Odd Lots

A few weeks ago on the Odd Lots podcast, we talked to Paul Schmelzing, a Ph. D candidate at Harvard, who explained how the bull market in U.S. Treasuries could come to a screeching halt. This week we examine the other side of the debate. Our guest is Srinivas Thiruvadanthai, director of research at the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center in Mount Kisco, New York. He explains how a combination of struct...

If you have any interest at all in finance, then it's mandatory to have seen the 1983 movie "Trading Places." You remember, right? Two wealthy Philadelphia commodity brokers bet on whether anyone, even down-and-out Eddie Murphy, can be trained to become a successful trader. What you might not realize is that something very similar happened in real life. In this week's Odd Lots, we examine the amaz...

There's a widespread sense that something remains broken in the global economy. Despite a comeback in official measures of economic performance, like GDP and the unemployment rate, there's a widespread sense of disillusionment and discontentment with the status quo. Clair Brown, an economics professor at UC Berkeley teaches a class on Buddhist Economics and has written a book on the subject. On th...

Among the biggest trends in the world of markets is the rise of passive investing. Rather than pay high fees to active mutual fund managers (who often fail to beat the market), people are pouring money into passive strategies that track major indices, but with little cost. So what are the ramifications of this trend for investors who choose to remain active? On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we spe...

Creating a new form of money is always tough. Will it hold its value? Will people trust it? Will people use it? All these challenges are even tougher if you're in the middle of a political chaos. On this week's Odd Lots, we speak with Rebecca Spang, a history professor at Indiana University and the author of a book about the monetary history of the French Revolution. Her book examines the disastro...

There are all sorts of reasons why markets break down. A lack of trust. Incomplete information. Divergent incentives. A lack of experienced actors. So it's hard to imagine a trickier market than kidnapping. Emotions are running rampant. You know very little about your counterparty. And there's no guarantee that anyone will stick to an agreement. On this week's Odd Lots, we speak with Anja Shortlan...

It's almost a truism that better-educated people earn more money. But suppose you're not interested in a normal job? What if you want to go into the mafia? Well, it turns out that you should still stay in school. On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we speak with Giovanni Mastrobuoni about the relationship between salary and educational attainment in organized crime. He's the co-author of a paper titl...

The Islamic State is mostly discussed in terms of its threat to the safety and security of the world. But as a geopolitical entity, its leadership has to deal with mundane considerations such as operating a financial system. So how does it work? On this week's Odd Lots podcast, the first in a series on money, markets and crime, we speak with Graeme Wood, the author of a new book about ISIS, about...

The stock market is currently in one of its longest bull markets ever, but that doesn't hold a candle to what's going on bonds. According to Paul Schmelzing, a PhD candidate at Harvard and a visiting researcher at the Bank of England, you have to go back more than 500 years (!) to find a bull market in bonds longer than than the one we're experiencing now. After bonds tumbled since last summer (es...

Welcome to the start of the new year! 2016 defied almost everyone's expectations, but that won't stop us from making predictions for 2017. On this episode of Odd Lots, we're joined by our Bloomberg News colleagues as we look ahead and forecast what will transpire in markets, politics, finance, economics and deals. Featuring: Max Abelson, Ed Hammond, Dan Moss, Megan Murphy and Mike Regan. See omnys...

It was quite a year, 2016! Trump and Brexit alone made it one for the history books. But there was more than political upheaval. In this end-of-year episode of Odd Lots, we speak to five reporters and editors from Bloomberg News to find out what they thought were the most interesting and important stories of the year. Among the huge stories that you might have missed: A momentous turn by the Bank...

One of our favorite topics here at Odd Lots is market structure. On multiple occasions, for example, we've talked about how trading bonds is fundamentally different than trading stocks. This week our guest is Josh Luber, who has built a market for a non-financial asset: sneakers. The market for collectible sneakers (like Air Jordans) is worth over $1 billion, but it's very hard to get transparent...

