Laurie Thomas Vass is a regional economist and a registered investment advisor representative of Investment Management & Insurance Advisors, Inc., a North Carolina registered investment advisory firm. As an independent investment advisor to real estate companies and technology companies, Vass has been providing investment advice to CEOs on private placements since 1988. Vass is a professional money manager, and is the inventor and holder of a research method patent on selecting technology stocks for investment. She was cited by Peter Tanous, in The Wealth Equation, as one of the top 100 private money managers in the nation. Vass is the author of seven books. She has published over 90 scholarly articles on the Social Science Research Network author platform, and is currently ranked in the top 1.4% of 330,000 authors, globally.