Odd Lots
Episodes
Michael Pettis on Persistent Imbalances in Post-Pandemic China
11 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
By some measures, the Chinese economy did better in 2020 than just about anywhere else. For one thing, it actually grew last year. Also because of the...
Why Music Back Catalogs Have Become a Red-Hot Asset Class
08 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Bob Dylan did it last year. Shakira did it in January. More and more famous musicians are selling off the rights to their back catalogs to investors. ...
Coming Soon: The Pay Check Season 3
05 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
More than 150 years after the end of slavery in the U.S., the net worth of a typical white family is nearly six times greater than that of the average...
Zoltan Pozsar on What Just Happened with the Treasury Market
04 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Treasury market just experienced what some might call a tantrum. Across the yield curve, we saw rates shoot up. And it's not even clear why it hap...
Howard Lindzon Tells Us Why He Launched His Own SPAC
01 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
SPACs, sometimes referred to as blank check companies, are incredibly hot. After being a sort of sleepy and sometimes sketchy backwater of the finance...
How Chinese Buying Is Causing a Boom in Agricultural Commodities
25 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There are lots of hot areas in the market, which everybody knows. Stocks are obviously hot, as are industrial commodities like copper. Agricultural co...
This Is How the World Ended up with a Shortage of Semiconductors
22 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The world is facing a chip shortage. Numerous companies, including the auto sector, are facing an inability to get semiconductors, hampering their abi...
A Value Manager on How Most Value Managers Are Getting It All Wrong
18 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As you might have heard, so-called value investing has not had a good run. At least from a quantitative standpoint, strategies that aim to buy low-val...
How Boring Food and Beverage Companies Turn into Huge Stock Winners Year after Year
17 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
During the worst of the pandemic, people loaded up on staples from their grocery store. Shelf-stable food items, beverages, canned tuna, canned soup, ...
How Monster Beverage Shares Soared a Monster 100,000% in the Last 20 Years
15 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When you think about the big winners in the stock market over the past couple of decades, you might think about Amazon or Apple or some other tech win...
ARK's Head of Research on How They Find the Next Huge Winner
11 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In a world dominated by passive investing on one end and retail YOLO traders on the other, there aren't many star fund managers these days. There's on...
Mike Novogratz's Vision for Rebuilding Finance with Crypto
08 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Bitcoin, and crypto more broadly, have been on a huge tear lately. Then, with the chaos surrounding GameStop, there's been more discussion about wheth...
Goldman's Jeff Currie on the Silver Squeeze and the Coming Boom in Commodities
04 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It's been a weird several days in the market. What started with a short squeeze in GameStop, driven by Reddit traders, somehow morphed into a huge sur...
Benn Eifert Explains How Retail Trading Is Rocking Markets like Never Before
03 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We know that retail activity, much of it on Robinhood, has been surging since last spring once the lockdowns began. But just how big of an impact is i...
Is The GameStop Trade Really A Political Rebellion?
02 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The GameStop short squeeze is one of the most extraordinary events to ever happen in markets. But does it have political significance? Some are saying...
Can Open-Source Semiconductors Upend the Chip Industry?
01 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We're seeing historic change happening in real time in the chip industry. The old leaders are going away, and new players and new models are emerging,...
How One Online Investor Made the Score of a Lifetime on GameStop
29 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Everyone is talking about GameStop. The physical games retailer that was left for dead has been one of the hottest stocks of the year, surging well ov...
Dan Wang on China's Mission to Be a World Leader in Semiconductors
28 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We've been talking a lot on the podcast about semiconductors. The stumble of Intel. The general troubles with US manufacturing, and, of course, the ri...
The Story of How TSMC Came to Dominate the World
25 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In every conversation about computer chips, it always comes back to the dominant player: TSMC. Founded in the 1980s, it's far and away the biggest and...
The Important Lesson a Quant Manager Learned in 2020
21 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It goes without saying that 2020 was a year like no other when it comes to the markets. A historic crash, and then a raging recovery, all set against ...
