If you’ve been in an apple store lately, you will experience a bit of deja vu.

Tom O’Malia

Orfalea Director’s Chair in Entrepreneurship – University of Southern California

Tom’s entire career experience has been in entrepreneurial ventures and teaching. He has served as the Director of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. Under his leadership, USC’s entrepreneur program consistently ranked among the top programs in the nation. He has personally taught and inspired thousands of entrepreneurs. Tom is widely-regarded a leader in both academic and business circles.

The USC entrepreneur program was recognized as the #1 program in the country by Success Magazine.

See this fantastic interview. (courtesy of: PerfectBusiness.com)

If Video Killed the Radio Star? What will social media kill?

We’re not waiting to see.

Here’s our new channel on YouTube with a new series. Gurus: Before and After.  Prognostications: before and after.  We love to watch the guru.

Did you know guru means ‘teacher’?  So. First? Dr. Doom himself, Nouriel Roubini.

The truth of the matter is, most of the people in my industry are sales monkeys. I should know, to some that’s what I may seem like.  

I worked for one of the ‘majors’. I spent almost 10 years in the industry. I’ve attended all of the conferences. And I have seen all of the types of people we label a success and failure in this business.  

A couple of my favorites are still the rich boy or girl playing banker with their family and friend’s money.  Then there’s the hard nose, pushy person who argues their way into your wallet, gotta love ‘the street’ in them.  And the truth is, we know this.  Yet, we perpetuate the cycle. Over, and over, and over.

We trick ourselves into thinking that if "so and so" is working at "such and such", then ‘this is what we should do’– this is how it works.   The media perpetuates it with guru worship, because you watch. Hollywood aids in it, with sexy voice overs ’cause it pays the bills. Politicians live by it because it’s easier. And if you really took the time to look, you’d notice– Wall Street is exactly like Amway; top heavy. 

The thing is, we know from behavioral science, the human condition likes to forget. Otherwise, we cannot be so brain-dead to think another $20 million in an ad campaign is going to make us forget.  How many times have we been burned, by the very people who feed us our information? Oh, no…

After much thought and personal debate about where to host such an endeavour to change this lemming movement, I’m starting a new series here at GDP.  

Everything your broker won’t tell you. Are you ready?

Here’s a quick lesson on High Frequency Trading. Get yourself up to speed on how things really work on the exchanges.

Dear Valued Readers and Clients,

I’m sorry for the radio silence this week on our blog and sporadic posting since we’ve upgraded the site.  It is my goal for us to be back to at least one post a day in the coming days.  We’ve been trying to upload new code to the site and it’s been a miserable failure.  We will try to tackle it with a fresh perspective next week.  As for the markets, I do think they are overpriced; whether looking at it from a technical or fundamental standpoint.  That being said, the markets are rallying and it can’t be ignored (albeit on smaller volume). So, celebrate today.

As a firm we are currently invested (on a basic level) as follows: 46% Stocks, 35% money market and alternatives, 15% in Bonds, and 5% alternatives. I do expect our allocation to change in the coming days. I was originally in the "retest the lows" camp–I still think we are due for a market correction (approx. 10%) but a retest of the March lows looks unlikely given this week’s action from a technical standpoint.  That is all I will say at this time in this forum, for competitive reasons.  Of course, you can email questions to ceo@gdpwealth.com . 

I hope we will have more interesting charts, documents, and, in general more compelling media to show in the coming weeks.  Thanks for your patience.  Wordpress (our website platform) is infinitely more powerful, but also WAY more complicated. 

If I could compel you to watch one thing for the summary of this week it’s this video.  The video involves a discussion of yet another example of how Wall Street is trying to squeeze the little guy, you, the millionaire next door. The panelists bring up the term, "front-running."  For those who don’t know about front-running— 

here’s the definition. Have a good weekend.

(this is not an endorsement to effect trades/allocation for your own personal account or solicitation)