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. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Algorithms. People talk about them all the time, particularly in relation to markets. But who actually designs them, and what do they do? On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak with Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland, and the author of "The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information." Pasquale, who has been following the growing importance of algorithms for several years explains the various ways they're shaping our life without us being aware of it.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When we think of computer-driven or "quant" investing, we often think fast moves, algorithms making buy and sell orders at incredibly short timeframes. So in theory, the likes of great long-term investors, like Warren Buffett, should be safe from the robot revolution. But maybe not so fast! On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we speak to John Alberg of Euclidean Technologies and Zachary Lipton of Carnegie Mellon, about their new research on the next generation of quant investing. Alberg and Lipton explain a recent paper in which they used machine learning to forecast the future fundamentals of companies, and the opportunity that offers in terms of beating the market over the long term.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are two popular schools of thought with regards to how markets work. There's the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) which says that it's basically impossible to beat the market, because all information is completely priced in at all times (more or less). On the other side is an increasingly popular behavioral view which argues that various human emotions and biases are always creating situations that aren't justified by the data. On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak to Andrew Lo, a professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management about his own theory, which he calls Adaptive Markets. The theory attempts to bridge the behavioral approach with the efficient markets view. He argues that the proper way to view the market is through an ecological lens, examining the players as flora and fauna of a complicated system, to help determine who's thriving, who's dying, and where asset prices will go.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Money goes where it's treated best. That simple truth is a big reason why more and more money—trillions, in fact—flows into a powerful, low-cost tool that's quietly transformed investing in recent years. Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, let you invest in everything from the stock market to gold like never before. This podcast will demystify them—and delight you in the process.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This month we saw a small sell-off in markets that got big attention. How did we get to the point where a 1 percent fall in the S&P 500 over the course of a week is huge news? And are we about to enter a time when it becomes much more normal to see markets fall? Matt King, global head of credit strategy at Citigroup Inc., has never shied away from the big picture questions. In this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, he predicts we'll see more wobbles in the future, and walks us through some of the biggest and most fundamental changes that have taken place in markets over the past few years.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this age of algorithms and quants, you hear less and less about good old stock picking. You know, like the style of investing associated with Warren Buffet or Benjamin Graham. But that doesn't mean you can't still dive into a balance sheet or cash flow statement in order to divine a stock's true worth. On this week's Odd Lots we speak to Aswath Damodaran, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, and the foremost expert on stock valuation. He explains his general approach to valuing stocks, and how he might use that framework on companies like GE, Tesla, and Uber.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most asset classes move in a fairly straightforward manner. They're either going up or down at any given time. But when it comes to currencies it's not that simple. Since they're all traded against each other (the pound vs. the dollar, the pound vs. the euro, the pound vs. the yen) there's always some rising and some falling at any given time. Everything's relative. So what drives these relative movements, and how do traders decide what bets to place? On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we talk to Ken Veksler, a currency trader, and director of Accumen Management about how this market operates, and how he navigates it.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You can't go a day without hearing about ICOs or Initial Coin Offerings. By taking advantage of a regulatory gap and buzz surrounding cryptocurrencies, companies are raising millions of dollars by launching their own coins. But what's the point of these coins? What are they supposed to do? And what are the pitfalls? On this week's podcast, we talk to Elaine Ou, a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access and a Bloomberg View contributor about the economics of ICOs, and how previous attempts at creating similar markets ended up as failures.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.