David Bellairian

The model is not the analyst. It is the fastest junior analyst you will ever hire. Photo via Unsplash. I’m David Bellairian. I run Glencore Associates , a private investment and asset management firm in Los Angeles, and I founded AIDiscover , an AI marketing agency. I use AI models every day, and I have written before about how I use them for stocks . This essay is about the other side of the portfolio: how I use AI when I am looking at a rental property, and, just as important, where I stop letting it help. The rule before the method The rule is simple. The model never makes the decision, and it never supplies a number I have not verified. It is a research assistant with an unlimited attention span and no judgment. If you give it the role of analyst, it will happily play one, and it will be confidently wrong in exactly the places where being wrong costs the most. If you give it the role of junior associate, it will save you ten hours a week. Everything below follows from that. St...

Gold is the one position in the portfolio that is nobody’s liability. Photo via Unsplash. I’m David Bellairian, founder and CEO of Glencore Associates , a private investment and asset management firm in Los Angeles. In an earlier essay I explained why the firm holds several asset classes at once and what job each one does. The question I get most often afterward is about gold: not whether to own it, but how much. This essay is the answer, and the reasoning behind it. Start with the job, not the forecast Most gold arguments are forecasts in disguise. Someone is bullish on inflation, or bearish on the dollar, or worried about a particular central bank, and gold becomes the expression of that view. I don’t size gold that way, because I don’t think I can forecast any of those things reliably, and a position built on a forecast has to be unwound when the forecast changes. At Glencore Associates, gold has one job. It is the reserve that does not depend on a counterparty, a functioning m...

Three years of law books, and a career that went somewhere else. Photo via Unsplash. I’m David Bellairian. I run Glencore Associates , a private investment and asset management firm in Los Angeles, and I founded AIDiscover , an AI marketing agency. I also hold a Juris Doctor degree, and I have never practiced law. I never sat for the bar. People find that combination odd enough to ask about, so this essay is the answer I give, written down once. The short version I went to law school, finished the degree, and then chose not to pursue the bar exam, because by the time I finished I knew that my passion was management and marketing, not litigation or legal practice. That isn’t a story about failing at something. It’s a story about figuring out what I was actually for, and then being honest enough to act on it. I want to be exact here, because precision is the whole point of the degree. I am not an attorney. I am not licensed to practice law in California or anywhere else. I do not give le...

 I'm David Bellairian, founder and CEO of Glencore Associates. When I wrote here last week about layoffs at profitable companies, the thread running under all of it was Oracle redirecting billions of dollars of payroll into AI data centers. I want to pull on that thread properly, because the actual number behind it is bigger than almost anyone outside the industry realizes, and the honest question about it isn't being asked enough. The size of the number Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle are on track to spend somewhere between 660 and 700 billion dollars combined on capital expenditure in 2026. Amazon alone is guiding to around 200 billion. Alphabet is in the 175 to 185 billion range. Meta is targeting 115 to 135 billion. Microsoft is tracking toward 120 billion or more. Oracle, the smallest of the five, is still at roughly 50 billion. Depending on which estimate you use, this is a 36 to 62 percent increase over 2025, which was itself already a record year. Roughly ...

 I'm David Bellairian, founder and CEO of Glencore Associates and founder of AIDiscover. I read a lot of layoff announcements this year, partly because I allocate capital for a living and partly because AIDiscover works with companies going through exactly this kind of restructuring. The pattern in 2026 doesn't look like the layoffs I remember from prior downturns, and I think most coverage of it is asking the wrong question. The scale of it Tech layoffs topped 245,000 in 2025 and are already running past 180,000 for 2026, on pace to come in higher than last year. Amazon alone cut 16,000 corporate roles in January, on top of 14,000 the previous October. Oracle cut as many as 30,000, roughly a fifth of its workforce, days after reporting strong quarterly earnings. Uber cut 3,300 jobs as part of a restructuring the CEO described as removing management layers, not cutting costs to survive. Cisco cut 4,000. HPE announced 2,500 over eighteen months. Here's the detail that actual...

 I'm David Bellairian, founder and CEO of Glencore Associates. Precious metals are one of five asset classes in the portfolio I run, and I wrote here recently about the debt dynamics behind a possible fisca l crunch. Gold is the other side of that same story. It's had one of the best runs of my lifetime, and the reasons behind that run are exactly the reasons I'm not touching my position. The run, in numbers Gold started 2025 near $2,600 an ounce. It gained roughly 65 percent over the course of that year, breaking through $3,000 and then $4,000 for the first time in history. By late January 2026 it had spiked to an intraday high above $5,500, before pulling back to settle closer to $4,900. Silver, platinum, and palladium all moved with it. This wasn't a quiet grind higher. It was one of the sharpest moves gold has made in my lifetime, and it happened alongside record central bank buying, a weakening dollar, and the heaviest ETF inflows in years. Why it's happening ...