Odd Lots

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Latest Episodes:

The Big Trade Underneath the Strangely Calm Surface of the S&P 500 Jun 17, 2024

Show notes

For much of this year, the S&P 500 has marched steadily higher while measures of stock market volatility, like the VIX, have stayed pretty low. But looking at the headline index only tells you part of the story. Beneath the surface of the S&P 500, individual stocks have been moving up and down a lot. And of course, traders have figured out a way to make money on the difference between the quiet overall index and all that volatility happening in individual stocks. This is the dispersion trade that's gotten quite a bit of attention in recent months. But figuring out exactly who's doing it and how pervasive it is isn't that easy. In this episode, we speak with Michael Purves, CEO and founder of Tallbacken Capital Advisors, and Josh Silva, managing partner and CIO at Passaic Partners, about this new volatility trade and what it means for the overall stock market.

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What a 'Degen' Crypto Trader Really Does All Day Jun 14, 2024

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A few lucky people have made generational wealth trading the ups and downs of the crypto market. And some finance professionals have shifted gears to focus primarily on the space. But what is it like to actually trade these coins day-to-day? How do people pick which ones to buy? How do they analyze the coins themselves? How do they get reliable information? And what is it like, emotionally, to trade such an infamously volatile asset? On this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak with Julian Malinak. In his day job, Julian works in healthcare tech. But the rest of the time, he's looking on message boards for the next 100-bagger. At one point he had made enough to retire on. And then it all went poof. But he keeps grinding and trying to improve his craft. Julian — who we found on the Odd Lots Discord server — explains what he does all day, and how the market really works from a trading perspective.

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How Indonesia and China Cornered the Nickel Market Jun 13, 2024

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There's been a huge change in the market for nickel, which goes into everything from electric vehicles to steel. Indonesia has grown to absolutely dominate production and now provides more than 55% of the world's supply. A lot of that is going to China, which has partnered with Indonesia to help grow its nickel industry at a phenomenal rate. Now, there are accusations that low-grade and low-priced Indonesian nickel is flooding the global market, to the detriment of other producers. Western miners like BHP and Anglo American have been shuttering their own nickel operations, and have written them down by billions of dollars in recent years. On this episode, we speak with Michael Widmer, head of metals research at Bank of America, about the sea change that's taken place in the world's nickel market and what it says about the green energy transition, as well as the scramble for other strategically important metals. We also talk about all those bullish calls on copper, and general volatility in the metals space.

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Elon Musk Dominates Outer Space Like Nobody Has Before Jun 12, 2024

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The company that Elon Musk is most known for, obviously, is Tesla. It's been extraordinarily successful and made him one of the richest people in the world. But his true love may be SpaceX, the rocket company whose technology may one day be used in getting humans to Mars. But even if interplanetary trips are a long way off, there's no historical precedent for the sheer scale of the outer space dominance that Elon Musk has built out. Between his rockets and his satellite-based internet company Starlink, no one individual has ever completely dominated outer space this way. So where are these businesses going and how do they fit into the Elon empire? On this episode, we speak to three of our Bloomberg colleagues who have covered Musk and his businesses. First, we talk about the history and science of rockets with Bloomberg News reporter Ashlee Vance, the author of the book, When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach. Then we speak with Dana Hull and Max Chafkin, two of the hosts of Bloomberg's Elon Inc. podcast, about Musk's broader constellation of companies and how they all fit together.

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This Is How the Food Industry Is Preparing For a Post-Ozempic World Jun 10, 2024

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The rise of GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic, is a potentially existential threat to the makers of salty, sugary, high-calorie snack foods. But it's obvious that the gigantic food industry will search out ways to adapt. So what types of new products will they sell? How will they be flavored? How will they be packaged and marketed? On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Barb Stuckey. She is the chief innovation and marketing officer at Mattson, a San Francisco Bay Area company that helps food producers find the next big flavor. Her team recently undertook a big study of Ozempic users to get a better understanding of how it changed their diets. She speaks to us about what they learned, what new types of products are in development, and how food manufacturers find the next big thing.

