Odd Lots: An MIT Professor Explains His Original Theory for How Markets Really Work

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Every week, hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway take you on a not-so-random walk through hot topics in markets, finance and economics.

There are two popular schools of thought when it comes to how markets work. There's the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) which says that it's basically impossible to beat the market, because all information is completely priced in at all times (more or less). On the other side is an increasingly popular behavioral view which argues that various human emotions and biases are always creating situations that aren't justified by the data.

On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak to Andrew Lo, a professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management about his own theory, which he calls Adaptive Markets. The theory attempts to bridge the behavioral approach with the efficient markets view. He argues that the proper way to view the market is through an ecological lens, examining the players as flora and fauna of a complicated system, to help determine who's thriving, who's dying, and where asset prices will go.
 

https://megaphone.link/BLM7404789125

To contact the authors of this story: Tracy Alloway in Abu Dhabi at talloway@bloomberg.net, Joe Weisenthal in New York at jweisenthal@bloomberg.net.

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