Odd Lots

The result of the U.K.'s Brexit referendum blindsided many and led to acrimonious accusations by supporters on either side of the vote. In the U.S., the rapid rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as presidential candidates has similarly surprised. Those able to properly gauge the public mood have made money, while those without their fingers on the pulse have lost it. This week we speak to Sean...

Emanuel Derman was one of the pioneers of quantitative finance, having gone from studying physics to working on Wall Street in 1985. His memoir, My Life as a Quant, is a must-read book that tracks the evolution of finance in recent decades as it's become more and more driven by mathematics. In the latest episode of Odd Lots, Derman discusses his career, the difference between finance models and ph...

Emanuel Derman was one of the pioneers of quantitative finance, having gone from studying physics to working on Wall Street in 1985. His memoir, My Life as a Quant, is a must-read book that tracks the evolution of finance in recent decades as it's become more and more driven by mathematics. In the latest episode of Odd Lots, Derman discusses his career, the difference between finance models and ph...

In the runup to the Brexit vote polls were mixed. Some showed remain winning. Others showed leave winning. Nonetheless, markets, pundits, and bookmakers always seemed to be pretty sure that remain was going to win. Whoops! In this episode of Odd Lots, we speak to Mike Smithson, an expert on political betting in the UK. He explains how the markets got it so wrong and how, on the actual night of the...

On this week's episode we take a trip down one particular road on the Gulf peninsula to explore how sudden market shocks — and the political discord that sometimes comes with them — can help shape the physical space around us. In the 1960s, the Middle East was in the throws of massive change as the oil boom sent some economies skyrocketing and left others in the (literal) dust. The construction of...

When Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen speaks, the world watches — and one group watches especially closely. ``Fed watchers'' have made a career out of analyzing and dissecting the words and actions of Fed policymakers, particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis that has seen the U.S. central bank launch thousands of stimulus programs. This week we speak to one of our favorite Fed...

The Great Recession was characterized by a historic and gigantic wave of foreclosures all around the country. Left and right, people were being removed from their homes. But because of the explosion of mortgage securitization -- the slicing and dicing of financial assets that got Wall Street into so much trouble -- there was often a failure to do the proper paperwork required for such evictions. T...

David Hendler made his reputation as a bank analyst at the independent research firm CreditSights Inc., foreseeing many of the problems that led to the financial crisis of 2008 and vocally criticizing the "too good to be true" trading profits posted by big financial institutions. Today he runs his own consultancy, Viola Risk Advisors LLC. He joins us this week to talk bank business models of the p...

The U.S. spends 8 percent of its GDP on finance -- twice the amount it did 40 years ago, according to economist Brad DeLong. That figure set off a wave of soul-searching recently as commentators asked how ``the financialization of the world'' came to be and others attempting to answer that very question. This week, we speak with Satyajit Das about how finance took over the economy, markets and mon...

At a time when retail sales are dominated by online behemoths like Amazon Inc. and big chain stores, independent brick-and-mortar shops are under growing pressure. Imad Khachan defies the odds to run the Chess Forum in New York's Greenwich Village. Here, chess fans can buy game sets or compete against each other for a small fee. It's an old-fashioned business model under assault by the digital wor...

Peer-to-peer lending was supposed to disrupt the traditional way people borrowed money. Instead of going to some giant, soulless institution, online platforms offered a way for people to post what they needed to borrow money for, and for other individuals to loan them the money. In other words, rather than have a bank match up savers and borrowers, why not just cut out the middle? But as the indus...

If you're like most people, you only bet on horses once a year, the day of the Kentucky Derby. You might try to cram a little beforehand, bone up about the favorites, and then place an ignorant losing wager. This year can be different! On this week's Odd Lots, our guest is Bloomberg's David Papadapolous, who in addition to his day job as a top editor is our resident expert on all things equine. Pa...

In less than two months, the U.K. will vote on whether to leave the EU in the so-called Brexit referendum. The stakes are potentially massive for the economies of the U.K. and Europe, for the London financial industry and for the British pound. Gamblers also have a lot on the line. This week on Odd Lots, hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak to Mike Smithson, the editor of PoliticalBetting....

