This past summer, the business intelligence software company MicroStrategy made waves when it put some of its extra cash into Bitcoin. Then, as Bitcoin ran up, it bought more, and the stock has now soared thanks to the bet. But what's the reasoning behind the move? We speak with MicroStrategy’s CEO, Michael Saylor, on why he thinks Bitcoin is the best reserve asset for any company.

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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 building the systems needed for trading and data analysis. On this episode, we speak with Camille Fournier, the head of Platform Engineering at Two Sigma, the financial services firm that, among other things, runs a large hedge fund. Fournier, previously the CTO at Rent the Runway, discusses how her job works, the challenge of managing software engineers, and how tech within a financial services company is different than tech within a consumer-facing startup.

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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 happening in the chip industry beyond the manufacturing woes of one company. As it turns out, we're seeing a dramatic rethink of chip architecture, and what they can do, with more emphasis on specialized semiconductors that are really good at performing a specific task. One company that's blazing new ground is Apple, whose M1 chip is earning rave reviews online. We speak with Doug O'Laughlin, a former buy-sider, who now writes the newsletter Mule's Musings, on the industry and other things in tech.

Correction: A previous version of this description misspelled Doug O'Laughlin's name.

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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 store? Can the current trends continue? We talked with two of the smartest macro thinkers we know: Jon Turek, the author of the Cheap Convexity Blog, and Naufal Sanaullah, the Chief Macro Strategist at EIA All Weather Alpha Partners, to discuss the big themes and what to watch for next year.

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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 China to finance massive infrastructure projects. But all that debt is becoming problematic as the coronavirus crisis strains public finances, resulting in a slow-motion debt crisis. In November, Zambia became the first African country to default on its debt this year, sparking a series of fraught negotiations with its creditors. Zambia famously owes a lot of money to China and the default is now casting more scrutiny on China's approach to its borrowers. On this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak to Gyude Moore, Liberia's former Minister of Public Works and Deputy Chief of Staff, turned Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development. He talks to us about how and why parts of Africa became so indebted to China, and whether China might be on the cusp of cutting borrowers some slack. 

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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 view has started to change. Increasingly the IMF, while continuing to promote openness, has viewed restricting the capital account for emerging markets as a useful tactical macro tool. On this episode of Odd Lots, we speak with Prakash Loungani and Sriram Balasubramanian of the IMF's Independent Evaluation Office on their examination of the IMF's work, and how its perspective has changed over the last several years. 

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With developed economies still operating well below pre-crisis levels, central banks face substantial pressure to pursue stimulative policies on an ongoing basis. But what more can they do with the tools at hand? And how much do political fights get in the way? On the latest Odd Lots, we speak with Peter Praet, the former Chief Economist at the ECB, who served under Mario Draghi for almost a decade, about the lessons learned during that experience, and how they apply going forward.

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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 plunged after it said it was experiencing delays in the production of its next generation chips. And while most tech companies have been on an absolute tear, Intel is still close to its lowest levels since the March bottom. So what went wrong and what do they need to do to right the ship? On this episode, we speak with Stacy Rasgon, a semiconductor analyst at Bernstein Research on Intel and the general state of U.S. high-tech manufacturing.

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There are many similarities between cryptocurrencies and social networks. And the rise of payment apps like Venmo make the link between payments and social media explicit. But this convergence between money and social media goes back a long time. On this episode, we speak with Lana Swartz, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, about her book, New Money: How Payment Became Social Media.

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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 that will eventually mean revert, or are the existing strategies dead and busted? Earlier this year, Inigo Fraser-Jenkins of Bernstein Research provocatively said he was sticking a fork in the quant world. But not everyone agrees with him that it's a lost cause. So in addition to talking with Fraser-Jenkins, we also brought on Aaron Brown, formerly of AQR Capital Management, for a debate on what works in quant and what the future holds

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