Odd Lots

Anjney Midha wrote the first check to Anthropic. He teaches a viral course at Stanford on how AI works. And he was, until recently, a partner at a16z. In other words, he is AI-industry royalty. Midha's new project is AMP PBC, a company that believes it can radically lower the price of compute. To ...

The hay market is not a transparent market: It is very fractured by types of hay, whether it is alfalfa or clover hay. There are a few opaque, illiquid markets like this — scrap metal for instance — that require some hands-on investigating to figure out. Aiden Johnson is co-founder and CEO of the HayWire newsletter, which aims to make the hay market more transparent: He and co-founder Cole Glasgow use an AI model to min...

In April, the price of tomatoes was around $2.69 per pound — the highest seen in some four decades. And tomatoes aren't the only food getting more expensive. From cauliflower to lettuce, fresh produce is spiking all over the place. So what's driving the price spike? And what can tomatoes teach us teach about America's political economy including changes in trade and tariffs? Our guest today is...

When we last spoke to Brannin McBee, the co-founder and chief development officer of cloud company CoreWeave, his business was not yet public and sourcing GPUs was a key constraint on growth. But three years later, things look pretty different. CoreWeave IPOed and has been raising money in the bon...

Prediction markets that enable you to bet on pretty much everything are everywhere nowadays. But there's still a big question over whether they can expand to include larger institutional investors like hedge funds. Part of the problem is that a lot of prediction market contracts are illiquid and trading volumes can sometimes be shallow. That's where trading firm Susquehanna International Group comes in. In this episode, recorded li...

Today’s episode, which was recorded at our recent live show at New York’s City Winery, follows up on a conversation we had with Iain Dunning, head of AI at Hudson River Trading. Last year, we talked about how his firm uses AI. Now, some seven months later, we follow up on how one of the biggest market makers around is deploying this technology. We talk about the price of memory, bottlenec...

There's a lot of debate about the future of AI — not just whether it will produce the returns investors are expecting, but also if AI will lead to mass worker displacement. Big banks are the perfect prism through which to explore some of these questions. Not only are they deploying AI very quickly, but they have a wide range of workers who are using the technology, from back-office employees to junior analysts to the most sen...

We talk about the commodity supply chain all the time. We talk about the ports and the trucks and the ships and all of that. But there's another dimension to moving commodities all around the world, which is actually paying for it. Who funds the oil tanker and what happens when that tanker is, say, stuck in the Strait of Hormuz? Commodity finance underpins production, transportation and storage of a wide variety of the things that ...

Rope is easy to take for granted. It seems obvious and straightforward. But of course, it had to be invented. Early humans discovered that by twisting fibers around each other, the resulting structure would be something durable and strong. Without rope, all kinds of things aren't possible, from li...

There's been a massive selloff in the bond market and rates are rising all around the world. Japan, Korea, the UK... You name it. Gita Gopinath, Harvard economics professor and the former first deputy managing director of the IMF, has long warned that bond markets are "in a fragile place." She see...

We love talking about money. And of course, we love talking about the dollar, in all its varieties — from bank deposits to eurodollars to stablecoins. But what fundamentally is a dollar and who actually controls it? To understand these questions, you need to understand how the dollar was born. Journalist (and current Ph.D. candidate in financial history) Brendan Greeley argues not only that the dollar is older than you might ...

As our listeners know, restaurants are great microcosms for macro-economic trends. They sit at the intersection of everything from consumer confidence to commodity costs to the labor market. So on our recent visit to London, we wanted to learn about the business of pubs. According to the British B...

Not many people think of designing buildings as an exercise in economics, but the entire process is defined by constraints around resources (both physical and financial), and an iconic building can also have a huge impact on the wealth and development of the area around it. So how do you encourage private developers to consider the public good when designing new projects? And how are some countries able to encourage more landmark b...

A short seller is a gumshoe who roots out a particular story about a specific company and brings it to light. And Fahmi Quadir, the founder and CIO of Safkhet Capital, has been labeled "The Assassin" for being one of the most famous, successfully betting against companies like Wirecard and Valeant. In today's conversation with Quadir, recorded at our live show in London at Wilton's Music Hall, she d...

Size is the name of the game for the AI chipmaker Cerebras: Their chips are truly massive, about the size of a dinner plate. According to Andrew Feldman, CEO and founder of Cerebras, that is about 58 times larger than the average chip. That sheer size enables blazing fast inference for AI queries. Feldman joins us on the week of his company's IPO to talk about his core product and how it fits into t...

It is hard to have a markets conversation that isn't out of date within a minute or two. But we think this one, with Ozan Tarman and Aditya Singhal of Deutsche Bank, is basically evergreen. This conversation, recorded at our live show at Wilton's Music Hall in London, is all about fundamentals: How Tarman, DB's vice chair of global macro, and Singhal, the firm’s head of EM trading across rates...

Whether it's the price of a barrel of Brent crude or a pound of beef, it's clear prices are skyrocketing for all kinds of goods and commodities. Price shocks and shortages are, if anything, the way consumers understand the economy right now — at the grocery store or at the gas pump. Certainl...

The internet is made for shopping. For years, the main inputs for e-commerce transactions involved targeted ads, algorithmic recommendations, SEO, and lots of mindless scrolling. But agentic commerce might represent a sea change for e-commerce: With the rise of AI agents doing shopping on behalf of consumers, how are retailers going to adapt? John Collison, co-founder of the financial services and payment processing company Stripe,...

Making a long career as a bear at a sell-side institution is tough. Generally financial markets have done quite well which means forecasting doom and gloom is, usually, only tenable for so long. Which is why we wanted to talk to one of the most successful bears out there. Société Générale has let Albert Edwards out of the bear cage for today's episode. Edwards knows his reputation as a bear is well ...