Why the Cost of Shipping Goods From China Is Suddenly Soaring
18 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The coronavirus crisis snarled global shipping in early 2020 as borders were closed, but lots of people expected it to improve as vessels returned to ...
How the U.S. Lost Chip Dominance and How It Can Be Regained
14 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The U.S. was once a manufacturing leader in semiconductors. That's no longer the case, given the rise of contract manufacturing and outsourcing, the d...
Cowen's Co-President on Why SPACs Are Having Such a Moment
11 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
One of the surprising developments in the last year was the boom in SPACs. The so-called blank check companies raised more money in 2020 than they had...
Chess Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura on Twitch Streaming and “The Queen's Gambit”
07 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We're in a rare moment where chess is popular in the United States. There are two big factors driving it. One is the smash hit Netflix show "The Queen...
What Happened to Europe's Economy After the Black Death
04 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It's been pointed out that, after the Black Death in Europe, real wages surged because there was such a shortage of labor in the aftermath. But what w...
This Is How Prejudice Can Hinder the Economy
31 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Economics is all about improving living standards, but rarely does the dismal science deal with social justice or talk about how a lack of it could ac...
Goldman's Jan Hatzius on the Lessons Learned in 2020
28 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
2020 has been an absolutely extraordinary year for the economy. In March, we saw the fastest economic contraction in history with an extraordinary sur...
Michael Saylor, the CEO Who Turned a Software Company Into a Bitcoin Company
24 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This past summer, the business intelligence software company MicroStrategy made waves when it put some of its extra cash into Bitcoin. Then, as Bitcoi...
Camille Fournier on Building Tech at Two Sigma
21 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We talk a lot about quantitative trading on the podcast, but typically from a rather big picture perspective, and not at the level of actually buildin...
Apple Is at the Cutting Edge of a Revolution in Chips
17 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On a recent episode of Odd Lots, we talked about Intel, and how the former dominant American semiconductor company was stumbling. But big things are h...
This Is the Macro Picture Going Into 2021
14 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
It's obviously been an extraordinary year for markets and the economy for reasons that don't need stating at this point. But what does 2021 have in st...
Why Africa Borrowed Billions of Dollars From China
10 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
It's no secret that some African nations went on a borrowing spree in recent years, tapping both international markets and sovereign lenders such as C...
Why the IMF Changed Its Views on Capital Controls
07 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For years, the IMF was generally of the view that free trade was good, and that open capital flows were also good. But in recent years, the latter vie...
Former ECB Chief Economist Peter Praet on What's Next For Central Banks
03 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
With developed economies still operating well below pre-crisis levels, central banks face substantial pressure to pursue stimulative policies on an on...
How the Number One U.S. Semiconductor Company Stumbled
30 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For years, Intel has been the pre-eminent U.S. semiconductor company. But lately, the company has stumbled. This past summer, shares in the company pl...
How Money Became A Form Of Social Media
26 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
There are many similarities between cryptocurrencies and social networks. And the rise of payment apps like Venmo make the link between payments and s...
Inigo Fraser-Jenkins and Aaron Brown Debate The Future Of Quant Investing
23 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Traditional quant strategies that try to screen for stocks that are "cheap" have had an extremely rough period. So is this just a temporary setback th...
The Episode That Turned Tracy Into A Bitcoin Bull
19 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Bitcoin has been on a tear lately, but it's been a bit unclear as to what's driving it. But whatever's driving it, co-host Tracy Alloway has given up ...
This Is How People Really Feel About Paying Taxes
16 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The politics of taxes are always fraught. In theory, everyone wants to pay less of them and bristle at the prospect of paying more. But it turns out t...
A Political Reporter Argues That Wall Street Doesn't Get DC
12 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Investors have always had to pay attention to what's going on in Washington DC, but this year it's been on a whole new level. Between virus response p...
This Is The NYSE's Plan To Win More Direct Listings
09 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This year's stock market boom has coincided with a boom in new listings. There have been plenty of IPOs, numerous SPACs, and an uptick in companies do...
