#86 Rasa Karapandza (EBS University) - Empirical Asset Pricing, Machine Learning, Payment For Order Flow, Cryptocurrencies

The Wall Street Lab

Rasa Karapandza is a Professor of Finance, Vice Dean of Education, and the Academic Director of the Master in Finance Program at EBS Business School in Germany. He is also a visiting Professor at New York University. He was previously also visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. Additionally, Rasa is a Member of the board of directors and member of the audit committee of RS2, a payment processing company. The general focus of Rasa's research is investments, empirical asset pricing, and portfolio management. He advised members of the US congress on the topics of regulating cryptocurrencies Rasa received his PhD in Economics and Finance from Graduate School of Economics Barcelona (summa cum laude). He holds a Masters degree in Economics and Finance from University Pompeu Fabra and a Bachelors degree in Astrophysics from the University of Belgrade. In this episode we cover a lot of ground. We get into Rasa's research about empirical asset pricing aka trying to predict future asset prices. We talk about how he utilises machine learning and language processing methods to extract sentiment from public news sources. We then speak about the controversial topics of High Frequency Trading and Payment for order flow. We cover cryptocurrencies and Rasa debunks some myths about blockchain. Rasa shares insights into his past and encouragements he wants to give to students.