Glendale doesn't cap your rent; it tells you what your rent decision costs. David Bellairian walks through Chapter 9.30 as an owner who holds a law degree but never practiced: the 7% trigger, banking, both relocation formulas, exemptions, and the right-to-lease trap.

A five-step process for using AI as a research associate on an income property, and the four jobs it is never allowed to do.

Why Glencore Associates treats physical gold as a reserve sized against what the portfolio owes, not as a trade on where the price goes.

Why David Bellairian never pursued the bar, what Jim Collins's Hedgehog Concept had to do with it, and how legal training still shows up in how he runs Glencore Associates and AIDiscover.

I spend most of my time underwriting deals at Glencore Associates and building marketing systems at AIDiscover, but every so often I build something just because it's useful. Freeframe is one of those projects, and I'm putting it out publicly today. The problem it solves Tubi, Pluto TV, Kanopy, and a handful of other ad-supported services now carry a genuinely good catalog of free, legal movies and shows. The catch is that nobody wants to open four apps and search four times

David Bellairian of Glencore Associates launches Freeframe, a free site that finds the legal, free way to watch any movie before you pay for another subscription.

Every deal I look at gets run through the same filter: cap rate, hold period, exit assumptions. That's the job, and at Glencore Associates it's the discipline behind everything from our private fund to our real property holdings. But one relationship in our real estate portfolio never really passed that test on paper alone, and I'd make the same decision again. Part of what we hold is leased to a community-based organization that helps people rebuild stability after financial

David Bellairian's product team is building a new software product under NDA. Here is the AI-assisted engineering methodology behind it: structured specs, heavy AI-assisted execution, and a testing discipline most small teams can't afford.

The short-term rental market isn't slowing down. Global bookings were worth roughly $149 billion in 2025, are on track to hit about $166 billion this year, and are projected to climb past $360 billion by 2033 — an 11.8% annual growth rate that outpaces most of traditional travel. More people want to book a house instead of a hotel room. That part of the story is settled. What's less settled is who actually benefits from that growth, because the two platforms hosts depend on m

I've built as an owner-builder in California, pulling my own permits rather than hiring a general contractor, and it's the most literal version of a philosophy I keep coming back to in this newsletter: you should only own, and only build, what you can actually inspect yourself. Owner-builder construction forces that discipline whether you want it or not, because there's no general contractor between you and the building department. You are the one calling for every inspection

I've written about how I use Grok and Claude to analyze a stock, read a 10-K, run the math, ask the skeptic's questions. What I haven't spelled out is that it's the exact same method for real estate, and for construction, which surprised me the first time I noticed it. The tool doesn't change. The discipline doesn't change. Only the document you're feeding it changes. The rule that travels across every asset class Use AI to analyze, never to predict. That's the whole rule, an

I've written about which properties I default to and about the rent ordinances that decide how they can be operated. What I haven't covered yet is the other two pieces that make or break a real estate deal before you ever collect a month of rent: the financing, and the specific mistakes that show up over and over regardless of the loan. This is the piece that ties those together, and ties back to Ray Dalio's diversification research, because real estate only behaves like an u

I get some version of this question often enough that it deserves a real answer instead of a shrug. One week I'm writing about a high-bandwidth memory shortage in AI chips. The next it's a 7-8% stop-loss rule from a stock trader's book published decades ago. The week after that it's lead paint in a Glendale duplex. On the surface, those look like three unrelated newsletters written by three different people. They're not. They're the same idea, applied three times. The idea is

I've written in this space about William O'Neil's 7-8% sell rule and about how I structure a five-asset-class portfolio at Glencore. Those two pieces sit next to each other for a reason, and Ray Dalio is the reason. O'Neil's discipline is about what happens inside one position. Dalio's research is about why I'm not relying on one position, or one asset class, in the first place. Put together, they're the two halves of the same philosophy. The insight Dalio calls his "Holy Gra

I'm David Bellairian, founder and CEO of Glencore Associates. I've written in this space about how I structure a five-asset-class portfolio, income real estate being one of them. What I haven't written about yet is the part that trips up almost every first-time investor in this asset class: real estate isn't one market with one set of rules. The rules change by city, by the building's age, by unit count, and sometimes by whether you own it as a person or through an entity. Ge

I'm David Bellairian, founder and CEO of Glencore Associates and founder of AIDiscover. A couple of weeks ago I wrote here about the roughly 700 billion dollars hyperscalers are spending on AI infrastructure this year. Since then I've spent more time in the weeds of where that money is actually getting stuck, and it isn't where most coverage points. Everyone talks about Nvidia and GPU supply. That's mostly not the constraint anymore. The real bottleneck sits one layer up, and

I'm David Bellairian, founder and CEO of Glencore Associates and founder of AIDiscover. I read constantly, mostly on planes and mostly business and investing books, and I get asked often enough for recommendations that I figured I'd write down the five I actually reread and hand to other people. These aren't the trendiest titles out right now. They're the ones that have held up. 1. The Outsiders, by William Thorndike Thorndike profiles eight CEOs who quietly outperformed the

I'm David Bellairian, founder and CEO of Glencore Associates and founder of AIDiscover. A few times a year someone asks me for one business book to read. My answer hasn't changed in years: Good to Great by Jim Collins. Collins and his research team spent five years studying companies that went from average stock performance to returns at least three times the market over fifteen years, and stayed there. What they found had almost nothing to do with strategy, product, or marke

David Bellairian on the one inspection most buyers of older Los Angeles homes skip, what lead and asbestos abatement really costs, and how to make the seller share it.

Most people ask an AI what to buy. That is the wrong question. Here is how David Bellairian, founder of Glencore Associates, actually uses Grok and Claude to analyze stocks, the math that matters, and the one strategy he would tell a beginner to run.