| Last weekend, my brother and I had a text conversation about how good our kids have it today and how rough it was when we were growing up. It got more ridiculous as it went on, including gems like, "Back in our day, we didn't have chairs, we sat on the ground - and loved it!" It reminded me of what it was like when I started investing more than 30 years ago. At the time, my broker was Waterhouse Securities, which was acquired by Ameritrade, which was bought by TD Bank. And then Schwab bought the brokerage business. To place a trade in the early '90s, you had to pick up your home or office telephone, dial the number, and speak to a broker. It cost $49 for each transaction, so a round-trip trade cost nearly $100 in commissions. If you wanted research, you had to call your broker and ask them to send it to you. If they had it, the research note was usually months old. Good luck finding any research on small cap stocks. You checked stock quotes by calling the brokerage during the trading day or by looking them up in the newspaper the next morning. It was a very different time. Today, investors can obtain so much information just by the click of a mouse. And they have access to many more investment opportunities than we could have dreamed of 30 years ago. There are exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for every investing style and theme. And now many investors can even get involved in pre-IPO opportunities. That used to be a playground only for the wealthy and connected. We've all heard the stories of already rich investors who made huge profits by investing early in companies that eventually went public. Peter Thiel's $500,000 investment in Facebook, now Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META), famously turned into more than $1 billion after the company went public. | 
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