When a young Sacramento-based investment newsletter publisher decided he was tired of watching Wall Street banks charge ordinary Americans $45 or more per stock trade in the early 1970s — a fee that, adjusted for inflation, would exceed $300 today — he launched a discount brokerage out of a rented office with a handful of employees and a conviction that the markets should belong to everyone. In 1996, when most brokers treated the internet as a curiosity, Schwab launched online trading and processed more than one million web-based trades within months. Founded in 1971 by Charles R. Schwab, the company built its initial identity as a low-cost alternative to full-service Wall Street brokers, early discount brokerage after the SEC deregulated commissions in 1975. What began as a simple transactional intermediary — charging investors a fee to execute stock trades — has evolved into a diversified financial services network that generates revenue through five primary mechanisms: net interest income, asset management and administration fees, trading revenue, bank deposit account fees, and advisory services. However, the same rate environment exposed a vulnerability: the company had invested heavily in longer-duration securities at low yields, creating large unrealized losses on its held-to-maturity bond portfolio and raising short-term questions about liquidity as clients began moving idle cash into higher-yielding alternatives such as money market funds. Founded in the early 1970s and publicly traded since 1987 (with a brief period of private ownership from 1983 to 1987 under BankAmerica), the company has survived and thrived through market crashes in 1987, 2000 to 2002, 2008 to 2009, and 2020, each time emerging with a larger share of a growing market. Robinhood's roughly 24 million funded accounts as of 2024 skew younger than Schwab's base, and the platform's gamified interface and crypto integration have captured a generation of investors who began their financial lives on smartphones, not at branch offices. Robinhood launched its IRA product in 2023, offering a 1 percent match on contributions — a direct incursion into the retirement savings territory that is Schwab's most profitable long-duration business. When the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates in March 2022, Schwab's bank deposit base eroded as clients, rationally, moved uninvested cash to capture 4 or 5 percent yields elsewhere. After graduating, Schwab launched his first business venture: an investment newsletter called Investment Indicator, operated out of San Francisco in the mid-1960s. The far-reaching moment in Schwab's founding narrative came on May 1, 1975 — May Day, as it became known in financial circles — when the Securities and Exchange Commission abolished fixed brokerage commissions.