Odd Lots

Last week, the US market sold off sharply. The S&P 500 fell as much as 3.6% on Monday alone, entering technical correction territory. Momentum trades were hit particularly hard and stocks that had been winners for years suddenly became losers, while ones that had been losers suddenly outperformed. Perhaps the strangest thing though, is that volatility didn't really surge as things sold off. Th...

We finally did it. We finally did an episode on the Jones Act. For years on the podcast, we've been referencing this controversial law from 1920, which places restrictions on domestic port-to-port transport in the United States. But we had never actually done an episode on what it is, why it was created, and why people feel so fervently about either keeping or maintaining it. There are plenty of p...

When Donald Trump won in November, one of the things that Wall Street was excited about was an expected liberalization of merger rules. There was a popular view that under Chair Lina Khan, the Biden FTC was overly stringent about what deals it would let go through, and that the new administration would give the greenlight more often. But at least so far, reality hasn't proven to be so simple. Ther...

Prediction markets are everywhere nowadays. You can go online and bet on political outcomes, or the weather, or how long Taylor Swift will stay together with Travis Kelce. But prediction markets have a long history, and one of the earliest involved betting on who would be the next pope. In fact, Renaissance Romans gambled on everything from papal elections to whether a particular noblewoman would...

Housing affordability remains one of the single greatest sources of economic stress. Even if inflation measures were to come down, the simple cost of shelter is a huge burden on a wide swathe of the population. Hardly anyone disagrees with the idea of increasing supply, but this is easier said than done. There isn't a lot of spare construction capacity and the political fights over liberalizing zo...

Markets have been selling off, with shares of tech companies like Nvidia down almost 20% so far this year. But even before the recent selloff, DeepSeek rattled the AI market and sparked questions over how US platforms will compete and actually monetize their technology. Despite all these hurdles, some investors remain tech optimists. Cathie Wood, the founder, CEO and chief investment officer of AR...

You’ve heard about Chinese EVs. You’ve heard about Chinese batteries and solar panels. And recently you learned that China is near the cutting edge of AI research. Here’s another category: biotech. In 2019, the Chinese share of molecules licensed to Big Pharma companies was 0%. In 2024, it’s now 31%. On this episode we speak with Tim Opler, a biotech industry investment ban...

One of the first moves made by the Trump administration was to change the nature of grants made by the National Institutes of Health. Under the new policy, there's a 15% cap on "indirect costs" associated with a given grant. This is money that essentially pays for institutional overhead, not directly related to the new costs of the specific project itself. So how do NIH grants actually work? What...

This week was a busy one and some of the most interesting things that happened came out of Europe, where policymakers announced up to €800 billion of additional defense spending and an easing of Germany's stringent debt rules. All of this comes as Europe responds to tariff threats from the Trump administration, as well as worries that the Trans-Atlantic security alliance may be over. So how s...

The 1970s were a pretty eventful time in markets. There was high inflation, the end of the gold standard, and a stock market crash. There was also a bunch of ideas coming out of the University of Chicago that would go on to be famous and highly influential for investors. Perhaps the most prominent is the Efficient Market Hypothesis, posited by Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama, which says that markets ar...

Almost whichever way you measure it, the US has a lot of debt. And, with the Trump administration recently proposing a budget that would see US debt levels swell even further, it doesn't look like this issue is going away any time soon. In this episode, we speak with Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates and the author of the new book, How Countries Go Broke ....

A week from today we will get the February jobs report and there are growing concerns that the US labor market is slowing. Already, the number of sectors adding jobs in this economy is on the decline. Meanwhile, the housing market continues to struggle. Add in the Department of Government Efficiency and worsening fiscal conditions in the state and local sector, and the government may prove to be a...

The first month of the Trump administration has been noisy and novel by basically any measure. But perhaps the biggest shockwaves have been in the realm of geopolitics. Europeans were caught off guard by a recent speech given by Vice President JD Vance in Munich, calling into doubt the future of the Trans-Atlantic partnership. Meanwhile, when it comes to tariffs, the Trump administration has actua...

The so-called “Mar-a-Lago Accord” has suddenly become a hot topic on Wall Street, with some investors and analysts starting to take the idea more seriously, holding meetings with clients and publishing research notes about the rumored plan. A riff on the 1985 Plaza Accord — named for the hotel where it was devised — the idea is that the Trump administration could achieve it...

People love listening to stories about making it big, and there are no shortage of success stories in the world of global business. There's TSMC, which has grown to become the most important producer of semiconductors. There's Hermès, which has been a power player in luxury consumer goods for over a hundred years now. Or how about Starbucks, Berkshire Hathaway, Renaissance Technologies, or...

Hedge funds are notorious for making big and sometimes risky trades. Banks, meanwhile, are supposed to be a lot more boring by comparison — for obvious reasons. But in recent years, we've seen banks like Silicon Valley Bank make some pretty bad bets themselves. Elham Saeidinezhad, an assistant economics professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, argues that banks have been turning in...

The US is a dominant force in a number of important industries, but it's been lagging behind in one crucial area: shipbuilding. Today, there are about 80 US-flagged ships involved in global trade, compared to more than 5,500 China-flagged vessels. The worry is that the US has been falling behind in this important component of international commerce, and that the country's entire economy could be a...

For a long time, the world of derivatives trading was a niche thing, largely occupied by professional investors who used them for hedging purposes. During the pandemic and the Robinhood boom, the retail masses started discovering them, and activity exploded. Since then, the use of options, swaps and other levered positions has grown among both individual traders and the big professionals on Wall S...

The price of gold is basically at record highs. But what is it about gold that people love so much? Why have people always craved a metal that has no real industrial uses? And what does owning or wearing gold represent? On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Maksud Agadjani, the founder of TraxNYC, a jewelry store based in NYC's Diamond District. You may recognize Maksud from the movie Uncu...

We all know that the Federal Reserve tries to stabilize the economy by raising or cutting interest rates to balance inflation and unemployment. But the central bank’s mandate actually goes beyond monetary policy. The Fed is also responsible for reviewing and distributing billions of dollars in cash to banks all over the US. In this episode, we go deep inside the vaults of the Federal Reserve...

The Trump administration has come into office with big ambitions to lower the size of the US deficit. So far, a number of small items have been identified as possible waste. But to meaningfully bend the curve on spending, there's widespread agreement that we'd have to look at things like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense. This is hard stuff to cut and it's something that governments...

There's a pretty widespread recognition that the EU is facing a bunch of economic challenges right now. Growth has been slowing and, as in many places, there's been post-pandemic inflation. But there are other issues too, including a sense that Europe is falling behind when it comes to key technologies like AI and semiconductors. There's also an ongoing energy crisis and the recent threat of tarif...

This week, we saw shares of software maker Palantir soar after reporting earnings and describing demand for AI as being "untamed." But what does Palantir do, and what do they actually sell to the federal government? More importantly, how does the government actually spend money on things related to security and national defense? Last year, Palantir's CTO Shyam Sankar published a document called "T...

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have gained access to a unit within the Treasury Department called the Bureau of Fiscal Service. But what does this unit actually do? How critical of a role does it play in the operations of government, and potentially, financial markets? On this episode, we speak with Nathan Tankus, the author of the Notes On The Crises newsletter. He e...

Over the weekend, President Trump announced that he was following through with his plan for aggressive tariffs. Imports from Canada and Mexico will now be hit with a 25% tariff, while China will get a 10% tariff. Although aggressive action was promised during the campaign, the news still rattled global financial markets, sending futures tumbling and the dollar spiking. Then, on Monday, Mexican Pre...