About this episode
In this special edition episode of FireSide, the Investment Research team hosts their own version of the Big Dance to assess what they believe In this special edition episode of FireSide, the Investment Research team hosts their own version of the Big Dance to assess what they believe will be the most impactful market event over the next three months. Each research team member—Lara Rhame, Chief U.S. Economist, Rob Hoffman, Managing Director and Andrew Korz, Director—completed a bracket comprised of 16 possible scenarios that could positively or negatively impact markets in Q2, competing bracket-style down to their number one pick. Join Kara O’Halloran as she conducts her courtside interviews and shares who is crowned most accurate predictor, based on a survey of their fellow FS Investments colleagues.
To follow along, you can check out the brackets below:
Transcript excerpt:
Kara O’Halloran (00:02):
We’re very excited to bring you this special edition of The Fireside Podcast. It is our Market Madness tournament. If you want to follow along with our brackets, which were all based on a survey of FS employees, you can find them all on the Fireside tab of fsinvestments.com. I hope you enjoy. Welcome back to Fireside, a podcast from FS Investments. My name’s Kara O’Halloran, and I am here with my whole team for our inaugural Market Madness tournament. So in the room with me is Rob Hoffman, the head of our research team. We have Andrew Korz, another director on the team, and Lara Rhame, our chief U.S. economist. Hi, everyone.
Kara O’Halloran (00:43):
All right. So I want to just set the stage about how this is going to work. So I have created a bracket with 16 things that could impact markets over the next three months. This is going to work exactly like a basketball bracket. We’re going to start in the Sweet 16 round, though. There are four regions, there are four seeds in each region, and we’re going to go through head-to-head matchups in a bracket style competition, until we narrow it down to the one thing that we think is going to impact markets the most over the next three months.
Lara Rhame (01:10):
Kara, I just want to say that I am so happy that your love and passion for college basketball was able to intersect with your incredible podcasting skills, and your passion for the markets. This is a perfect storm for you.
Kara O’Halloran (01:24):
It’s a dream come true.
Lara Rhame (01:25):
This is your dream come true.
Kara O’Halloran (01:25):
I’ve had a lot of fun with this. And I know a podcast is an audio medium, but I need to let everybody know that Andrew and I are sitting here in the room in Villanova jerseys, so those are where our true loyalties lie. All right. So the winner of each round that we’ll go through, and therefore, the factor that is moving on to the next round, was determined by a survey that we took of FS employees. So once we’ve walked through it, all the full survey results will determine what our correct or official bracket is.
