Wallstrip was a daily business satire news video podcast launch in October 2006, a year before the US stock market reached its peak. The initial concept was to highlight publicly traded companies whose stock was trading at or near an all time high. As the bear market set in, the show dropped the niche criterion and would feature other companies as well as make commentary on the economy at large. In May 2007, the program was acquired by CBS's interactive unit at an estimated value of US$4 million to US$ 5 million.

A typical show would last a couple of minutes. As the host presented the show, a corner of the screen would continually display a series of wacky photos that were loosely related to the narration to add humour of the content. Interviews with heads of various companies, industry insiders, and even the general public during on location shows were common.

Timothy Sykes (born 1981, Orange, Connecticut) is an American author and investor. He is featured in the reality television show Wall Street Warriors, and is author of the book An American Hedge Fund: How I Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator & Created a Hedge Fund. He is known for exposing the skeletons of and profiting from the short selling of penny stocks.

Through his investments, Sykes grew his $12,415 gift money into $1.65 million from 1999-2002 while he was pursuing his Bachelor's Degree in Philosophy from Tulane University.

Often called the "The Startup", in early 2003, Sykes founded Cilantro Fund Management LLC, a hedge fund based in New York City. The fund was ranked number one Short Bias Hedge Fund for 2003-2006 by Barclay Hedge, before closing in late 2007 after losing roughly one third of its value due to an illiquid investment.

Sykes bounced back in 2007-2011, becoming the #1 ranked trader out of 60,000+ on Covestor, a platform that verifies trades and performance.

Sykes studied at Tulane University receiving a major in Philosophy and minoring in Business in 2003. He now is a financial activist where he exposes corporations, companies and individuals involved in 'pump and dump' scams and he also teaches novices how to profit from short-selling stocks of such corporations.

Henry Blodget (born 1966) is an American former equity research analyst, currently banned from the securities industry, who was senior Internet analyst for CIBC Oppenheimer during the dot-com bubble and the head of the global Internet research team at Merrill Lynch. Blodget is now the editor and CEO of The Business Insider, a business news and analysis site, and a host of Yahoo Daily Ticker, a finance show on Yahoo.

Blodget received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University and began his career as a freelance journalist and was a proofreader for Harper's Magazine.

In 1994, Blodget joined the corporate finance training program at Prudential Securities, and, two years later, moved to Oppenheimer & Co. in equity research. In October 1998, he predicted that Amazon.com's stock price would hit a pre-split price of $400 (which it did a month later, gaining 128%).

This call received significant media attention, and, two months later, he accepted a position at Merrill Lynch. In early 2000, days before the dot-com bubble burst, Blodget personally invested $700,000 in tech stocks, only to lose most of it in the years that followed. In 2001, he accepted a buyout offer from Merrill Lynch and left the firm.

Chrystia Freeland (born 1968) has been the Global Editor-at-Large of Reuters news since March 1, 2010, having formerly been the United States managing editor at the Financial Times, based in New York City. Freeland received her undergraduate education from Harvard University, going onto St Antony's at University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She attended the United World College of the Adriatic, Italy, 1984-86.

Freeland, a Ukrainian-Canadian, was born in Alberta, Canada. Freeland has worked in Kiev, Moscow, London, Toronto and currently in New York. She is the author of Sale of the Century, a 2000 book about Russia's journey from communism to capitalism.

She lives in New York City with her husband and their three children.

She has appeared five times as a panelist on Real Time With Bill Maher, on February 26, 2010, January 14, 2011, May 27, 2011, July 15, 2011 and April 20, 2012. She has also appeared on The McLaughlin Group, The Dylan Ratigan Show, Imus in the Morning and The Colbert Report. Currently, she is periodically standing in for Arianna Huffington as a panelist on public radio's political debate program, "Left, Right & Center", produced by KCRW. (After Huffington was named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, a newly created unit of AOL, she stopped appearing every week.)