Michael Mauboussin On Valuing Intangible Assets
05 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Measuring a company's book value is a classic practice among investors seeking to understand how much a firm's actual assets are worth. But what happe...
A Forensic Accountant On Why Chinese Internet Companies Are So Tough To Analyze
02 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The IPO of Ant Financial will go down as one of the most extraordinary deals of all time. And in general, Chinese internet companies have been huge wi...
Lessons From Ruth Krivoy, the Former Head of Venezuela's Central Bank
29 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The COVID-19 crisis has pushed central banks around the world into uncharted territory. Typically when we talk about this, it's from the perspective o...
JPMorgan's Josh Younger on Rate Derivatives and Volatility Ahead of the Election
26 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For months now, traders have been positioning for a major volatility spike around the November election. But what are markets really expecting, and ho...
Benoît Cœuré On Central Bank Digital Currencies And The Future Of Monetary Policy
22 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Central banks around the world are increasingly launching pilot projects to explore the possibility of issuing digital currencies. But how would they ...
Rep. Ro Khanna On Why Democrats Should Cut A Stimulus Deal With The White House
20 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
With just two weeks until the election, talks over a stimulus deal remain ongoing, with negotiations having picked up between House Speaker Nancy Pelo...
A Volatility Arbitrage Trader On What Markets Are Saying Right Now
19 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
It's been an extraordinary year for traders of volatility. We had the crisis, we had this incredible surge in retail call options buying, and we have ...
How Tobacco Became One Of The Greatest Investments In History
15 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For over a century, tobacco stocks have been among the greatest investments in history, consistently outperforming other sectors decade after decade. ...
Michael Hudson On Why The US Risks Becoming The Next Greece
12 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, you heard a lot of talk about the US becoming like Greece unless the budget deficit were brought under cont...
What It Takes To Win At Quant Investing
08 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Interest in quantitative investing strategies continues to grow; however, as the space gets more competitive, making money and winning gets harder and...
An IMF Economist On The Challenge Of Finding The Neutral Rate Of Interest
05 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
One of the guiding lights of Fed policy over the years has been the so-called Neutral Rate of Interest or R*. It's at this rate, theoretically, where ...
Volatility Suppression Turned The Entire Economy Into One Big Carry Trade
01 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In a carry trade, an investor borrows money cheaply to buy an asset that yields more. As long as nothing changes overall, the investors get to pocket ...
How All Financial Markets Turned Into The Same Big Trade
28 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
These days it seems like all financial markets are the same big trade. A gold chart looks like a Tesla chart, which looks like an Ethereum chart, whic...
This Is What Happened When They Tried To Fix Journalism Using Blockchain
24 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Back in 2017, during the Bitcoin boom, there were a number of different attempts to use blockchain technology to improve a host of businesses and indu...
A Top Crypto Exchange CEO Explains Why The 2020 Boom Is Different
21 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Crypto is hot this year again. In 2020, we've not only seen a substantial rally across a lot of different coins, there's been an emergency of new expe...
How Traders Used Google Searches To See The Economic Recovery In Real Time
17 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The use of so-called "alternative data" has been gathering attention for some time. Investors have been looking at things like credit cards or satelli...
How SoftBank And Robinhooders Added Fuel To The Stock Market Boom
14 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most intriguing subplots to the 2020 stock market boom has been the speculative fervor with which investors have dived into this market. An...
Why Blank Check Companies Are The Hottest Thing This Year
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
SPACs have been around a long time. The basic premise is that a group of people raise a bunch of money from public market investors, with the premise ...
How A New Type Of Money Helped Cause The Great Financial Crisis
07 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
It's fun to talk about what money is, but often it's hard to connect the dots and make it actually relevant to the discussion of the economy and marke...
Paul McCulley: We Are "Unambiguously" On The Verge Of A Profound Change In The Economy
03 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Paul McCulley is a former Managing Director at PIMCO and a legend of the industry, having helped coin phrases such as "shadow banking" and the "Minsky...
Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari On The Historic Challenges For Monetary Policy
31 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Fed is facing historic challenges for two reasons. The first is the coronavirus and the task of facilitating the economic recovery. The second cha...
The Father Of CMBS Says We’re In ‘Uncharted Territory’ When It Comes To Valuing Real Estate
27 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
There are some sectors of the real estate market, such as suburban residential housing, that are doing just fine throughout this crisis. However, othe...
The CEO of a $1.4 Billion REIT Explains The Surprising Year In Housing
24 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When COVID hit, people had visions of a plunge in home prices and a massive wave of evictions. So far, that largely hasn’t played out. On this episo...
Rep. Ayanna Pressley On How The Fed Can Fight Racial Inequality
20 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the United States, Black Americans have experienced persistently higher levels of unemployment than their White counterparts. While the Fed has foc...
How To Run A Bowling Alley-Arcade-Restaurant-Bar In The Middle Of A Pandemic
17 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The pandemic has been brutal for restaurants and other indoor entertainment venues. So imagine running a space that's a restaurant, a bowling alley, a...
The ECB’s Former Vice-President Explains The Historic Step That Europe Just Took
10 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For years, people have identified the lack of fiscal transfers and fiscal burden sharing as one of the glaring architectural flaws of the European eco...
Viktor Shvets On Why There’s No Going Back To Pre-COVID Capitalism
06 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In light of the massive disruption to the economy, there’s a widespread view that things have been permanently altered, that fiscal policy must take...
Why Investors Keep Losing Money Betting Against The Hong Kong Dollar Peg
03 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For years, macro hedge fund managers have been stalking the Hong Kong Dollar. Since 1983, the currency has been pegged at around 7.75 per US dollar, a...
How They’re Really Making Money On Your Free Robinhood Trades
30 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
With so many people working at home, bored, and with no sports to bet on, there’s been an incredible explosion of retail stock market trading. One s...
Introducing: Blood River
28 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The killers of Berta Caceres had every reason to believe they’d get away with murder. More than 100 other environmental activists in Honduras had be...
How A Professional Writer Turned Herself Into A World Class Poker Player
27 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Switching careers is always difficult. But former New Yorker staff writer Maria Konnikova did it in dramatic fashion. Konnikova decided that the best ...
Meet The Mayor Who Printed His Own Currency To Fight The Virus
20 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
With the virus crushing economic activity, local governments have had to cut spending and rely on Federal support in order to maintain basic services....
Why Studying Keynes Is More Important Than Ever
13 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In response to the economic crisis, governments around the world have engaged in stimulative policies that might be characterized as “Keynesian” i...
How The Government Can Guarantee Everyone A Job And Fix The Unemployment Crisis Immediately
09 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Officially, the US unemployment rate stands at 11%. This is higher than the worst levels of the financial crisis. And there are reasons to think that ...
Why The World Is Getting Angrier, And What Says About The Economy
06 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The world has gotten angrier in recent years, and the coronavirus crisis seems likely to have accelerated the trend. So what does this say about the e...
Hyun Song Shin On What Central Banks Have Learned From The Crisis
02 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Central banks and fiscal authorities around the world have taken extraordinary measures to stem the economic fallout from the coronavirus crisis. But ...
This Is Why The China Bubble Never Seems To Pop
29 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For years and years, the Chinese economy has been characterized as a bubble, with too much debt, and a history of badly thought out, state-directed in...
Introducing Foundering
25 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Adam Neumann had a vision: to make his startup WeWork a wildly successful company that would change the world. He convinced thousands of other people ...
What The Black Death And Spanish Flu Can Tell Us About What Comes Next
22 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Nobody knows what the post-COVID future looks like. But there are some lessons to be learned from previous pandemics. On today’s episode we speak wi...
