Skip to content
Sign in
Artwork for Odd Lots
BusinessInvestingNewsBusiness NewsNews Commentary

Odd Lots

Bloomberg

#16 in Business this week

Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway explore the most interesting topics in finance, markets and economics. Join the conversation every Monday, Thursday, and Friday

Play
Open in
  • 1,301 episodes
  • Avg 41 min
  • English

Episodes 1,301

NewestOldestLongest
All20Unplayed20In progress0Played0
Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.
  • Dec 16, 2016 · 26 min

    59: What Sneakers Can Tell You About How Financial Markets Work

    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 pricing, in part because the action happens across a variety of different sites and venues. Luber explains how his startup StockX wants to unify the industry, bring about transparency, and fundamentally change how this market works. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Dec 9, 2016 · 25 min

    58: Ignore Investing's Mathematical Underpinnings at Your Peril

    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 mathematical concepts for investing. We also discuss the pros and cons of quantitatively led finance. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Dec 2, 2016 · 26 min

    57: Was November the Start of a Huge Turning Point In Markets?

    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 trader, about what's happening in markets around the world. We talk about currencies, inflation, growth, China, the election, the eurozone and more... a full global tour! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Nov 25, 2016 · 24 min

    56: How To Launch Your Own Form Of Money

    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 backed by a company with a known team. In the latest episode of Odd Lots, ZCash founder Zooko Wilcox explains how and why he launched his own currency and explains why anyone would actually use it. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Nov 18, 2016 · 28 min

    55: Here Are The Signs That A Civilization Is About To Collapse

    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 what we should be watching out for today. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Nov 11, 2016 · 27 min

    54: How Trump Did Something Yellen, Draghi Could Only Dream Of

    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. How come? On this week's Odd Lots, we spoke with David Beckworth, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center, about Trump, fiscal policy, monetary policy and the changing market outlook for interest rates and inflation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Nov 4, 2016 · 30 min

    53: Why We Stopped Trusting Experts

    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 Mallaby about Greenspan, experts and the huge changes at the Fed in the last couple of decades. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Oct 28, 2016 · 31 min

    52: What Math Models of Herding Cows Can Teach Us About Markets

    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. Jie Sun, Erik Bollt, and Mason Porter, the authors of "A Mathematical Model for the Dynamics and Synchronization of Cows," extrapolate their findings to humans and modern markets. This episode is co-hosted by our resident bovine expert, Lorcan Roche-Kelly. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Oct 21, 2016 · 33 min

    51: Why Everyone Is Freaking Out About Globalization

    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 working for everyone. In this episode we discuss how we ended up with 'hyperglobalization,' what the technocrats got wrong, and what exactly can be done to fix it. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Oct 14, 2016 · 31 min

    50: What Slavoj Žižek Would Say About Poker and the Peso

    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.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Oct 12, 2016 · 35 min

    49: The Man Who Wants to Better Trading by Slowing It

    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 special edition of Odd Lots, Katsuyama speaks with Bloomberg View Columnist Matt Levine about the next big steps in stock market structure. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Oct 3, 2016 · 27 min

    48: The Lost History of Financial Market Modernization

    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 darn old-fashioned despite numerous attempts to pull it into the 21st century. Looking back at history, we can see a pattern to market modernization that was initiated by the OTC equity market almost 50 years ago. Can this history provide us with insights that can put fixed income markets on a path to modernizing? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Sep 23, 2016 · 27 min

    47: Why it's Time to Stop Using the Word 'Disruption'

    "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 explains the harmful impact of language and buzzwords, and why we need to focus more on "maintaining" the infrastructure and technology that sustains everyday life. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Sep 16, 2016 · 28 min

    46: Space Robots Are Helping Hedge Funds Invest

    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 sales by studying parking lots and track oil supplies by scanning global oil tanks. He explains how his company figures out what to look for and how to look for it, and how investors and governments use his information to make decisions. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Sep 12, 2016 · 33 min

    45: Why A Whistleblower Walked Away From Over $8 Million

    Could you walk away from a reward of over $8 million? The guest on our latest episode of the Odd Lots podcast did just that. Eric Ben-Artzi was a risk officer at Deutsche Bank who concluded that his bank was mis-marking the assets of part of his derivatives portfolio to a significant degree. When he couldn't get his colleagues to reprice the derivatives he called a hotline and blew the whistle, ultimately leading to a huge reward. In this episode he explains what he saw that was wrong and why he ultimately didn't take the money. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Sep 2, 2016 · 32 min

    44: What a 12-Year Knows About Money That an Economist Doesn't

    "What is money?" This seemingly simple question has the ability to drive people crazy. Is it a unit of account? Is it something about exchange? Does it have to be blessed by the government or backed by something hard? On this week's podcast, we speak with fund manager Eric Lonergan, the author of "Money (The Art of Living)," to answer this question as well as the other vexing ones that spring from it. Ultimately we get an answer that's as simple as the question itself, one that would make more sense to a typical 12-year-old than an economist. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Aug 29, 2016 · 21 min

    43: Seinfeld Can Teach You Everything You Need About Economics

    The hit show Seinfeld is often referred to as the show about nothing, but maybe it's actually a show all about economics. Alan Grant is an associate professor of economics at Baker University and a proprietor of The Economics of Seinfeld, a website that catalogues all the ways the legendary sitcom imparts valuable economic lessons. In the latest edition of the Odd Lots podcast, Grant talks about what you can learn from watching the show, and the specific lessons of various episodes, including The Chinese Restaurant (a lesson in opportunity cost), The Contest (a lesson in time preference) and the apartment (rationing mechanisms and rent control). See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Aug 22, 2016 · 26 min

    The Millennial Generation Is Stagnant And Older People Are Part

    In developed economies, younger generations have faced stagnant wages, mediocre employment prospects and dizzying costs of homeownership. One culprit: The generations that came before. Policies that helped older generations recieve strong pensions and affordable housing have made life more difficult for the young. In this week's Odd Lots podcast we talked to Laura Gardiner of the Resolution Foundation about her new report on "renewing the generational contract" between generations. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Aug 15, 2016 · 31 min

    41: Billionaires Help Tell the Story of Brazil's Boom and Bust

    The 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro have been tainted by protests, economic slowdown, and a massive political scandal. In this episode we take a look at Brazil's boom and bust as told through the prism of the country's elite. Alex Cuadros is the author of "Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country." He tells how a commodities boom gave rise to larger-than-life Brazilian billionaires including mining mogul Eike Batista, soybean farmer-turned-senator Blairo Maggi, and beer-and-burger-king Jorge Paulo Lemann. He tells us why 'Brazillionaires' sometimes argue over their place on public wealth rankings, what happened when Batista's Porsche went missing, and how Brazil's billionaires favor dead bugs in their decorating. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
  • Aug 8, 2016 · 20 min

    40: Why Summer Has Just Gone on Sale

    This week is the summer edition of Odd Lots and we're talking about the market forces shaping the price of two essential ingredients for any pool party: inflatable toys and barbecue meat. Bloomberg Reporter Polly Mosendz walks us through the $4 million dollar battle blowing up over the inflatable pool toys popularized on Instagram and now the subject of a major dispute between retailers vying for the top sales spot on Amazon Inc. Then Bloomberg's Lydia Mulvany tells us why meat prices are cheaper than ever and the cost of grilling staples including burgers, ribs and pork chops could go even lower. So grab your inflatable donut, pick up your BBQ tongs, and join the Odd Lots fun. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    • Transcript
Showing 1,241–1,260 of 1,301 episodes