Odd Lots Bloomberg

Remember GameStop? The poster-child for 2021's memestock mania recently surged almost 5x in a matter of days — and it was all catalyzed by a few tweets from Keith Gill, aka "Roaring Kitty." So what's going on? How similar and how different was this move to what captivated the world's attention three years ago? On this episode of Lots More, we speak with Luke Kawa, markets editor at Sherwood Media, who was one of the first to chronicle the world of WallStreetBets and memestocks for Bloomberg News. He breaks down what we just saw and the lessons we can take away from it.
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The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have taken an invigorated approach to antitrust under the Biden administration, targeting companies for labor issues like non-competes, in addition to looking at more traditional measures of anti-competitive behavior, like higher pricing. But how does an economist examine the impact of monopoly practices on the overall economy, or take into account new and different measures of their effects? In this episode, we speak with Ioana Marinescu, principle economist at the DOJ's Antitrust Division, about how she analyzes these thorny issues and what she's learned from specific recent cases, like Activision/Overwatch League, or Penguin Random House’s attempted acquisition of Simon & Schuster.
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We’re taking The Big Take to Asia. Each week, Bloomberg’s Oanh Ha tells a story from the home of the world's most dynamic economies - and the markets, tycoons and businesses that drive the ever-shifting region. 
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Multi-strategy hedge funds are all the rage right now. But there's also a lot of confusion about what exactly they do, and how the the so-called "pod shops" differ from more traditional hedge funds. In this episode of the podcast, we speak with Giuseppe 'Gappy' Paleologo, a long-time veteran of the space. In addition to writing books about quantitative finance, Gappy was director of risk and quantitative analysis at Citadel and head of enterprise risk at Millennium, among many other jobs. He walks us through what multi-strat traders actually do all day, what makes for a good multi-strat candidate, and how to win in the pod shop game.
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Copper has long been touted as a big winner from the world's drive towards electrification. All those electric vehicles and new grids need lots of the metal to work. At the same time, since it takes years for new copper mining capacity to actually come on stream, many people expect a long-term shortage of the metal to materialize. But despite all that excitement, copper prices actually fell over the past few years. Now, copper bulls are getting another chance as the metal surges towards a new record. So why didn't the thesis play out before? And what does the mismatch between short-term prices and long-term supply actually mean for the world? In this episode, we speak to Jeff Currie, a long-time copper bull and commodities veteran who's now at Carlyle Group. We talk to him about why copper is his highest-conviction trade ever, plus the outlook for oil and big changes in petrodollars.
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Pierre Andurand made his name trading oil and other energy-related assets, but wild swings in the price of cocoa have recently lured the founder of Andurand Capital Management into a new market. He bet on cocoa earlier this year and saw the trade pay off as the price of the beans surged to a record $12,000 a ton. Prices have since fallen back to around $7,800, but Andurand sees scope for further upside as extreme deficits in the building blocks of chocolate loom. In this episode, we talk about how he entered the cocoa market, how he formed his investment thesis, and potential interest in other soft commodities, like coffee and orange juice. We also talk about copper, where a similar story of structural shortages is now playing out in prices.
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