SmarterMarkets™

Commodity legend Mark Fisher shares some choice stories, including how the Hudson River can be used as a risk management tool to cure over-trading, then goes on to reflect on how the design of commodities futures markets could be improved.

NEO Stock exchange founder Jos Schmitt explains why most existing stock exchanges give an unfair trading advantage to some customers over others, and explains why he launched a new exchange specifically designed to level the playing field for all investors.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Singapore Frank Lavin weighs in on Singapore’s suitability as the emergent Asian Financial Capital City and Singaporean regulators’ willingness to consider new and innovative approaches to designing smarter financial markets.

Logica Funds’ Mike Green explains why he and most of the smartest people in finance are in the business of exploiting and profiting from deficiencies of current markets, rather than fixing them. Mike explains why incentives don’t favor fixing what’s broken, and what we need to do to change the system and enable migration to a new generation of Smarter Markets.  

Charlie McGarraugh is Chief Strategy Officer for Blockchain.com, the largest self-custodied crypto wallet provider globally.  Previously he was a Goldman Sachs Partner and former head of metals trading, so his native language is finance. In this interview, Charlie explains Tokenization in terms that Finance professionals can relate to, then goes on to explain what this change will mean both to financial markets and to the people who work in them.

Abaxx co-founder Thom McMahon weighs in on the company’s activities to actually design and build the fully tokenized commodity trading system envisioned by Robert Friedland, Maryam Ayati and Jeffrey Currie in our first three episodes. Thom also explains why a physical delivery LNG contract is essential to the green energy revolution, and how Abaxx Exchange is designing that contract right now to establish Singapore as the global benchmark market for LNG price discovery.

Goldman Sachs commodities chief Jeff Currie weighs in on the next commodity cycle, the return of inflation, and why it’s essential for the marketplace to figure out how to put a price on carbon in order to enable the realization of ESG objectives. Jeff goes on to describe tokenization of commodity futures warehouse receipts as the best use case he’s heard for distributed ledger (aka “Blockchain Technology”).

Energy industry veteran and NEO co-founder and CEO Maryam Ayati reacts to Robert Friedland's vision of grading and trading commodities based on ESG aspects of how they're produced, and expands on Robert's ideas to explain how the entire commodity supply chain could be tokenized using distributed ledger technology, and how commodities could literally be traced to their source using new "watermark" technology that applies molecular-level digital fingerprints to almost any  commodity.

Billionaire Canadian financier Robert Friedland headlines the inaugural episode, and shares a vision of commodities being graded based on how responsibly they were produced with regard to ESG priorities, thus allowing free market price discovery to determine a market premium to reward responsible producers of metals and other commodities which have historically had an adverse environmental impact. Robert goes on to share his vision for how a distributed ledger (blockchain) could be used to hold commodity producers to account and assure buyers of commodities that they've received the full and true details of how those commodities were produced.

In this new podcast series, I'll be talking to leaders in both business and in finance. We'll discuss the shortcomings of financial markets as they're currently designed and talk about what could be done to make markets smarter than they are today.