SYNOPSIS
When Charles Schwab founded the corporation which bears his name, he and his team experienced a relentless stream of obstacles from the very beginning, through his company’s astonishing growth, and in the crucible of the stock market’s steady ups and downs. In his memoir, Schwab writes about his passion to open the clubby world of Wall Street investing to Main Street—so all Americans can go from being earners to investors and owners as well. He opens up about his struggles with dyslexia and how he not only worked through it, but ultimately embraced it. Schwab talks about the challenges of his first year into his discounted stock trading crucible: living in a small apartment in Sausalito with his wife, Helen, and their new baby, carrying a six-figure debt and a stack of personal loans with scarce resources and no roadmap to manage the company’s growth. He recounts Schwab’s sale to Bank of America—the merger that almost doomed his organization—and the timely leveraged buyout he crafted to regain independence. He also shares memories of the nail-biting days of the 1987 stock market collapse just weeks after the company had gone public; the dot-com meltdown of 2000 which led to the company reinventing itself; and how risk management protected clients during the financial crisis in 2008 and propelled company growth. Charles Schwab turned a democratizing idea into an industry-changing reality, thanks to unwavering principles, perseverance, and optimism that has always been at the heart of being… Invested.
FIND CHARLES SCHWAB’S BOOK HERE: https://content.schwab.com/invested/
About the Author:
Charles (“Chuck”) R. Schwab was born in Sacramento, California. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in economics from Stanford University and a master of business administration degree from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He started the San Francisco–based Charles Schwab Corporation in 1971 as a traditional brokerage company, and in 1974 became a pioneer in the discount brokerage business.
Schwab’s corporation took an early lead, offering a combination of low prices with fast, efficient order executions, and soon became the nation’s largest discount broker. Today, it’s the nation’s largest publicly traded investment services firm, with over three trillion dollars in client assets. Often credited with “democratizing” investment, Chuck Schwab has driven countless innovations in the investment services industry designed to help individuals make the most of saving and investing, including 24/7 access to services, the one-stop mutual fund supermarket providing access to thousands of no-load, no-transaction-fee mutual funds, custodial services for independent registered investment advisers, online trading, integrated banking and brokerage services, and many others. Today, the company has expanded from its roots as a discount brokerage and provides a full-service investing and banking experience to clients domestically and abroad and millions of investors.
Mr. Schwab has been Chairman of The Charles Schwab Corporation since its inception and has served as CEO for most of its history until October 2008. He is also Chairman of Charles Schwab Bank.
Along with his wife, Helen, he also supports entrepreneurial organizations working in education, poverty prevention, human services, and health. He also served for 10 years as Chairman of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
On January 22, 2008, President George W. Bush named Charles Schwab Chairman of the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Literacy, a groundbreaking initiative that advised the president and the secretary of the treasury on ways to promote and enhance financial literacy.
He is the author of several best-selling investment books, including How to Be Your Own Stockbroker; Charles Schwab’s Guide to Financial Independence; It Pays to Talk, written with his daughter, Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz; and You’re Fifty—Now What?