How can you tell whether people in any given country are happy or not? That's the topic we wrestle with on the latest edition of the Odd Lots podcast. First we talk to Peter Atwater of the firm Financial Insyghts about the growing signs that a significant swathe of the population is depressed and how that's showing up in markets, the culture and of course the election. Then we speak to Bloomberg I...

Country music lost a legend when Merle Haggard passed away earlier this month at the age of 78. At first glance, there doesn't seem to be much connection between Haggard's music and markets (excluding the fact that he once pined for the days of silver-backed currency in one of his songs), but there is a country music artist that bridges the gap between Merle and this podcast. Merle Hazard, the nom...

Iceland is known for geothermal beauty, fishing and as the birthplace of Bjork. It also made international headlines in 2008 thanks to a banking crisis that tipped the country into recession and reverberated around Europe. Now, Iceland is back in the headlines after the leak of the so-called Panama Papers unveiled offshore accounts held by Iceland's prime minister and sparked mass protests that ev...

A high-flying hedge fund manager lost everything back in 2007 after an accounting scandal prompted investors to pull money from his $12 billion fund. Almost a decade later, Dan Zwirn has been cleared of all wrongdoing by U.S. securities regulators and is busy rebuilding his investment empire, specializing in lending to companies that don't usually have access to traditional bank financing. Zwirn's...

Short-selling, the practice of betting against stocks by agreeing to sell equities that you don't own, has been in the headlines recently. The share price of Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. has fallen nearly 90 percent from its peak since being targeted by prominent short-sellers including Citron Research's Andrew Left and Bronte Capital's John Hempton, while some other types of short-s...

For years, the image of a stock market trader was synonymous with images of Testosterone-fueled traders wheeling and dealing on the floor of big exchanges. But change has swept stock markets in recent years, diminishing their role in everyday trading. Now, the vast majority of stock trades take place through computerized systems, giving rise to huge debate over the dangers and benefits of high-fre...

Asset purchases! Currency devaluations! Low interest rates! Negative interest rates! And... more? The world's central banks have unleashed a torrent of unconventional monetary policy since the 2008 financial crisis, hoping to heal economic wounds and revive markets' animal spirits. Rescuing us from another Great Depression is no longer seen as sufficient. Seven years on, doubts are starting to bui...

In 1987, investors watched in horror as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 22 percent in an event that became known as "Black Monday." Months later, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission published an 840-page report into the incident; in it was buried a seed that would eventually sprout into the $3 trillion market for exchange-traded funds. Eric Balchunas, ETF analyst for Bloomberg, ha...

In late 2008, as markets tanked thanks the the global financial crisis, two massive Ponzi schemes unraveled. One was the $17.5 billion fraud engineered by Bernie Madoff. The other was the smaller but no less interesting one run by R. Allen Stanford, a flamboyant Texan who lived in the small Caribbean island of Antigua and operated a bevy of companies under the Stanford brand. Best known for his in...

Everybody knows by now that a handful of hedge funders made a fortune by betting against housing before the market crashed back in 2008. But, people who bought at the bottom, when everyone else was panicking, also did extremely well. In the latest episode of Odd Lots we speak with Bloomberg Alastair Marsh, who discovered two traders who won big time by buying the most toxic assets in the world dur...

In theory, anyone with an internet connection can became an expert on just about anything from just about anywhere. In the latest edition of Odd Lots, we speak with Lorcan Roche Kelly, a cattle farmer, and former explosives engineer in rural Ireland who decided in the early days of the euro crisis to figure out what the heck was going on with his nation's banks. Lorcan tells the story of how he we...

On today’s episode, we’re taking the “dismal” out of the dismal science by interviewing Yoram Bauman, who bills himself as the world’s only stand-up economist. Join us for a Laffer curve-a-minute romp through the humor of homo economicus. Along the way, we find the upside in the economic assumption that all human beings are selfish jerks and learn what classes would be included in the University o...