Free-quent Flyer
Blogger
I listen to a lot of podcasts, which makes me acutely aware of the fundamental problem with the podcast ecosystem: there are way too many, way too bad podcasts.
Fortunately for you, I'm here to help.
This is my completely subjective ranking of finance and investing podcasts, based exclusively on the entertainment and education value of the average episode.
There is virtually no actionable information here, so don't use these podcasts to guide your day trading or anything else. On the other hand, there's a lot of information about how market participants think about things, so if you're a market participant you could conceivably find it useful to see how other, perhaps more experienced counterparties are thinking about the same things you're thinking about. But I basically just listen to these podcasts to amuse me while I walk around manufacturing spend.
Without further ado, here are the 8 most entertaining finance and investing podcasts (that I've listened to), ranked:
Fortunately for you, I'm here to help.
This is my completely subjective ranking of finance and investing podcasts, based exclusively on the entertainment and education value of the average episode.
There is virtually no actionable information here, so don't use these podcasts to guide your day trading or anything else. On the other hand, there's a lot of information about how market participants think about things, so if you're a market participant you could conceivably find it useful to see how other, perhaps more experienced counterparties are thinking about the same things you're thinking about. But I basically just listen to these podcasts to amuse me while I walk around manufacturing spend.
Without further ado, here are the 8 most entertaining finance and investing podcasts (that I've listened to), ranked:
- The Meb Faber Show. The competition for the top spot is fierce, but The Meb Faber Show earns a slight edge due to its focus on markets and investing. Now, Meb Faber himself appears to me to be something of a crackpot obsessed with the idea of momentum investing, trend following, etc., so don't actually take any of his advice, but he's eloquent and entertaining and has a righteous Southern California accent. This is a show I make sure to listen to every single episode of, and am never disappointed.
- Masters in Business. This was my favorite business podcast for a while (I wrote a light-hearted review of it here), and it's still very good, although it's slipped from the top spot just because Ritholtz seems to be running low on guests and has started casting a bit farther afield. There have recently been quite a few episodes interviewing "business leaders" rather than finance professionals per se, which is fine, just a bit of style drift I don't love.
- Investing Insight from Morningstar.com. This is an end-of-week podcast I've recently started listening to and have been enjoying, despite or maybe because of its fairly aggressive branding. Morningstar, as you may know, is a mutual fund rating company, so all the podcast segments have some kind of Morningstar branding, presumably to encourage you to partake in Morningstar's other products. But you can also just ignore the Morningstar branding and enjoy their fairly high-level discussions of mutual funds, ETF's, management, and fees.
- Slate Money. I really, really hate this podcast, but invariably listen each week. The British host, Felix Salmon, is an unbearable ignoramus, Slate's Moneybox columnist Jordan Weissmann is a neoliberal stooge, and the third panelist Cathy O'Neil is a leftist authoritarian. It's mostly a business and finance weekly review show with ignorant commentary from the panelists.
- Invest Like the Best. This podcast is quite good and would be ranked higher, perhaps 3rd, except the host Patrick O'Shaughnessy strays very, very far from his remit and interviews all sorts of nobodies. A typical guest: "Shane Parrish, who created the extremely popular Farnam Street—a website dedicated to understanding the world by mastering the best of what others have already figured out." Huh. Who cares?
- We Study Billionaires - The Investors Podcast. This is another hit-or-miss show, but fortunately they indicate in the title of each episode whether it's about investing (which can be fairly entertaining) or about business. I avoid the business episodes and listen to the investing episodes, since they have some very, very entertaining guests (pro tip: listen to every episode with goldbug Jim Rickards, who is terrifically amusing on every level).
- MoneyLife with Chuck Jaffe. Now we're getting down into the shows you really only listen to if you've reached the end of the day and have run out of shows you actually want to listen to. This is an hour-long daily show, with some interesting guests from all across the financial industry. The problem? The sound effects. It's basically an audio-only version of Jim Cramer's Mad Money. Of the 60-minute runtime I would guess that 30 or 35 minutes are intros, extros, and sound effects. If he cut those and just had a 30-minute interview show this podcast would rank much, much higher. But that's not the world we live in. Listen at your own peril, and with your finger on the skip-forward button.
- Trend Following with Michael Covel. The bottom of the barrel. This is a late-middle-aged adult male in 2017 who believes the key problem — the real problem — facing America is that the free exchange of goods and services for money is being obstructed by a government that just doesn't understand the state needs to get out of the way and let business work its magic. The only reason I've included it here is that Michael Covel is a phenomenally wealthy businessman and this podcast is, to all appearances, a passion project of his, which makes it educational, although not entertaining, to learn about his fantastical enthusiasms for Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and the other icons of right-wing ideology, policy and, most importantly, disaster.
