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On Wall Street, there once was a buttonwood tree, tall, old, now legendary. Under it the first stocks were said to have been traded in the late 1700s. In the 1880s, J. Pierpont Morgan, that age's quintessential industrialist, treated stocks solely as the domain of financiers. In the 1900s, Charles Merrill's brokers took Wall Street to Main Street, looking for customers among ordinary folk. Two decades ago, Charles Schwab launched the discount brokerage business, inviting Main Street to bypass Merrill's hefty commissions. At the beginning of the 1990s, Harvey Houtkin invited people to circumvent brokers entirely: Pull up a chair and plug in to the game yourself.
Steve Fishman
"Brokers wild," Details, October 1997 |
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