Last week I shared that I read a biography of Joe Ricketts, founder of Ameritrade (see here). One of his main competitors—and the company that acquired Ameritrade in 2020, over a decade after Ricketts sold it—was Charles Schwab Corporation. I was intrigued and wanted to learn more about the discount brokerage model and the era that birthed the model, so I read the autobiography of Charles Schwab.

Invested describes sixty or so years of Schwab’s journey in his own words. Interestingly, what eventually became Charles Schwab Corporation started in 1962 as a biweekly investing newsletter called Investment Indicators. Annual subscriptions were $60, and at its peak it had about 3,000 subscribers. No money management, just overviews of the economy, insights on select growth stocks, and hypothetical portfolios.

This newsletter catered to independent investors who were smart and capable of making their own decisions. The understanding gained from serving this demographic formed the foundation for what Schwab built over the next sixty years: a place for individual investors to manage their own investing.

Schwab’s journey to build his namesake firm and amass a personal fortune worth over $10 billion had its share of ups and downs. He does a great job of describing each segment of his journey and how he navigated its specific challenges in detail. He also describes what it’s like to navigate multiple stock market crashes when you run a brokerage that makes money from stock trades (spoiler: volume dries up, the brokerage business gets hit hard).

The most interesting aspect of his journey to me was his position in the early 1970s, when he was in his mid-30s. He described himself as “floundering.” He had zero assets and lots of debt. He was recently divorced, had young kids, and was living in a one-bedroom apartment while still trying to build his then floundering firm. Close to giving up, he began attending evening law school classes. But he pushed through and, with some lucky breaks in 1975, had a vision for a new model for individual investors, the discount brokerage.

I’m super interested in understanding the 1968–1982 era, and this book provided another great entrepreneurial perspective of the era and how to navigate challenging macro times.

If you’re interested in learning about Charles Schwab, Charles Schwab Corporation, the asset management industry, or how a nontechnical founder built what I consider a tech company, consider reading Invested.