About John Luse

TALENT: Over Forty years ago I earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Finance and Economics from the University of Vermont, in Burlington, VT. The school was founded in 1791 and admission standards are stiff. My concentration of credits and high marks in accounting, math of finance, security analysis, taxation and other related subjects qualified me already back then to work personal and corporate financial plans and manage money.

EXPERIENCE: After college I completed Airborne training and became a paratrooper and Company Commander in the Army. I received an honorable discharge with the rank of 1st Lieutenant. Then I got my feet wet on Wall Street with Francis I. Dupont & Co. in New York City. Subsequently I worked for Kidder-Peabody, also in New York and Shearson, Lehman, Hutton (now Smith-Barney) here in Newport Beach. My most cherished East-Coast personal recommendations are from two top managers at IBM. One controlled the $15 billion cash management portfolio IBM had at the time, and the other, managed all IBM’s real estate holdings. I would be pleased to send you copies.

A start-up company named Vaportech Corporation got me to California in 1976. It had a patented process and products and a huge market. I helped fund it in return for payment in restricted stock and came out to help run it. I learned a lot. Success depends on management, management…and management. And that, if you can’t control management or sell the stock (because it’s Rule 144 restricted), don’t make the investment. Vaportech was a waste of time and money.

After Vaportech, I looked for other deals to make a quick buck with but decided that I couldn’t afford the risk and got back into the established securities business. I helped Income Property Group (San Diego, CA) and Federated Funds (Pittsburgh, PA) market their investments to stock brokers and financial planners.

But my first love has always been managing stocks, bonds and mutual funds, etc… to help individual investors meet their goals, and by 1989, I was doing just that at Shearson Lehman Hutton (Now Smith Barney) in Newport Beach, CA.

In 1996 I was awarded the Registered Investment Advisor designation and license. I’ve felt for a long time that there should be a way to win on Wall Street without taking the big risk of owning individual stocks or subscribing to the Blind Faith Theory inherent with mutual fund investing. The Classical Asset Allocation strategy has a fatal flaw because it assumes that some of the funds it uses go up when others go down. But, as we found out in 2000, most of mutual funds went down together all around the world.