Financial History Issue 131 (Fall 2019) | Page 19

1985 advertisement for trading by touch-tone
phone. The ad features Joe Ricketts’ brother, Dick,
showing the world that if you have a touchtone
phone, you can call in to make trades for only
three pennies per share on the Accutrade system.
When Cliff realized we were serious,
he proposed that a colleague come in as
a fourth partner, so in a disagreement it
would be two against two. We agreed.
For a name, we took Omaha, because we
assumed we would be a local business, and
we put “First” in front of it, like banks do.
We would be First Omaha Securities.
This, finally, was my chance. I was
excited as hell, but my share was a lot of
money to me. I had to borrow several
thousand dollars from Bob, several thou-
sand more from my brother Dick and
even a little from friends. I knew that if
I lost that $12,500, my life would change
drastically. In those days, I was only get-
ting by week-to-week. How would I pay
back that kind of money if I lost it?
And yet, at the same time, I remember
feeling comfortable. There I was in the
middle of all that risk, and it felt normal. It
was as if I’d been waiting for it all my life.
Of course, I knew that our business
would mean work, work, work. But this
work would be an adventure. There was
no class you could take to explain how
to succeed as a broker in the new age of
negotiated commissions. No one to tell
us what to do. We had to get out there
with our brains and our strength and
make it succeed. It was like the frontier
days. We were the first beaver trappers
Tom Pleiss, Larry Collett, Jim Ricketts and Joe Ricketts pose with a trade show display
for an Ameritrade, Inc. back-office data system in the early 1990s.
in an unknown river valley. In my heart
I believed: This is me. This is what I was
meant to be.
Forty-five years later, that company
we started sometimes handles more than
a million trades a day. It employs about
10,000 people, all of whom can build lives
for themselves and their families. Suc-
cesses like that made this country, and
they are what will keep it strong in the
future. The principle I first learned as a
young man still holds: the way to relieve
misery and bring happiness is through
free enterprise.
I prefer the term “free enterprise” to
“capitalism,” which sounds as if you need
a lot of capital to participate. But we started
Ameritrade, as many entrepreneurs do,
with almost no money. Many Americans,
I’m afraid, no longer respect free enter-
prise. The term has come to seem the prop-
erty of conservatives, while liberals appear
drawn instead to socialism. Many young
people apparently do not understand what
economists have clearly shown, which is
that for this country to provide jobs for
people coming into the workforce each
year, we need to increase gross national
product by at least 3% annually. Free enter-
prise is what creates new jobs and makes
the economy expand. I don’t see how we
can be America without it.
As I looked back on my career, I won-
dered what I could do to convey the power
and the possibility of free enterprise to a
country in danger of forgetting. I wanted
to show that we have the opportunity to
take on the big odds and change people’s
lives. I realized I could show that by tell-
ing the story of how we built Ameritrade,
which is a dramatic story because the
outcome was always in doubt. Every year,
there was a new reason we were almost
driven out of business. Our story is an
exciting way to show what it takes to build
a breakthrough business, to make clear
how entrepreneurship built this country
and to demonstrate why free enterprise
remains its best hope for prosperity and
happiness to this day. 
Joe Ricketts is the founder, former CEO
and retired chairman of online broker-
age TD Ameritrade, and the author of
The Harder You Work, The Luckier
You Get.
Copyright © 2019 by Joe Ricketts. from
The Harder You Work, the Luckier You
Get: An Entrepreneur’s Memoir, pub-
lished by Simon & Schuster. Reprinted by
permission.
www.MoAF.org  |  Fall 2019  |  FINANCIAL HISTORY  17