Welcome, friend and future deep-dweller!

In this episode of Deeponomics, I sit down with Yuval Millo, Professor of Accounting at Warwick Business School, to trace the intellectual journey behind the social studies of finance and what it means to take markets seriously as social and reflexive systems.

Millo walks us through the early days of the field, including how his investigation into the Black–Scholes option pricing model led him to the idea of performativity and the insight that financial theories don’t just describe markets, they shape them.

We dive into his recent work on financial analysts, investors, and the subtle social structures that create market inertia, from overconfidence born in tight networks to the stickiness of buy-side and sell-side relationships.

We also explore his research on active fund managers, why so many still persist despite decades of underperformance, and what happens when the rise of passive investing becomes an epistemic threat to the identity of active professionals.

Finally, we touch on his newer work on machine learning and credit modeling, where opaque systems risk creating self-referential loops that humans cannot easily escape or evaluate.

If you’re curious about how markets actually work once you zoom in on the humans, tools, and stories that animate them, this conversation offers a rare inside view from someone who helped shape the field.

Learn more about Yuval Millo: https://www.wbs.ac.uk/about/person/yuval-millo/

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