Investors are constantly poring over income statements from big companies to figure out whether they should buy or sell the business's stock. But should they bother? In this week's episode, Joe and Tracy talk to Feng Gu, a professor at SUNY Buffalo, and Baruch Lev, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, about why the way we account for a company's earnings might be massively outdated.

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By now, almost everyone in financial markets is familiar with ETFs (exchange-traded funds), and how they allow investors to move quickly in and out of a basket of stocks with a few clicks. But perhaps people don't realize quite how revolutionary they are, and how much of an impact they've had on the financial system. On this week's episode we talk to Eric Balchunas, an ETFs analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence and Joel Weber, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg Markets magazine about how extraordinary ETFs are, how far they've come, and how they're about to evolve and get even more gigantic.

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On Monday October 19th, 1987, the Dow Jones fell 508 points in a one day crash that will forever be known as "Black Monday". In honor of the 30th anniversary, Joe and Tracy talk to Blair Hull, managing partner of Hull Trading Co., who was actively trading that day. While everyone else panicked, Hull spotted an opportunity and won big in the chaos. On this episode, we talk about how he was able to keep his head above water and what lessons that day holds for markets today.

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"Liquidity" is one of the most widely-talked about yet least understood concepts in markets. Roughly speaking, a market is liquid if you can transact in it without affecting the price significantly. But there's little agreement about why some markets are more liquid than others, or why liquidity sometimes just evaporates with little notice. This week we speak to Karthik Shashidhar, the author of "Between The Buyer And The Seller" about what we can learn about liquidity from things like Uber, dating apps, and real estate brokers. 

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The world of sell-side analysts has been upended in recent years with intense competition, new technology and regulation in the form of MIFID. At the same time, many of the issues being faced by the analyst industry are similar to the ones now faced by the media.

On this week's episode, we talk to Steven Abrahams, the former head of mortgage bond and securitization research at Deutsche Bank AG, and now the co-founder and CEO of Milepost Capital Management, about his two decades of experiences in fixed income analysis. He talks about how his role has evolved over the years, what makes a good sell-side analyst and the parallels between the research industry and journalism.

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To wrap up our series on financial bubbles, the Odd Lots podcast looks back at an early episode, focusing on one of the most iconic bubbles of the 20th century: Beanie Babies.

Two market bubbles stand out from the late 1990s. Technology stocks that were supposed to make everyone a zillionaire. The other: A series of mass-produced stuffed animals priced at $5 each. Odd Lots hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway speak with Zac Bissonnette, author of "The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute," to figure out exactly what made millions of people believe that these plush cuties were destined to soar in value. We dive into the psychology behind one of the weirdest speculative manias of all time and draw a connection with the dotcom bubble.

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There's a good chance that if you were a boy in the early 90s that you were a collector of baseball cards. For a few years, the baseball card industry went from being a niche collectible to a massive industry. It was, for a brief period, a legitimate bubble. On this week's Odd Lots podcast we talk to Dave Jamieson, the author of Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession. Among the topics we discussed include the role that pricing guides had in exacerbating the boom, the way that supply massively expanded to meet the raging demand, and how baseball cards have always been a gateway to various vices.

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The tulip bubble is the quintessential bubble. If you want to call something a bubble, just mutter something about tulips, and everybody will know what you're arguing. But what was the tulip bubble, really, and how did it form? To get a unique perspective on this historical episode, on this week's podcast we speak with Douglas French, an adherent of Austrian economics, and the author of a book on Tulip Mania. He argues that like many bubbles subsequently, this historical episode can be traced to bad monetary policy, which encouraged reckless speculation.

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During the 2008 financial crisis, Florida was an epicenter of the real estate meltdown. But for decades before that, the state has been characterized by booms and busts. In this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we spoke with Arva Moore Parks, a Florida historian and preservationist about the great Florida real estate bubble of the 1920s, or as she calls it "The Boom." Parks tells us about the role of the real estate visionary George Merrick, whose influence on Florida remains today, and we discussed what this bubble had in common with others seen throughout history.

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Markets are at their most exciting when they're in a bubble. Spectacular fortunes can be made and lost in the blink of an eye. So how do bubbles form and end? On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast we talk to Scott Nations, the president and chief investment officer of NationsShares, and the author of "A History of The United States in Five Crashes." We discuss with him various stock market crashes and bubbles in U.S history, and what they all have in common.

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