Odd Lots

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 with Jamie Catherwood of O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, aka the “Finance History Guy.” Jamie talks to us about what he’s learned from studying both the Spanish Flu and the Black Death about what this crisis means for markets and the economy.

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Chamath Palihapitiya is the CEO of Social Capital, the Chairman of Virgin Galactic and a partial owner of the Golden State Warriors basketball team. He’s also been an outspoken critic of the way the crisis and economic recovery have been handled. In April, he famously railed against the airline bailouts in a CNBC clip that went viral. On today’s podcast, he talks to us about how he would have handled the bailout differently, and why he sees a reckoning coming for powerful tech companies in the near future.

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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’s Pizza also went public. What’s crazy is that the stock has performed almost identically since then. On this episode, we speak with Jonathan Maze, the Editor-in-Chief of Restaurant Business Magazine about how they delivered this incredible performance.

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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 asset prices that are expensive by historical standards. Of course, a lot of people are inclined to blame the Fed for this. But the real issue precedes the Fed, and in fact the Fed (and other central banks) are only responding to political decisions that depress consumption, investment and inflation. On this episode, we speak with Jon Turek, the author of the Cheap Convexity Blog, about how policies all around the world that suppress consumption and encourage exports are the real policy choices that lead to low rates and expensive financial assets.

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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 hard work to discover opportunities off the beaten track, it may still be possible to find undiscovered value. On this episode, we speak with Burton Flynn and Ivan Nechunaev of Terra Nova Capital Advisors about their highly unusual approach to doing research. The two of them, along with their families, traveled the globe, spending a month at a time in different countries to find places to put their money. They explained to us why this approach was important, what they learned, which countries excite them the most, and how these markets are dealing with the COVID crisis. 

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