On the Thursday, January 24 edition of Bloomberg Baystate Business we spoke with Bloomberg Intelligence gaming and lodging analyst Brian Egger about MGM-Springfield, the latest on the Wynn saga, and sports betting. Rob Almeida of MFS stopped by to talk about the markets. Bloomberg News endowments reporter Michael McDonald joined us to talk about his story on Baupost Group’s Seth Klarman, who sees opportunity in the markets. Boston Business Journal real estate editor Catherine Carlock talked about the commercial real estate market in Boston. Finally, MIT’s Andrew Lo talked about technology, finance and investing. Hosts: Peter Barnes, Janet Wu and Pat Carroll. Producer: Dan Pierce.

A new generation of philanthropists, whose wealth was created via entrepreneurship in technology-driven fields, has the unique opportunity to make a real difference in speeding the pace of progress in the fight against cancer. Not content with having hospital pavilions named for them or with giving large, open-ended gifts for academic research, they want to use their wealth to have a direct and visible impact on patients’ health. Research we have conducted has revealed a variety of new, highly impactful investment approaches that can help accelerate the pace of the development, approval, and commercialization of new cancer therapies. By embracing these new approaches this new generation of philanthropists has the opportunity to truly help cure cancer.

People tend to fear the wrong things when it comes to indexing and exchange-traded funds. Take the recent hand-wringing over an Index Industry Association report that there are now 3.7 million market indexes, an increase of about a half a million from last year. The Twitter commentary was predictable, with observations such as “peak passive” and “smells like CDOs.

Sanford C. Bernstein — the firm that famously compared passive investing with Marxism in a research note and then proceeded to make two indexes and launch two ETFs tracking them — was so triggered by that number they wrote a satirical story mocking the quixotic quest for the perfect index.

There's big money in biotech in the Greater Boston area. Last year, venture capital firms invested more than $3 billion in the state's biotech and pharmaceutical companies, according to the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. The amount has risen every year since 2012. Local companies have already produced revolutionary treatments for rare diseases, cancer and more. And there's promise and hope for cures and treatments still to come. Because of that, there's no shortage of capital.Biotech companies often go public even if they haven't yet put a product on the market, let alone turned a profit. MIT finance professor Andrew Lo says there's good reason for so much exuberance.

As we draw closer to the 10-year anniversary of the global financial meltdown, a lot of investors seem convinced we won't be revisiting anything remotely resembling that period of extreme wealth destruction any time soon. And who can blame them? The value of their rebuilt portfolios has soared during a sustained stretch of well-below- normal interest rates, strong earnings growth, inflated asset values and record-low volatility. Bullish forecasters predict more of the same for 2018, playing down a host of potential pitfalls.

Legendary investor Warren Buffett once described it as a "mirage" to be avoided by any sensible investor. JP Morgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon has famously described it as a "fraud" and last month warned that if "you're stupid enough to buy it, you'll pay the price for it one day." Another global bank boss, Credit Suisse's Tidjane Thiam, calls the manic trading that has driven its price into the stratosphere the "very definition of a bubble" that's destined to end badly.

A longstanding academic theory for describing how markets work has finally died. Its impact on investment theory and practice was enormous, but has also led to some risks. The so-called efficient market hypothesis (EMH), which basically assumes that investors are rational and that it's impossible to beat the market because prices reflect all available information, has been under fire for years. And MIT's Andrew Lo, who Time Magazine named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2012, finally put an end to it in his new book, “Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought.”

Early in January in a Chicago hotel, Campbell Harvey gave a rip-snorting presidential address to the American Finance Association, the world’s leading society for research on financial economics. To get published in journals, he said, there’s a powerful temptation to torture the data until it confesses—that is, to conduct round after round of tests in search of a finding that can be claimed to be statistically significant. Said Harvey, a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business: “Unfortunately, our standard testing methods are often ill-equipped to answer the questions that we pose.” He exhorted the group: “We are not salespeople. We are scientists!”

It has been a whirlwind year for the stock market amid the presidential election, interest-rate increases and the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s climb to the 20000 mark. And there has been no shortage of advice on what to do and what to ignore along the way. Our panel on The Wall Street Journal’s Experts blog offered their take on a variety of investing topics–from IRA rollovers to how to get in on the podcast craze. You can read what they had to say throughout the year here.  And below are five of the most-popular investing-related Experts posts of 2016.

"Uncertainty around how long it will take to find a cure for different forms of cancer is forcing investors to reconsider pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into pharmaceuticals.

"But offering long-term debt rather than venture capital can help draw them back, according to Andrew Lo, Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He was speaking at the Financial Innovations in Healthcare conference, held at London Business School (LBS) and supported by the AQR Asset Management Institute."

"In the social media cacophony, some of the noise rises to the level of stock market signal.

"That’s the finding of a working paper overseen by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Andrew Lo, which says a trading strategy based on views posted on Twitter prior to Federal Reserve policy meetings regularly turned a profit. A one-standard-deviation increase in tweet sentiment can be exploited to boost Fed-day equity returns by 0.62 percent, it found..."

"With Yale’s endowment at an all-time high of $25.57 billion, the University’s investment success has been buoyed by startups like Uber, Airbnb and LinkedIn...

"Massachusetts Institute of Technology finance professor Andrew Lo ’80 said Yale’s portfolio has had better returns than other venture capitalists. He speculated that this is due to Yale’s extensive network of contacts, which includes alumni and seasoned portfolio managers."

"The MIT study looked at English-language tweets in 2007-14 about the Fed, measuring sentiment and adjusting for the reach of the tweeter.

"'We exploit a new dataset of tweets referencing the Federal Reserve and show that the content of tweets can be used to predict future returns, even after controlling for common asset pricing factors,' the authors, Andrew Lo, a professor at MIT, and Pablo Azar, a PhD student there, write."

"Has the investment industry’s marketing push outsmarted itself? For several years, huge effort has gone in to selling “smart beta” funds. It has worked, creating great excitement. Now, not at all surprisingly, the backlash has begun..."

"Americans pay some of the world's highest rates for health care coverage and drug therapies. Although these costs hurt consumers, drug companies point out that the U.S. system allows them to bring new therapies to market faster and sometimes exclusively for domestic patients. Still, tabs like $84,000 for a curative hepatitis C treatment price most people out, even those with the best insurance.

"Andrew Lo, a finance professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of its Laboratory for Financial Engineering, has proposed a fix of sorts. He and fellow researcher David Weinstock, a physician at the Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, recently published a paper in the journal of Science Translational Medicine that shows how capital markets could finance these costly treatments in the same way that consumers bankroll other large purchases, like mortgages."