Wall & Broadcast

Think you know what time it is? Right now? Even if you don’t, you probably assume the machines running our financial markets do, right?

Time in the markets is routinely measured in milliseconds or microseconds and transactions occur on the nanosecond scale.  Yet for all of this innovation and technology, the markets have a real problem when it comes to time. And this problem is costing the industry millions of dollars every single day.

Join Wall & Broadcast as we explore time and the markets. It’s turtles all the way down…

In July of 2012, Guy Gentile, a self-described business maven with day-trading operations in the Bahamas and the U.S., was arrested while sitting on the tarmac of White Plains Airport in Westchester NY. Guy was given an ultimatum…either help the US government catch Wall Street insiders who had gone bad, or spend his days in the Federal lockup awaiting charges of wire fraud. Come along with Wall & Broadcast as Guy tells his story of Wall Street white-collar crime, betrayal, and revenge…

If there’s one thing the election of President Donald J. Trump has taught us, it is to question everything we’ve historically assumed to be true. What if you had to guess someone’s political affiliation based solely on their stated views on market regulation? Do you think you’d be able to do it? We at Wall and Broadcast wanted to take a closer look at how people actually feel about regulating Wall Street, especially as the current administration champions a massive deregulatory wave. In our first episode of Season 2, we speak to market professionals, industry outsiders, lobbyists, a congressman on the House Financial Services Committee, and the Pulitzer prize winning author of Lords of Finance, and what we hear is often totally counterintuitive…

Social media is everywhere. Even if you wanted to, it seems you cannot escape its influence. This is just as true for the financial markets. Today’s investors and traders are looking for an edge, and the smart ones are turning to social media to gain that advantage. But it’s not in the way you might think.

In this week’s episode, we introduce you to two professionals who are looking at social media in a whole new way. These pioneers are trying to figure out how to leverage the intelligence within social media platforms to understand how the markets will react and move. The question is: Can platforms like Twitter and Facebook predict the markets?

Listen to Stocktwits co-founder & CEO Howard Lindzen opine about all things social and Estimize CEO Leigh Drogan discuss how high-flying institutions are looking to mine social media for insight. TABB Group analyst Valerie Bogard, who has been following Wall Street and social media for several years, places everything into its proper perspective.  

What is credit? Why does it exist? How do we decide who gets it? In episode 9 of the Wall & Broadcast we explore the evolution of the concept of credit and how we determine who is creditworthy. Many of us take advantage of credit every day without thinking twice – whether through the use of our American Express, Visa or CITGO cards, our mortgage or home equity loans. But what happens when, through no fault of our own, we do not have access to these financial tools?

There are millions of Americans either with no credit history or very little credit history who are unable to gain access to reasonably priced credit. Often called “No File” or “Thin File” applicants, these borrowers are relegated to the most expensive products with no recourse. And things get even more complicated for people with a long credit history who have been labeled subprime due to life circumstances that might be unavoidable. What is the industry doing to extend the credit lifeline to families on the edge? Is there any hope? Or are we destined to continue lumping everyone in either prime or sub-prime categories, with the ensuing financial implications going un-remedied?

Sometimes it’s hard to judge a person by what you read about them in the press. And with Patrick Byrne, the controversial CEO of Overstock.com, it’s especially hard, because he has a lot of haters. In episode 8 of the Wall & Broadcast, we try to cut through the noise and get to the heart of what drives Patrick Byrne. He’s on a quest to remake Wall Street. Why? Because he’s been burned by Wall Street in the past, and much like Charlie Shrem from Episodes 5 and 6 of our podcast, he believes in the power of the blockchain to solve what he sees as Wall Street’s problems. Join us to hear Patrick speak for himself so you can decide for yourself whether or not he’s just crazy.

To some in the business world and on Wall Street, the growing expectation that one must pair “doing good” with “doing business” – described by terms like “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) and “environmental social and corporate governance” (ESG) – feels like being told to eat more fiber. A firm’s leaders may genuinely care about social and environmental issues. They may be actively involved in philanthropic projects to address environmental and social problems. They may even acknowledge that it will enhance their brands’ reputations – “We should probably have somebody in charge of that; people care about that stuff these days.” But as a core strategy for making money? Many CEOs believe you’re naïve if you think your attention to environmental and social issues will make you money – these strategies are a money suck; they smack of inefficiency, foolish idealism, and ultra-left-wing, anti-profit-seeking, bad-for-the-economy thinking. Even Hillary Clinton told environmental activists to “get a life” in an email leaked by WikiLeaks. The question is: Can you really make money and do good at the same time? We attempt to find out in episode 7 of the Wall & Broadcast.

This is the 2nd part of a two-part episode on Charlie Shrem, America’s first Bitcoin superstar.  When we left Charlie at the end of Episode 1, he was just being confronted by joint FBI, DEA, IRS task force at JFK Airport in New York.  Upon his arrival, he is arrested and detained by the federal authorities.  Tune into the second part of this two-part episode to find out what happened to Charlie. Why was he detained?  On what charges? We follow Charlie through the shock of these events and discover how his experiences changed him and his relationship to the world of Bitcoin and blockchain. We conclude the episode with a conversation with Ned Scott, the Co-founder and CEO of Steemit, an exciting new blockchain project that Charlie is involved in.

There was a time; not so long ago, that Bitcoin was just an obscure little diversion for the hardest of the hard-core crypto geeks existing on the fringes of the internet.  Out of those recesses rose a quiet young yeshiva student from Brooklyn who would seize upon a unique opportunity, using his own personal experiences and his love of computers to create one of the first successful retail Bitcoin enterprises.  His name was Charlie Shrem, and by the time he was 21 years old he was a Bitcoin titan.  His startup, BitInstant, allowed ordinary people to easily purchase bitcoins from retailers like 7-11 or Walmart. Within months of starting BitInstant, Charlie was traveling and speaking all over the world about Bitcoin and gaining a reputation as a Bitcoin superstar.  But what goes up can also come down.  Listen to episode 5 of Wall & Broadcast to learn more about how Charlie rose to prominence and ultimately found himself confronted and detained by federal authorities at JFK Airport.       

If you’re anything like us here at Wall & Broadcast, you love movies about Wall Street.  Whether it’s the sheer outright hilarity of Trading Places, the brutal ruthlessness of Margin Call, the gritty day to day grind of Boiler Room, or the mixture of greed, wealth and power of The Wolf of Wall Street, we can’t seem to get enough of what Hollywood is saying about our industry.  But is Hollywood getting it right?  Strap in for another episode of Wall & Broadcast where we try to find out if the entertainment industry’s portrayal of our industry is accurate.  We speak to an actual frozen concentrated orange juice futures trader from the 80’s, a former Wall Street secretary from Staten Island, Downtown Josh Brown of CNBC fame who worked in a couple of ‘boiler rooms’ himself, and actors Rudy Eisenzopf from the Big Short and Alessandro Nivola from the upcoming Wizard of Lies to get some answers.