes a similar case: intuition is a form of unconscious intelligence shaped by experience and evolution, not a mystical sixth sense or mere whim. He observes that good intuition often outperforms complex analysis in uncertain, real-world environments.
Maybe, it’s not “intuwishing” after all?
This leaves us with the question: how on earth do you reliably tell valid intuition from invalid impulse?
It takes practice—the kind of practice that goes into a decent golf swing—but here’s the process.
- Decide that all senses, feelings, and emotions have information. They are data. (Don’t say that you shouldn’t feel a given feeling, as that’s deleting data.)
- Learn to sort your visceral reactions into two buckets – about me or about the decision at hand? (Your PnL, your boss, your team, or your last trade is almost never the latter.)
- Acknowledge the truth of the ones about yourself. (This ironically mitigates their distracting internal noise.)
- Take the senses, feelings, and emotions that are not about you seriously. (As if they were the product of a quantification process.)
True intuition is subconscious pattern recognition based on experience, and it’s more a sense of recognition than an urge to act. It feels a bit like recognizing a familiar face in an unexpected place. OTOH, irrelevant impulse carries compelling energy. It feels like you must do it now, or you will be threatened.
In short, the question “What am I feeling and why?” turns intuition from a bad word into a competitive edge—just like Toby, who has been called the “best trader in the world” by another client in his space.
Denise K. Shull, January 31, 2026