What's the optimum amount of money you should bet on a particular outcome? The answer is dictated by mathematics, yet plenty of people still go against the laws of numbers and probabilities when it comes to investing. This week, we speak with Victor Haghani, CEO of Elm Partners Management and the co-founder of the collapsed hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, about the most important mathemat...

Something huge happened in November. No, we're not talking about the U.S. presidential election. We mean the worst month in history for the the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate Total Return Index, a bond market index that's more than two decades old. So is this the start of something big, or was it just a blip? In this week's episode, we speak with Bloomberg Strategist Mark Cudmore, a former FX...

By now you've probably heard of Bitcoin. But Bitcoin isn't the only digital currency. In fact, there are hundreds of "altcoins" out there, all of which are different from Bitcoin in varying degrees. One of the hottest new currencies is ZCash, a digital currency designed to provide more anonymity than Bitcoin. And unlike Bitcoin, whose founder is pseudonymous and unknown to the public, ZCash was ba...

All great civilizations eventually collapse. It's inevitable. So what are the signs of their demise? On the latest edition of Odd Lots, we speak with Arthur Demarest, a professor at Vanderbilt University who specializes in the end of civilization. Demarest is an anthropologist and archaeologist who's most well known for his work on the Mayans. He tells us about his work, what he's learned -- and w...

There's a lot to process from last week's U.S. election. One surprising thing already is the market reaction. Equities surged following the vote, and interest rates are sharply higher. Market measures of inflation expectations and Fed hikes now suggest that people see more inflation and more rate hikes in the future. This is something our top central bankers have had a very difficult time in doing...

One could argue that "expert" has become a bad word. People routinely roll their eyes at the advice of experts and sometimes mock them. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than the Federal Reserve. In the 90s, Alan Greenspan was lauded as the author of the great economy. Today, the Fed is a political punching back. On this week's Odd Lots podcast, Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway talk to Sebastian...

Investors are often said to exhibit herding behavior when they follow each other into crowded positions — creating market bubbles that are susceptible to sudden pops when everyone begins stampeding for the exit. This week we take the analogy literally and speak to three professors who have created a mathematical model to examine why cows synchronize their behavior and — crucially — why they stop....

Dani Rodrik, a professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University, was writing about the downside of globalization before it was cool. The rise of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, the U.K.'s decision to leave the European Union and the expansion of nationalist political parties around the world has since given fresh impetus to the notion that globalization isn't workin...

What does psychoanalytic philosophy tell us about capitalism? In this edition of Odd Lots, we speak to Ole Bjerg, a professor at the Copenhagen Business School. Bjerg studies the work of Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher, and also writes about matters of finance, markets and money. In this episode, Bjerg discusses the game of poker and what it says about capitalism as a whole. See omnystudio.c...

Brad Katsuyama has racked up oceans of newspaper ink since being propelled into the public spotlight as the protagonist of Michael Lewis's book on high-frequency trading, Flash Boys. The 38-year-old co-founder and chief executive of IEX, an exchange with a 'speed bump' designed to slow down lightning-fast traders on behalf of longer-term investors, won U.S. regulatory approval in June. In this spe...

How is it that stocks are traded on electronic exchanges in the blink of an eye but bonds still trade over-the-counter by phone and sometimes even by fax? Today we discuss one of the most pervasive mysteries of market structure with Chris White, the former Goldman Sachs executive who's now CEO of ViableMkts, and his old boss, Les Seff, COO at AIMPaaS LLC, to discover why bond trading remains so da...

"Disruption," "incubation," "innovation"... you hear these words nonstop these days as people talk about the incredible changes taking place in society thanks to technology. This week on the Odd Lots podcast our guest tells us we all need to stop. Or at least use these words a lot less. Lee Vinsel is a professor of science and technology studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology and he explai...

The most valuable commodity for investors is information, and hedge funds and asset managers are going to great lengths to get it -- even to outer space. This week on the Odd Lots podcast, Tracy Alloway and Bloomberg View columnist Matt Levine are joined by James Crawford, a former NASA scientist who founded Orbital Insight. Crawford's company uses satellite photos to do things like track retail s...