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 physics models, and where Wall Street is going next. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy informati...
Jul 11, 2016•30 min
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 physics models, and where Wall Street is going next. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy informati...
Jul 11, 2016•30 min
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 vote, there were some huge opportunities for gamblers willing to take the right risks. See omnystud...
Jul 01, 2016•23 min
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 the E11 highway in the Trucial States — which would later grow into the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ...
Jun 27, 2016•21 min
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 watchers. Tim Duy is the professor of practice and senior director of the Oregon Economic Forum at ...
Jun 20, 2016•25 min
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. This week on Odd Lots, we talk to David Dayen, the author of the new book Chain of Title, about a gro...
Jun 13, 2016•27 min
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 past, present, and future. We tackle some of the biggest topics in the financial industry — are bond ...
Jun 06, 2016•20 min
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 monetary policy. A former banker, trader and corporate treasurer, Das is well-placed to walk us through...
May 27, 2016•23 min
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 world on two fronts as more chess players opt to compete online. We talk with Khachan about the challen...
May 23, 2016•24 min
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 industry has grown up, it looks more and more like the old establishment firms it was trying to disrupt. ...
May 13, 2016•26 min
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. Papadapolous explains the art of pinhooking -- buying a horse at auction and then flipping it -- and t...
May 04, 2016•30 min
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.com, an expert on, well, betting on politics. Smithson takes us through the history of political gam...
May 02, 2016•22 min
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 Intelligence economist Carl Ricadonna about the so-called Misery Index, a super simple way of measuri...
Apr 25, 2016•28 min
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-de-twang of Nashville-based money manager Jon Shayne, became famous online for his endlessly catchy...
Apr 15, 2016•23 min
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 eventually unseated him. While the island nation is one of the few countries that sent bankers to pris...
Apr 08, 2016•29 min
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 new fund, Arena Investors LP, is one of a crop of so-called shadow banks seeking to plug a financin...
Apr 04, 2016•27 min
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-sellers have been given the Hollywood treatment with the release of the film version of Michael Lewis...
Mar 28, 2016•25 min
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-frequency and automated trading. This week, Pimm Fox, co-anchor of Taking Stock on Bloomberg Radio, joi...
Mar 21, 2016•26 min
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 build about the ability of central banks to continually boost economic growth. Talk of central banks "r...
Mar 14, 2016•23 min
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, has the story of the stock exchange executives who seized upon an idea to create what is now one of th...
Mar 07, 2016•29 min
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 involvement in the sport of cricket, Stanford soon found himself under a much less flattering spotligh...
Feb 29, 2016•25 min
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 during the depths of the panic in early 2009. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Feb 22, 2016•23 min
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 went from a farm in Sixmilebridge, Ireland to advising hedge funds on what sovereign bonds they should...
Feb 16, 2016•30 min
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 of Comedy curriculum. We also take a look at some of the funniest economics papers of all time, inclu...
Feb 08, 2016•24 min
Episode 13: Everyone dreams of being able to win almost every time when gambling. Of course, whether it's blackjack, horse betting, poker or the stock market, it's really hard to consistently win. But one professor, armed with advanced mathematical knowledge and computers, was able to beat the system while gambling on the obscure sport of Jai Alai. In this week's Odd Lots podcast, Steven Skiena, who teaches computer science at Stony Brook University in New York, tells the story of how he made 50...
Feb 01, 2016•26 min
On this episode, co-host Tracy Alloway is joined by Bloomberg Markets reporter Luke Kawa for a journey back in time. As the global elite mingle at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, we look back at a WEF gathering five years ago. Back then, the mood was buoyant -- markets had recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and the euro-zone debt crisis had yet to fully unfold. But Barrie Wilkinson, a partner at Oliver Wyman Ltd., wasn't feeling so jubilant. As bankers, reg...
Jan 25, 2016•24 min
When the world lost David Bowie this month, it lost one of modern music's undisputed geniuses. Less well-known is Bowie's contribution to the financial world. In this episode of Odd Lots, hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with David Pullman, the banker who worked with Bowie to develop "Bowie Bonds," which paid investors on the cash flow from the artist's song royalties. This episode covers how these bonds came to be, their lasting\u0010impact on financial markets and what it was like ...
Jan 19, 2016•33 min
This week, we're taking on one of the most fragile commodities markets around. No, it's not oil (though we do get to that later in the program), it's the market for bananas. Dangerously reliant on a single, boring breed of the tropical fruit, banana growers now face a rampant disease that threatens one of the world's biggest food supplies. We talk to Dan Koeppel, author of "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World," about the development of a monoculture-based banana market and the p...
Jan 11, 2016•31 min
(Bloomberg) -- It’s a new year and a new episode of Odd Lots. Co-hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway have re-stoked our proverbial holiday fire, refilled our wine glasses and are ready to continue our conversation with a newly relaxed group of Bloomberg News reporters and editors. This time we’re looking ahead to 2016, making predictions for key markets and finance events during the next 12 months. Hear how sentiment could affect stocks, why the Federal Reserve is about to become even more im...
Jan 04, 2016•22 min
(Bloomberg) -- Gather ‘round the Odd Lots fire. Co-hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway have assembled a collection of Bloomberg News reporters and editors to spread holiday cheer by sharing their favorite market stories and happenings of 2015. We discuss the stock market sell-off of Aug. 24, the fall of Silk Road, drama in the pharmaceuticals industry, how we all survived the first U.S. interest rate increase in almost a decade, China’s movie-goers, and the many, many people worried about bon...
Dec 28, 2015•22 min
