Odd Lots

The year is over, and now's the time to look back at the big stories of the past year. On this week's episode, we're joined by Chris Nagi and Matt Boesler of Bloomberg News to discuss what they saw as the dominant themes of 2017. For Nagi, it was the relentless decline in market volatility (despite a year of remarkable headlines) and for Boesler it was the persistent shortfall in inflation, and th...

Algorithms. People talk about them all the time, particularly in relation to markets. But who actually designs them, and what do they do? On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak with Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland, and the author of "The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information." Pasquale, who has been following the...

When we think of computer-driven or "quant" investing, we often think fast moves, algorithms making buy and sell orders at incredibly short timeframes. So in theory, the likes of great long-term investors, like Warren Buffett, should be safe from the robot revolution. But maybe not so fast! On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we speak to John Alberg of Euclidean Technologies and Zachary Lipton of Car...

There are two popular schools of thought with regards to how markets work. There's the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) which says that it's basically impossible to beat the market, because all information is completely priced in at all times (more or less). On the other side is an increasingly popular behavioral view which argues that various human emotions and biases are always creating situat...

Money goes where it's treated best. That simple truth is a big reason why more and more money—trillions, in fact—flows into a powerful, low-cost tool that's quietly transformed investing in recent years. Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, let you invest in everything from the stock market to gold like never before. This podcast will demystify them—and delight you in the process. See omnystudio.com/li...

This month we saw a small sell-off in markets that got big attention. How did we get to the point where a 1 percent fall in the S&P 500 over the course of a week is huge news? And are we about to enter a time when it becomes much more normal to see markets fall? Matt King, global head of credit strategy at Citigroup Inc., has never shied away from the big picture questions. In this episode of...

In this age of algorithms and quants, you hear less and less about good old stock picking. You know, like the style of investing associated with Warren Buffet or Benjamin Graham. But that doesn't mean you can't still dive into a balance sheet or cash flow statement in order to divine a stock's true worth. On this week's Odd Lots we speak to Aswath Damodaran, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Bu...

Most asset classes move in a fairly straightforward manner. They're either going up or down at any given time. But when it comes to currencies it's not that simple. Since they're all traded against each other (the pound vs. the dollar, the pound vs. the euro, the pound vs. the yen) there's always some rising and some falling at any given time. Everything's relative. So what drives these relative m...

You can't go a day without hearing about ICOs or Initial Coin Offerings. By taking advantage of a regulatory gap and buzz surrounding cryptocurrencies, companies are raising millions of dollars by launching their own coins. But what's the point of these coins? What are they supposed to do? And what are the pitfalls? On this week's podcast, we talk to Elaine Ou, a blockchain engineer at Global Fina...

Investors are constantly poring over income statements from big companies to figure out whether they should buy or sell the business's stock. But should they bother? In this week's episode, Joe and Tracy talk to Feng Gu, a professor at SUNY Buffalo, and Baruch Lev, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, about why the way we account for a company's earnings might be massively outdated. See...

By now, almost everyone in financial markets is familiar with ETFs (exchange-traded funds), and how they allow investors to move quickly in and out of a basket of stocks with a few clicks. But perhaps people don't realize quite how revolutionary they are, and how much of an impact they've had on the financial system. On this week's episode we talk to Eric Balchunas, an ETFs analyst at Bloomberg In...

On Monday October 19th, 1987, the Dow Jones fell 508 points in a one day crash that will forever be known as "Black Monday". In honor of the 30th anniversary, Joe and Tracy talk to Blair Hull, managing partner of Hull Trading Co., who was actively trading that day. While everyone else panicked, Hull spotted an opportunity and won big in the chaos. On this episode, we talk about how he was able to...

"Liquidity" is one of the most widely-talked about yet least understood concepts in markets. Roughly speaking, a market is liquid if you can transact in it without affecting the price significantly. But there's little agreement about why some markets are more liquid than others, or why liquidity sometimes just evaporates with little notice. This week we speak to Karthik Shashidhar, the author of "...

