One of the biggest brokers of the online boom was run from Omaha, Nebraska, a thousand miles from Wall Street. Joe Ricketts started the business in 1975 as a discount broker, selling trades for less than the full-service firms charged. By the time it filed to go public in early 1997, the web was turning stock trading into something anyone could do from a desk at home. Ameritrade bet that price would win, and that most investors did not want advice.

A Discount Broker on the Plains

Ricketts opened his firm the year Wall Street ended fixed trading commissions. That change let brokers compete on price, and he chose to compete on nothing else. His firm took orders and filled them, with no research and no stock tips. For years its customers placed those orders by phone. When the web arrived, Ameritrade moved its customers online and kept cutting the price.

From Fifteen Dollars to Schwab

Ameritrade Holding went public in March 1997 at $15 a share. The online trading boom of the late nineties made it one of the busiest brokers in the country. In 2006 it bought TD Waterhouse and became TD Ameritrade. Charles Schwab, its oldest rival in discount trading, bought the company in an all-stock deal that closed in October 2020. The price was about $22 billion.

Cover: Bullfight, Édouard Manet. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a bull in the ring (a bull market for everyone).