Chamath Palihapitiya Says A Reckoning Is Coming For Big Tech
18 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Chamath Palihapitiya is the CEO of Social Capital, the Chairman of Virgin Galactic and a partial owner of the Golden State Warriors basketball team. H...
Domino’s: This Is How A Pizza Chain Stock Did Just As Well As Google
15 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the summer of 2004, Google went public and, as everyone knows, it’s done phenomenally well. What’s less known is that a few weeks later, Domino...
Why You Can’t Blame The Fed For Ultra-Low Interest Rates And Soaring Asset Prices
11 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
One of the characteristics of the pre-crisis (and perhaps also the post-crisis) economy is the presence of very low interest rates, and financial asse...
Two Investors Did A Tour Of The Globe To Find The Best Place To Put Their Money
08 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As many active fund managers have discovered in recent years, it’s extremely hard to find a sustainable edge in investing. But for people who put in...
This Is What Happened To LIBOR During The COVID Crisis
05 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to Part V of the Odd Lots LIBOR series, in which Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal take a look at life after LIBOR, the interest rate tied to m...
How The Transition Away From LIBOR Is Actually Going
04 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to Part IV of the Odd Lots LIBOR series, in which Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal take a look at life after LIBOR, the interest rate tied to ...
The Case for AMERIBOR As The Replacement for LIBOR
03 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to Part III of the Odd Lots LIBOR series, in which Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal take a look at life after LIBOR, the interest rate tied to...
This Is The Index That's Supposed To Replace LIBOR
02 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to Part II of the Odd Lots LIBOR series, in which Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal take a look at life after LIBOR, the interest rate tied to ...
Meet the Man Who Blew the Whistle on LIBOR
01 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the Odd Lots LIBOR series, in which Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal take a look at life after LIBOR, the interest rate tied to more than $...
Here’s Who Really Benefits From The Dominance Of The U.S. Dollar
28 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When people talk about the dominance of the U.S. dollar in global commerce, they often refer to it as a unique privilege of the United States that its...
Three Sovereign Debt Experts Explain How The World Can Instantly Bring Aid To Emerging Markets
25 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The economic crisis will result in an extraordinary amount of pain for emerging markets. In addition to the health disruption, the global economic col...
What The Weak Recovery In Japan Can Teach Us About Re-Igniting The U.S. Economy
21 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Even with the recent stock market rally, expectations are poor for a robust recovery in the U.S. So what does history teach us about what works and wh...
Mark Cuban On Why The Government Should Directly Hire Millions Of People
18 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How should the government address the economic crisis? On this episode, we talk with Mark Cuban, the Shark Tank co-host and billionaire owner of the D...
The Coronavirus Crisis Could Lead To The Mother Of All Trade Imbalances
14 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
With the acute phase of the health crisis having faded in China, factory activity has ramped up again. One big problem though: With the economy so dep...
Richard Koo Explains Why The Recovery Will Be So Difficult
11 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Countries around the world are undergoing an unprecedented, simultaneous real economic shock. So how should policymakers respond? Richard Koo is the C...
What the Market Crash Says About How Investing Works
07 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve seen a huge market crash this year and a number of firms reporting portfolio losses. So why were so many big investors crowded into the same t...
Nouriel Roubini Sees A Bad Recovery, Then Inflation, Then A Depression
04 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
During the last crisis, the economist Nouriel Roubini earned the nickname “Dr. Doom” for his ominous prognostications about the economy and financ...
How To Fund The Search For A COVID-19 Vaccine And Boost The Recovery
30 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The hunt is on for a clinical therapy to prevent or treat COVID-19. But what’s the best way to go about this? How can governments accelerate this pr...
Adam Tooze On How This Crisis Is Different Than The Last
27 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2018, Columbia history professor Adam Tooze published his magisterial work “Crashed”, which framed the Great Financial Crisis as essentially a ...
How The Coronavirus Crisis Pushed The Fed Into Truly Uncharted Territory
23 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The fate of the economy remains extremely unclear. However there is little doubt that the Fed has taken dramatic steps to arrest the crisis. Not only ...