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Caution...driving and writing can be hazardous to your health. Ideas for Wizard of Wall Street™ were only written down when traffic was at a stand still.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

It all began in a traffic jam on I-95S, in 1998, while going to work. Day after day the traffic continued to back-up and the interstate became a giant parking lot for 20 minutes every morning. Day after day my notebook started to become filled with ideas and examples of how I envisioned my game to flow.

For over 10 years earlier I had been trying to faithfully make annual deposits for retirement and had done this through my local bank. I had been introduced to one of their agents and was advised to place my money into mutual funds. I had no idea whether these funds were the best avenue to have my money reside in or what other alternatives might have been available. I knew that there were stocks available and mutual funds were a conglomeration of closely related stocks, but I knew nothing about investing nor how the stock market worked. I had read some articles on how stocks could appreciate at a greater level than mutual funds and they could also be riskier to place your money in too. Since I wasn’t getting any younger and my retirement fund had started late in my life I decided that I would try to teach myself how the stock market functioned. I picked-up a few books and read some articles and found none of these pieces of literature interesting. I would start reading a few pages then I start to doze off. This neither worked nor satisfied my eagerness to learn. Then one day, while sitting in my car, going no place fast, I thought of how I could start to learn about one of the greatest financial institutions that man had devised…The Stock Market. I would take some money and invest it on-line so I could be an active participant in real-time. I found this fast action attempt to “win” money becoming almost habit forming. I did eventually lose 80% of my internet investment, but with the knowledge that I was not alone in the investment world. There were others out there who were probably as naïve and as cocky as me, thinking that they too could “win” millions. I came to the realization that this was a form of gambling, at least the way I had played the market. I then thought that there has to be a safer way to learn how the stock market works and be just as exciting as on-line investing. This is when I started to develop Wizard of Wall Street^tm.