The Odd Lots Preview

Joe Weisenthal (0:04)

Hello, and welcome to Odd Lots, a new podcast from Bloomberg. I'm Joseph Weisenthal, co-host of What You Miss on Bloomberg TV and an editor at Bloomberg Markets. I'm here with my colleague, Tracy Alloway.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

Hi there, I'm executive editor of Bloomberg Markets, and I'm really excited to be here for our new podcast, Odd Lots. For those of you who don't know, an odd lot is a small bundle of stocks or bonds. It's relatively unusual. People usually pay a premium to trade it. This is free. You're not paying a premium, but we're going to be discussing some interesting ideas.

Joe Weisenthal (0:37)

And so they don't normally fit within the normal trading patterns of the day. Is that the idea?

Tracy Alloway (0:42)

Exactly. We're doing something a little bit different here.

Joe Weisenthal (0:44)

And how does it fit with, you and I, we do stuff on the web all day. We blog and tweet and send out charts. And how do you see what we're doing fitting with that?

Tracy Alloway (0:55)

We get a 360 degree view of markets. We cover stocks, credit, bonds, commodities, you name it, we're covering it. This is our chance, I think, and you'll have to tell me what you think about it, to really get into some of those themes that we're seeing and discuss them in a bit more detail.

Joe Weisenthal (1:10)

Right. We're going to be talking about finance, market, economics, market structure.

Tracy Alloway (1:15)

Geopolitics and everything that we kind of want to talk about. We can think of odd lots as the overflow area for all the interesting financial and market stuff that we see.

Joe Weisenthal (1:25)

I wanted to have longer conversations with people. You always want more time. And so for our first episode, we're going to be talking with Tom Keen, the legendary host here at Bloomberg, of Bloomberg Surveillance on TV and radio. Hello, Tom.

Tom Keene (1:40)

Good to be here.

Joe Weisenthal (1:40)

Why do you like podcasts? And you talked about why you like them. You think it's a good format. What appeals to them?

Tom Keene (1:46)

Yeah, it's really important. We learned a lot years ago with iTunes, with doing podcasts. The number one thing we know is what we don't know about video.

There's a huge mystery to how video is going to be consumed. There's no mystery about audio. Audio gets consumed. That's the number one thing about podcasts.

Joe Weisenthal (2:05)

So people will listen.

Tom Keene (2:06)

We know from all sorts of research, audio wins over video. Every day, that may change. People have been predicting it would change for years.

But so far, podcasts win.

Joe Weisenthal (2:18)

For the first episode, you'll be able to listen to us talk about Tom Kean and his extraordinary and unusual background, as well as the economy, the big issues, and particularly how mathematics and music relate to the markets.

All right, well, I can't wait to have this conversation. And I hope everybody out there is looking forward to it. And hopefully, enjoy the first episode. And you should subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, and follow me and Tracy on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and at the stalwart, we will definitely tweet out the link to each episode. So, thank you for listening, and you'll hear from us soon.