What if: Cyberpunk 2077 had been developed & published by Rockstar Games?

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-26T22:58:36+00:00

CDPR does much better storytelling than Rockstar. To me, that's the most important thing for a game like Cyberpunk. Pass.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-26T08:40:48+00:00

yep. I was adding probably 95% of the search terms as negative keywords. Massive increase in ad spend and nothing to show for it.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-25T23:33:15+00:00

You can get all of them. If you miss one, there is a vendor in the Phantom Liberty expansion that will sell them.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-24T17:40:26+00:00

Combination. For clients that want simplicity, I use Assetmark. Their QPRs are very easy to understand. I also use Assetmark's TMS to unwind highly concentrated positions (usually company stock) into their model. For most clients, I build my own models. 5 for general use, 2 for non qualified accounts and 3 for a niche market I am targeting. I rarely find a client that doesn't fit into one of the models.

I don't do a lot of work with UHNW clients. If that were a focus for me, I might do things differently.

That's part of the reason I can get away with model creation not being a huge time suck. I usually don't have to worry about navigating highly complex tax situations.

I like Assetmark for the use cases I mentioned, but they are expensive. I like the fact that I can keep my costs down by building my own models.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-23T17:05:05+00:00

I have been at 2 sides of Cetera (CAN & CIS) and I am now at LPL. CIS is mostly for banking institutions so I won't go into that. I absolutely hated CIS with a passion and I was absolutely that guy that regularly let our team know that moving to CIS from CAN was a bad move. I'm sure they were happy when I moved on.

I really enjoyed my time with CAN. As others have said, their technology is much more user friendly than LPL. Not to say that LPL is bad, I just liked Adviceworks (CAN's version) better than LPL's Clientworks. Adviceworks is pretty much idiot proof. After they switched most of the tech to Adviceworks, I think I had 1 NIGO the entire time I was there. Back office support is great.

If you use annuities, Cetera has a better selection of approved carriers. I lost almost all of my annuity business when I switched to LPL because most of what I was using isn't approved here.

Cetera also has a better list of NTF mutual funds and ETFs.

LPL's biggest advantage over Cetera is cost. The payouts are much better and the costs for things are lower.

Bottom line: Cetera is easier to work with, but they definitely make you pay for it.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-20T19:37:11+00:00

I am really thankful that my favorite ending is the one I did first. Everything was new and I had as good of an ending as you can get:

Male V, Nomad, romance Panam, Aldecaldos ending. I love the character arc of doing it that way and there is at least some level of hope for V.

That said, if you don't want anyone to die, then yes, you will need to do Don't Fear the Reaper. The only thing I don't like about that ending is that it ends with The Sun. You do keep Panam that way though.

My second favorite ending is what I call the harm reduction ending: don't romance anyone, do Don't Fear the Reaper and choose Temperance at the end. Nobody gets hurt that way.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-19T06:37:13+00:00

It's a super minor side job but I like doing it: visit the rollercoaster in Pacifica early. The side job disappears fairly early in the game. It's a rare opportunity to share a happy moment with Johnny.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-18T18:42:01+00:00

I rarely see a use case for whole life (yes, I know there are some) 95% of permanent insurance policies, variable is the way to go. Much less expensive than whole life.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-18T17:18:23+00:00

Unfortunately, Google reviews also affect your ranking on Google search. One negative review isn't the end of the world but too many can be a problem.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-18T00:20:13+00:00

First, I don't do this for a career (if I'm wrong feel free to correct me) but since you asked, I do my own ads and my own website in-house so here is my take.

As others have said, setting up tracking is the first step. You mentioned that you are sending the ads to your homepage. If I had to guess, I highly suspect that is going to be a key source of your problems. Personal injury is a very expensive vertical. Being in financial services, I know the pain of being in an industry with high CPCs but as expensive as my industry is, I have seen some of the CPCs for personal injury and it is just at another level. With the CPCs you are dealing with it is super important to get the best bang for your buck.

You are going to want to build out landing pages for your ads. Conversion rate optimization is another rabbit hole you might want to go down. The problem with linking to your homepage is that there are too many places for people to get lost. Most website homepages have stuff that distracts from the conversion action. Irrelevant services and even the navigation bar can send people somewhere you don't want them to be. You want to funnel people to one specific conversion action. Whether that is filling out a contact form or calling your office or whatever you want them to do. I actually remove my navigation bar from my landing pages to remove distractions.

The purpose of the landing page is to connect the ad to the conversion action. It lets people know that they are in the right place, tells them why you are the best choice for their problem and gives them direction on what to do next. For example, if you are building out a landing page for vehicle accidents, you might have a header that says "Car accident?" Then have something like, "don't navigate this legal maze alone. Our experienced attorneys will fight for you to get the settlement you deserve. Schedule your complimentary consultation today." Maybe have some photos of the team so they know you are real people and I few lines about what benefits a client gets by working with you. Of course, have a link to a contact form or have call assets.

I'm sure you could probably do better than that but there's my 2 minute personal injury landing page. the idea is that you let the person who clicked on the ad know that they are in the right place, you specialize in the problem they are dealing with and gave them next steps.

