Episode 1: Tom Keene on Mathiness and His Favorite Guitar

Joe Weisenthal (0:04)

Hello, and welcome to the first episode of Odd Lots. I'm Joe Weisenthal, co-host of What You Miss and editor of Bloomberg Markets.

Tracy Alloway (0:11)

Now, I'm Tracy Alloway, executive editor of Bloomberg Markets.

Joe Weisenthal (0:15)

Here at Odd Lots, we want to have a discussion every week about economics, finance, markets, market structure, which Tracy loves, maybe some politics and culture thrown in, stuff that doesn't necessarily fit into the normal day-to-day conversation. We couldn't think of any guest better to have than Tom Keene.

Tom Keene (0:36)

Am I a guinea pig?

Joe Weisenthal (0:39)

You're the guinea pig.

Tom Keene, as everyone should know, is the host of Bloomberg Surveillance on TV and radio here at Bloomberg. He knows more about markets and economics and world events than just about anyone else in the room. He has a very eclectic background in music and mathematics. And I wanted to have Tom Keene on the show because Tom is always interviewing people, but he's never answering questions. He's never behind a microphone.

Tom Keene (1:06)

I try to avoid it like a plague, seriously. I'm not doing this for you, Joe. I'm doing this for Tracy.

Joe Weisenthal (1:12)

Everybody knows that.

But who are you, Tom? Why are you here? How did you get to be Tom Keene, who everybody knows and loves?

Tom Keene (1:21)

I get it a lot, and what I would suggest is it's one part short-term stuff, one part long-term stuff, and one part blind luck. The long-term thing is being acutely aware when I was a kid and ever more every day, knowing how twisted the early years were. I felt something like a bad Stan Freberg record.

And you don't know who Stan Freberg is. He was a great comedian. He just died this year. And then recently, it was about the privilege of running into Matt Winkler.

And basically, Matt and I were the support of Al Mayers, who runs Bloomberg Media, and Ted Fine, who runs TV. They're the ones that made all this happen.

Tracy Alloway (2:01)

Matt Winkler, for our listeners who don't know, is the guy who founded Bloomberg News, essentially. So you got lucky. You met Matt Winkler.

Tom Keene (2:09)

He just hired me because of the bow tie. But to make a long story short, you get lucky.

And I met Matt, and we basically invented what you see. That's a safe statement.

Joe Weisenthal (2:20)

What were you doing before then? Because when I think of you, I think you project this aura of someone who's been doing radio for decades. But what were you doing before you did radio and TV?

Tom Keene (2:31)

Well, before the media thing, I was in the investment business, but there's a whole sidecar thing in music and in entertainment.

For example, and I gauge it off my oldest child's age, I used to hold them in my arms and do the stock report in Boston. And this is the vanilla days, not cross asset. The Dow Jones Industrial Average up 42 points today, 842, blah, blah, blah, you know that. And so I did a little bit of investment stuff back then, but a lot of it was just the music business as well, which is the show biz aspect, which a lot of people in business media try to ignore every day and they're wrong. I mean, the FT is pink. It's pink for a reason, it's pink.

It's like what you did. I mean, you invented the modern headline in modern business journalism. So it's just, you know that Weisenthal wrote that headliner. You just know that.

Tracy Alloway (3:25)

How has your investment experience informed your career?

Tom Keene (3:28)

Oh, huge, oh, huge. It's a massive type two in that you learn so much enjoying losing money.

For those of you of Gaussian, it's log normal. You learn way more on the downside than the upside.

Tracy Alloway (3:43)

Lots of fat tail risk.

Tom Keene (3:44)

There's fat tail risk, but it's not that that's overemphasized. It's the joy of losing money within the fat tails, which is the way it played.

Joe Weisenthal (3:54)

I mean, I think that's probably counterintuitive to a lot of people.

Tom Keene (3:56)

You learn factors more losing money than making money.

Factors more. But I can tell you that the way I learned to lose money was enjoying losing money in the options market.

Joe Weisenthal (4:07)

And then, so when you're doing the show, whether on radio or TV, how do you apply that, the fact that you learned so much more when you lost money, when you think about structuring a show?

Tom Keene (4:17)