John O’Connell was recently published in Investing.com on the CFTC’s June 2026 proposal to finally give prediction markets a rulebook. For sixteen years the Commission’s power to block event contracts ran on guesswork, with no defined process or deadline, and the proposed rule replaces that with a three-step test and a real review clock...
John O’Connell was recently a guest on the Modern Financial Advisor Podcast, joining host Mike Langford to lay out where wealth management firms actually stand on AI adoption. He opens with a story that should make every compliance officer sit up: a firm turned on Microsoft Copilot, connected it to SharePoint, and assumed its...
A loop has five parts. Skip one and you do not get a slower loop. You get a system that burns tokens on a dead end, or one that silently produces the wrong answer with total confidence. Understanding what each part does, and then building one yourself, takes less time than most firms spend debating...
John O’Connell was recently published on why estate planning really takes so long at most firms, and it isn’t the attorney. John says that before any legal drafting starts, someone has to reconstruct what already exists. That discovery work is where engagements actually stall, but it stayed invisible because drafting speed is a sellable demo...
John O'Connell was recently published in PowerAdvice on how Schwab's new $5 Block Desk fee puts a price tag on your trading strategy. His point is that the fee looks trivial in isolation but multiplies across accounts, securities per model, and trading frequency, so a $1B active rebalancer can face roughly $450,000 a year,...
The American Gaming Association's State of the States 2026 report put a number on something state treasurers had suspected but could not quantify. Prediction market platforms diverted more than $500 million in potential sports betting tax revenue in 2025.¹ Kalshi and the platforms that followed it into the market collected that revenue from the same...
John O'Connell was recently published in WealthManagement.com on what the July 2026 Hugging Face breach means for wealth firms adopting AI at speed. His argument is that an AI agent broke into Hugging Face's infrastructure not through some exotic zero-day, but by systematically trying thousands of inputs until two legitimate, unreviewed features, a data...
John O’Connell was recently published in Investing.com on the limits of financial influencers for high earners. His argument is that finfluencers filled a real vacuum, with 79% of millennial and Gen Z consumers turning to social media for financial advice, and the best creators genuinely help with the foundational layer: emergency funds, debt payoff,...
Wealth Solutions Report featured our newest white paper, sponsored by GReminders, on the hidden cost of client meetings. The paper's core argument is that firms treat scheduling, prep, note capture, and follow-up as separate admin jobs when they're really one process that quietly drains advisor and staff capacity. We pointed to Cerulli data showing...
You signed a contract for an AI feature priced like software has always been priced: one fee, one number, adjusted once a year at renewal. That assumption is now wrong, and the vendor you signed with knows it before you do. Per-seat licensing worked because the marginal cost of one more login stayed close to zero....