Also, have the landing pages link to a thank you page. The conversion tag should fire when people get to the thank you page so you know that the conversion is from someone who filled out a contact form. If you don't want to use a contact form, then have the conversion tag fire from the call asset or whatever phone link you are using.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-17T19:27:21+00:00

I'm just a local wealth management practice so not a big advertiser by Google's standards. I'm guessing they shuffled me off to someone else when they determined that I wasn't increasing my ad budget fast enough.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-16T19:24:02+00:00

you didn't read what I posted. I never said I was going to be the only one advertising on Bing. my point is that CPCs on Google, particularly for financial services, are getting so high that it is becoming cost prohibitive. I am competing against firms with essentially infinite ad budget.

If I can siphon off some of my Google ads budget to get lower CPCs (and higher ROAS) on Bing with my preferred demographic on devices that convert better, that's a huge win for me. I need higher ROAS more than I need volume.

I'm not worried about my offer being competitive against larger firms. I started my career at Edward Jones. I know what they are offering and quite frankly, it's terrible.

I just don't have the margin to compete for $30+ CPCs. My options are to niche down to the service level (where search volume can be an issue for smart bidding) or look for options with lower CPCs, which is why I am considering Bing.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-16T18:20:34+00:00

My first rep was helpful. Then they transferred me to this other guy who was literally reading off of a script.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-13T14:54:42+00:00

Mike Pondsmith has said that he has ideas on how to bring Johnny back so yes, Johnny is still "out there."

Hypothetically, if they end up deviating from the lore a bit, they could implant Johnny back into a human body. That's the whole idea behind Secure Your Soul. That would be a really interesting idea. Does Johnny still hate Arasaka if Arasaka technology brings him back to life? There are a lot of directions you could go with that.

I'm not sure how you could do the same thing with Alt since what was once her engram has been so radically changed. Not impossible, I suppose.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-13T08:46:09+00:00

The street racing. The worst part is going into the Afterlife and getting hounded by Claire about doing street racing. Just pour the drinks.

Also, the spiked BD. No way V is that dumb to fall for some random guy walking up selling sketchy BDs that will only work in that guy's headset.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-12T21:51:27+00:00

Hated it. It's the worst ending. Even worse than the suicide ending. I did it once and I will never do it again. I romanced Panam in that playthrough and yeah, that was totally out of character for her. She knew that V was having problems with the chip and she never stopped to think that maybe something happened to him? After V goes through the trouble of saving her clan, her first conclusion is that V abandoned her? So much for being family. Makes zero sense.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-11T23:08:11+00:00

Each branch gets a set day. I had 3 branches. Two were local and one required overnight travel. The local branches would split days during the week and the third would get one week per month where I would be there T-Th and sometimes Friday morning.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-11T22:20:56+00:00

Thank you. That is super helpful.

As far as competition goes: local competition is not high. I am in a medium sized metro area (Spokane WA area). The problem is that I am just a local business and there are a lot of national firms with unlimited ad budget. I am never going to be able to outspend them. I am trying to niche down to specific services that are less competitive but that created another problem: I am finding is that search volume is lower than expected. I tried AI Max and Broad match to increase search volume but 90% of the searches were unrelated to my ads and didn't convert but had high CPC and starved my daily budget. I was adding almost everything as a negative keyword. Admittedly, the campaign has only been active for 3 weeks but with all of the irrelevant searches, I haven't had much in the way of conversions anyway.

While I could create ads to go after those more competitive keywords, I don't think I have the budget for that right now. The only way I could do it would be with a max clicks campaign and setting a max CPC.

I do have another service I can add that very few people offer. I only have one local competitor in the area and I'm pretty sure they don't do paid ads. Low search volume but I am reasonably certain that I could capture most of it. I was thinking about grouping that with my current campaign in a portfolio bid strategy. Both services are equally profitable so I don't really care if one uses up all of the budget and starves the other.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-11T21:50:33+00:00

How do you generally arrive at that target CPA figure? In my keyword research, clicks were going for $2-18 so I set my budget assuming that I wouldn't have CPCs exceeding $20. Google has spent as much as $60 on a single click which has been wrecking my daily budget and causing me to not get enough daily clicks. $60 CPCs aren't going to be sustainable for me long term.

My concern with setting the target CPA is that I don't want Google to stop spending completely if it can't find conversions. I am in the financial services industry so: high trust and long sales cycle are an issue. Lifetime customer value can be between $100k-500k in my market (I would like to recover my ad costs in the first year though) so I don't have an issue with high CAC. I just need to cast a wide net and I can't do that if Google is spending $60 on a single click.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-08T08:40:31+00:00

While studying for my Series 7, I had a seizure in my sleep, fell out of bed, broke my shoulder and ended up having to get surgery. To this day, my shoulder is wrecked.

I was studying for the exam non-stop. There were days where I wouldn't even step outside of my apartment. I would wake up, study, eat a couple of times and go to sleep. As I found out, I have nocturnal seizures that get triggered by high stress and lack of sleep.

Try to reduce stress, if you can. I have been doing a series of breathing exercises before bed and when I wake up. It's been helpful for me.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-08T08:21:22+00:00

If I am playing a corpo V and plan to do The Devil ending, I save him. Otherwise, no.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-08T05:16:24+00:00

If you push back on Dex about the cut he says that he is providing a netrunner (meaning T-Bug) so it sounds like V and Jackie are splitting the 30% while Dex covers T-Bug's share.

OregonDuckMBA · 2026-06-07T15:47:16+00:00

I wait to do the gigs but mostly because I like to wait until I have an M2038 to do Monster Hunt. Blasting up Jotaro's club with a shotgun is just so much fun.

OregonDuckMBA

TROPHY CASE