David Bellairian is the founder and CEO of Glencore Associates, a Los Angeles private investment and asset management firm, and founder of AIDiscover.

A business can have a strong product, a hard-working team, and a polished website, yet still struggle if it misunderstands the market. Growth starts with knowing who buys, why they buy, what they compare you against, and what makes you worth remembering. Market analysis and personal branding work best together. Market analysis shows where the opportunity is. Personal branding helps people trust the person or business stepping into that opportunity. One gives direction. The ot

By David Bellairian, Founder of Glencore Associates Of everything William O'Neil wrote across his career — the CAN SLIM framework, decades of Investor's Business Daily columns, his study of the biggest stock winners in market history — the single rule he's probably best known for is also the simplest: sell, without exception, once a position falls 7-8% below your purchase price. Not a suggestion. A rule. I think it's worth understanding why he insisted on it, because the reas

By David Bellairian, Founder of Glencore Associates William O'Neil built one of the more durable frameworks in equity investing by studying, in detail, the biggest stock winners of the twentieth century and asking what they had in common before they became winners. The result — CAN SLIM, laid out in his book How to Make Money in Stocks and taught through Investor's Business Daily, the publication O'Neil founded — is a seven-factor checklist rather than a black-box formula. I'

By David Bellairian, Founder of Glencore Associates Ray Dalio's Principles isn't really a finance book, even though it comes from one of the most successful investors of the last fifty years. It's a book about how to make decisions honestly — how to find out you're wrong quickly, instead of slowly. I've drawn on a handful of its ideas in how I approach decisions at Glencore Associates, and I think they hold up regardless of what you're allocating capital toward. Here's what s

By David Bellairian, Founder of Glencore Associates I read Ray Dalio's work the way I'd read a good map: not because I think it predicts the future with precision, but because it names the terrain honestly. His framework on debt cycles — laid out across Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises and The Changing World Order — is one of the clearest public explanations of why economies expand, why they eventually can't, and what happens next. Here's the framework in plain terms

By David Bellairian, Founder of Glencore Associates AI has moved from a novelty in investment management to something close to standard practice, particularly among family offices and privately held capital structures — the category Glencore Associates operates in. It's worth being specific about what that actually means in practice, because the honest answer is narrower and less dramatic than the popular framing of "AI trading algorithms" usually suggests. What AI is actuall

By David Bellairian, Founder of Glencore Associates David Bellairian's diversification strategy at Glencore Associates allocates across four categories: public equities, gold reserves, income-producing real estate, and a commercial vehicle portfolio. On paper, that's an unusual combination — most discussions of diversification stop at stocks and bonds. Here's how David Bellairian thinks about each category, and why they're held together rather than separately. David Bellairia

By David Bellairian, Founder of Glencore Associates Most discussion of capital management assumes a fund is trying to grow — more investors, more assets, more scale. Glencore Associates is built around a different premise: it doesn't solicit the public, doesn't manage capital on behalf of outside investors, and isn't currently open to outside investment at all. Understanding why that's a deliberate structure, rather than a limitation, explains a lot about how the firm actuall

By David Bellairian, Founder of Glencore Associates Glencore Associates describes its approach in five words: "Capital, held in tangible form." It's worth explaining plainly what that phrase means in practice, since it's easy to read past a tagline without understanding the actual distinction behind it. Paper claims versus physical assets A great deal of modern capital exists as a claim on something else — a share, a fund unit, a derivative contract — rather than as the thing