Essential Listening: Accurate Forecasters

One of the challenges of recommending podcasts is distinguishing between regularly scheduled podcasts, with standing hosts that tackle timely issues, and those podcasts that stand alone on their own. In my daily linkfests, I don’t link to blogs, per se. I link to blog posts.

The same thing here: The podcasts below all stand on their own and don’t require the listener to fast forward to the good stuff.

That being said, the episode of Slate Money mentioned below focuses on a single topic with a single guest. Episodes like these provide a window on the tone and tenor of a panel-type podcast — the listener can decide whether to get a steady stream of that podcast later by hitting the subscribe button.

If you have already checked out last week’s edition of Essential Listening, let’s move on to some new podcasts I think are worth listening to this week (or any other):

• Barry Ritholtz of Ritholtz Wealth Management talks with legendary money manager Mario Gabelli, CFA, of Gabelli Asset Management. In this episode, they discuss Gabelli’s long career and how value investing has changed over the past decades. (The Big Picture)

• James Osborne of Bason Asset Management talks with Jason Zweig, author of the newly published The Devil’s Financial Dictionary and columnist at the Wall Street Journal. In this episode, they discuss how our brains work against us when investing and how thrift in our society became passé. (Fireside Markets)

• Michael Martin talks with Aaron Brown, risk manager at AQR Management and the author of the newly published Financial Risk Management for Dummies. In this episode, they discuss the challenge of explaining the technical topic of risk management for a general audience. (MartinKronicle)

• Julia Galef talks with Philip Tetlock at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the newly published Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. In this episode, they discuss what traits accurate forecasters share and whether forecasting skills are domain independent. (Rationally Speaking)

• Cardiff Garcia of FT Alphaville talks with the most recent Nobel prize winner in Economics, Angus Deaton of Princeton University. In this episode they discuss the tensions between theory and practice in economics and how foreign aid in practice doesn’t currently work. (FT Alphaville)

• Russ Roberts talks with Cesar Hidalgo of MIT and author of Why Information Grows. In this episode, they discuss how information grows in a modern economy and how networks play a key role. (EconTalk)

• Ben Thompson and James Allworth talk about how the rise of ERP systems have changed how companies are able to use data. In this episode, they discuss how smart data utilization can help make an average company good but cannot transform a good company into a great one like Apple. (Exponent)

• Felix Salmon and the Slate Money panel talk with Mehrsa Baradaran, author of How the Other Half Banks. In this episode, they discuss how there is a huge swath of American society that is underbanked and why there is a simple solution out there and it includes (yes) the US Postal Service. (Slate)

To help the discovery process along, please feel free to leave a comment with some undiscovered podcasts that others might enjoy. I might even highlight your suggestion in this next edition of this podcast roundup.

You can read more from Tadas Viskanta on his blog Abnormal Returns or follow him on Twitter @abnormalreturns.

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All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the author’s employer.

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