The world of sell-side analysts has been upended in recent years with intense competition, new technology and regulation in the form of MIFID . At the same time, many of the issues being faced by the analyst industry are similar to the ones now faced by the media. On this week's episode, we talk to Steven Abrahams, the former head of mortgage bond and securitization research at Deutsche Bank AG, a...

To wrap up our series on financial bubbles, the Odd Lots podcast looks back at an early episode, focusing on one of the most iconic bubbles of the 20th century: Beanie Babies. Two market bubbles stand out from the late 1990s. Technology stocks that were supposed to make everyone a zillionaire. The other: A series of mass-produced stuffed animals priced at $5 each. Odd Lots hosts Joe Weisenthal and...

There's a good chance that if you were a boy in the early 90s that you were a collector of baseball cards. For a few years, the baseball card industry went from being a niche collectible to a massive industry. It was, for a brief period, a legitimate bubble. On this week's Odd Lots podcast we talk to Dave Jamieson, the author of Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession . Amo...

The tulip bubble is the quintessential bubble. If you want to call something a bubble, just mutter something about tulips, and everybody will know what you're arguing. But what was the tulip bubble, really, and how did it form? To get a unique perspective on this historical episode, on this week's podcast we speak with Douglas French, an adherent of Austrian economics, and the author of a book on...

During the 2008 financial crisis, Florida was an epicenter of the real estate meltdown. But for decades before that, the state has been characterized by booms and busts. In this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we spoke with Arva Moore Parks, a Florida historian and preservationist about the great Florida real estate bubble of the 1920s, or as she calls it "The Boom." Parks tells us about t...

Markets are at their most exciting when they're in a bubble. Spectacular fortunes can be made and lost in the blink of an eye. So how do bubbles form and end? On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast we talk to Scott Nations, the president and chief investment officer of NationsShares, and the author of "A History of The United States in Five Crashes." We discuss with him various stock marke...

Royal Bank of Scotland has been around, in one form or another, for hundreds of years. The company keeps artifacts from its lengthy history in an archive that features everything from a customer ledger kept during the Great Plague and Great Fire of London in the 1600s, to a notice sent to branches in 1914 to shut down ahead of the start of World War I. On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcas...

It's been 10 years since the start of the credit crunch that eventually led to the global financial crisis. For many investors, the events of 2007 to 2008 shook their entire understanding of how markets are meant to work. In this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast we speak to Mark Dow, a global macro trader and financial blogger, as well as a former economist at the U.S. Treasury and the Inter...

We use money everyday, but it's rare to actually think about what money is or what it represents. And in fact many of the people who are the closest to it -- academics, traders, etc. -- understand it the least. On this week's episode of Odd Lots, we talk to Lana Swartz, an Assistant Professor at the University of Virgnia in the department of media studies. We discuss why money can be understood as...

Most people have some kind of hazy conception of how the stock market works. Stocks are simple to understand, and there are only so many of them out there to trade. But the bond market is a whole different beast, and in some ways it remains way behind stocks in terms of how technology has changed the industry. On this weeks' Odd Lots podcast, we talk to Bloomberg's Rob Elson, a former trader, who...

We talk a lot on Odd Lots about the idea of investing. But what's it like to actually have to put money to work in some of the trickiest investing environments in history? David Schawel was an equity analyst who suddenly became the manager of a portfolio of subprime mortgage bonds during the worst of the credit crunch. Now he manages fixed-income portfolios for New River Investments. We talk to hi...

Financial markets around the world are stuck in a long period of low volatility and boredom. But one pocket is seeing some wild action -- grains. Spring wheat (a form of high-protein wheat grown in the northern Midwest) has been on a tear, alongside action in soy and corn. What explains the whipsaw? Joe and Tracy speak with Tommy Grisafi, a longtime trader who works as a risk manager at Advance Tr...