David Harper, CFA, FRM, is the founder of Bionic Turtle, which he uses to help students and aspiring professionals prepare for financial certification exams - and develop career-related skills - with his unique movie tutorials.

He's been a loyal "Investopedian" since 2003 and he helped to create the very first (and very successful) Investopedia Advisor portfolios.

He occasionally conducts in-depth research on small cap technology companies and rents himself out for valuation work or as an expert witness. He enjoys spreadsheets and derivatives, but if he is required to work with attorneys, he charges extra.

Before he started his own gig, he consulted for lots of public company boards, where he learned that companies look entirely different from the inside.

His first rule of investing? "Do lots of homework, dig deep or seriously consider not playing. But digging deep only earns you into ignorance, more or less. Don't forget: You'll never know what's really going on. Dragons be thar but, alas, nobody draws them on the map for you."

He writes a little bit of code and fancies himself handy with CSS, ActionSript, XML and Visual Basic. He is inspired by e-learning ("the next big thing - bigger than robots"), open source, Adobe's Flash ("AJAX is a temporary fix - unless complexity turns you on"), good design, and newspapers ("because you cannot easily replace a seasoned storyteller filtered by a professional editor").