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Lots More with Kyla Scanlon on the Economic Vibes Jun 07, 2024

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Kyla Scanlon has a great way of identifying the economic vibes, building up a massive TikTok following with videos about the Federal Reserve, inflation, markets, and more. She also coined the viral term 'vibecession' to describe the mood of many Americans who haven't been feeling the economic growth shown in official figures. In this episode of Lots More, we catch up with the Bloomberg Opinion contributor on what the vibes are right now, what resonates on social media when it comes to economic coverage, and her new book, In This Economy? How Money and Markets Really Work.

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Orsted's Americas CEO on Fixing What Went Wrong in Wind Power Jun 06, 2024

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Last year was a bad one for the US wind power industry, with lots of cancelled projects, writedowns, and an overall reassessment of how the math behind these mega projects might shake out in an era of higher interest rates and supply chain disruptions. But despite all of that, renewable power from wind is still a big part of America's plans to transition towards cleaner energy, with billions of government dollars earmarked to help build out capacity. So what went wrong last year and how is the industry looking now? On this episode, we speak with David Hardy, CEO of the Americas for Orsted, one of the biggest players in wind power. He talks about recent challenges, the potential implications of another Trump presidency, as well as when we might see subsidy-free onshore wind projects in the US.

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Corporations Learned The Maximum Amount They Can Charge For a Product Jun 03, 2024

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What's the price of a hamburger? Well, it depends. Are you making the purchase on the spot? Did you order ahead using an app? Are you a frequent customer of the burger chain? With inflation having surged at the fastest rate in roughly four decades, there's suddenly a lot more interest in how companies figure out the most that they can charge you for a given purchase at that moment in time. As it turns out, much of the economy is becoming like the airline industry, where there is no one price for a good, but rather a complex range of factors that go into what you're willing to pay. Thanks to algorithms, apps, personalized data, and a bevy of ancillary revenues, companies are increasingly learning how to not leave any pennies on the table. So how did this come about? What exactly is happening? And when did everything become gamified? On this episode we speak with Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, and David Dayen, the executive editor of The American Prospect. The two of them have put together a special episode of the magazine that's all about the world of pricing strategies, the tools companies use, and the industries that exist to help companies figure out what they can charge. We discuss what they learned and the impact this is having on the economy.

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Lots More on the Two Troubled NYC Office Buildings Everyone's Talking About May 31, 2024

Show notes

Over the past two weeks, two New York City office buildings have become major talking points in the market for commercial real estate. Troubles at 1740 Broadway led to the first loss in the AAA-rated tranche of a commercial mortgage bond since the financial crisis. Meanwhile, issues at 1440 Broadway recently propelled the serious delinquency rate for office loans to its highest level since early 2007. So what do these two properties tell us about the outlook for commercial real estate, and how these deals work? On this episode of Lots More, we bring back Hiten Samtani, founder of ten31 Media, to talk about the future of these buildings, as well as their storied history.

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The Big Problem With the Modern Electricity Grid May 30, 2024

Show notes

The modern electricity grid is a weird thing. The delivery of electricity is a natural monopoly, for kind of obvious reasons. Despite that, we still attempt to shoehorn market-based mechanisms into the system. Many utilities are shareholder-owned, yet heavily regulated. In many markets around the country, producers of natural gas, wind, coal, nuclear, solar and so on, compete to sell their electricity into the grid. Now that we're looking for ways to decarbonize the grid, we're running headlong into complications and perverse outcomes of what we've built. On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Matt Huber, a professor at Syracuse University, and Fred Stafford, a pseudonymous writer who talks about energy markets, grid history, and nuclear power. We talk to them about how we got the current grid, and why nuclear energy in particular is squeezed out of existing markets.

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