| Plato said that necessity is the mother of invention. I can't argue with that... and I would say the necessity of finding better, easier, smarter and different ways of making money has spawned some of the greatest inventions ever. Having been a trader and investor for over 40 years now, I can tell you that it's never been faster, easier or cheaper to get into the markets... and that there have never been more ways to invest and trade. I've never been more excited about what will come next than I am right now. And the truth is... the path we took to get here was filled with inventions aimed at making investing accessible to all. First there were stock markets... commodities markets... and futures markets. Then, in 1973, modern options trading was born at the Chicago Board Options Exchange. The market's moneymaking potential skyrocketed. But exchanges were hard to join and expensive to trade through. Brokers charged "fixed" commissions - and I don't mean "fixed" just as in set costs, I mean "fixed" as in rigged in an antitrust kind of way. The SEC eventually got involved. It was pushed hard - not by Wall Street brokerages or exchanges, but by upstarts who wanted to introduce what would later be known as discount brokerages. It mandated that on May 1, 1975 - known on the Street as May Day - fixed commissions would have to be negotiated. In other words, let there be competition. Hard-charging, hard-competing discount brokerages opened markets and trading to everyone, giving retail investors easy access to stocks and mutual funds - and, eventually, just about everything. Then, in 1993, thanks to product inventors at State Street Global Advisors, modern-day exchange-traded funds (ETFs) were launched when the SPDR (Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipt) 500 Trust debuted. SPY (the ETFs trading symbol) is a portfolio of 500 large cap stocks and is designed to replicate the S&P 500 Index, the institutional U.S. stock market benchmark. But it can be traded like a single stock, all day, every day the market is open. Now you can trade ETFs that track or hold portfolios of just about everything, in every asset class... and some you've never thought of. Anyone can now trade the Dow, the Nasdaq-100, oil, gas, gold, junk bonds, Treasury bills, notes and bonds, real estate, soft commodities, or just about anything else you could think of... all thanks to the invention of modern ETFs. In the mid to late 1990s, inventors challenged traditional exchanges like the NYSE and AMEX, and even the Nasdaq, by opening ECNs, or electronic communications networks. Retail traders could trade listed stocks on their platforms directly with other ECNs without having to pay exchange fees. Those inventions made trading faster and cheaper for everyone, especially day traders. | 
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