Odd Lots

In recent years, one of the easiest ways to make money in this market has been to bet on low volatility. Up until recently, markets have been exceptionally tranquil, and trades predicated on that tranquility continuing have made a fortune. But two of the most popular vehicles for making that trade, XIV and SVXY got obliterated in one day in early February. On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak to Pravit Chintawongvanich, the head of Derivatives Strategy at Macro Risk Advisors about the episode. He explains what the short volatility trade was, how specifically these funds operated, and how they ultimately became victims of their own success. 

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This month, Bloomberg is excited to bring you a brand new show. Every Friday on What'd You Miss This Week, we'll feature the most interesting interviews from Bloomberg's daily market close show, "What'd You Miss" hosted by Scarlet Fu, Julia Chatterley and Joe Weisenthal. We want to take you beyond the headlines and bring you a unique perspective on the week's top stories, and those you may just have missed. It's the perfect way to kick off your weekend. Be sure to subscribe now, so you don't miss a thing!

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Anyone who watched poker on TV during the golden age of coverage a few years ago is familiar with Annie Duke. She's one of the most famous poker players of the era, and is one of the winningest women poker players of all time, with 38 money finishes at the World Series of Poker. She's been retired from poker for a few years now, but she has a new book called "Thinking In Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All The Facts." On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast, Annie talks about the skills that made her good in poker, and how they can be applied to many areas of our lives, including trading and business.

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Quantitative finance is red hot. These days, basically everyone (banks, hedge funds etc.) is hiring mathematicians and coders. So what differentiates one quant shop from any other? On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak to Alfred Spector, the CTO of Two Sigma Investments, which is one of the most successful quant firms in the world. Spector is a computer scientist who previously did long stints at both Google and IBM. He tells us about why Two Sigma spent resources to create its own video game, and what the firm does to ensure that technologists and mathematicians are eager to work there.

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If you cover the economy from New York City or Abu Dhabi, it's easy to get caught up in a media bubble. But the U.S. economy is obviously not a monolith. On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak to Jeff Korzenik, the Chief Investment Strategist at Fifth Third Private bank, a major bank in the Midwestern states. During our discussion, we talk about the ramifications from the opioid crisis as well as the Trump administration on the economy and the markets.

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When we think about financial assets, we usually think of their price as being derived from some set of intrinsic characteristics. A stock price may be a function of growth, margins, interest rates, and a few other things. For government bonds, we might say that inflation and growth are the big components. It's easy to forget that financial assets are goods sold on a market consisting of humans with their own demand and consumption needs. On this week's Odd Lots, we speak to Amlan Roy, Global Chief Retirement Strategist at State Street Global Advisors, about how radical changes to demographics all over the world has changed the supply and demand framework for financial assets, and thus the price of government bonds.

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For centuries, markets were highly-personalized things, often controlled by select groups of people who traded based on long-established and closely-knit relationships. Closed networks -- such as merchant guilds in 16th century Europe -- could ensure trust between buyers and sellers by pushing out bad actors. But then, something happened that would eventually become the foundation of all modern markets. In the 1500s, new trade routes and the arrival of the printing press helped erode the power of merchant guilds and give way to a much more open system of trading where strangers could interact with each other. 

On this edition of the Odd Lots podcast, Prateek Raj gives his theory about why modern markets first took hold in Northern Europe, and what this 500-year-old period of disruption can tell us about the world today. 

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We talk a lot about bubbles on this podcast. Often we talk about them from the perspective of a trader or speculator. But what about the people whose lives get caught up directly in the craziness? On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak to Bloomberg's own Dash Bennett, who worked for an internet company right during the peak of the mania in early 2000. Dash describes the incredible signs of excesses that he saw at the beginning and the bleak way it all ended when everyone lost their jobs and had all their perks taken away.

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On last week's episode of Odd Lots, Bloomberg's Chris Nagi and Matt Boesler gave us their takes for the biggest stories of the past year. So naturally, for this week's episode, we look ahead. Chris and Matt are back in the studio to give us their predictions for what we'll be talking about in 2018. 

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The year is over, and now's the time to look back at the big stories of the past year. On this week's episode, we're joined by Chris Nagi and Matt Boesler of Bloomberg News to discuss what they saw as the dominant themes of 2017. For Nagi, it was the relentless decline in market volatility (despite a year of remarkable headlines) and for Boesler it was the persistent shortfall in inflation, and the challenge that that's posing to traditional economic models.

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