Capitalists Love This Podcast. So Do Their Critics.
“Odd Lots” goes deep on lentils in Saskatchewan, the global tractor supply and trucking markets. Is it the skeleton key to understanding this strange economic moment?
On a recent Thursday evening at Racket NYC, a music venue in Chelsea that typically features the high-decibel likes of Faster Pussycat and King Lil G, the mostly male, mostly younger standing-room-only crowd was wearing a lot of button-down shirts. It had come for an evening of economic and markets talk.
The Bloomberg podcast “Odd Lots”— hosted by the journalists Joe Weisenthal, 44, and Tracy Alloway, 41 — was putting on a live event. The first guest to go onstage was Charlie McElligott, an exuberantly bearded managing director of cross-asset macro strategy at the Japanese investment bank Nomura. Despite the global chaos of tariffs, war and technological and political disruption, Mr. Weisenthal noted, stocks were at an all-time high.
Mr. McElligott rattled off a sophisticated analysis of the state of the market using lots of Wall Street-isms. (“With the amount of short-dated volatility selling, when dealers are stuffed on gamma, it compresses the distribution of outcomes.”) The audience listened raptly. Many people there were finance professionals, but even those who weren’t could feel that they had received a sophisticated analysis. Part of the appeal of “Odd Lots” is a privileged sense of eavesdropping while insiders talk to one another without dumbing anything down.
