The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Ellis Traub's book,  "Take Stock: A Roadmap to Profiting from Your First Walk Down Wall Street" that  best reveals the high—and low—points in his life and explains the motivation behind his interest in this effort. Right off the bat, I’ll tell you what I’m not. I am not an MBA, a CFA, or a CFP. My letterhead doesn’t include a wake of alphabet soup trailing after my name. I’m not a professional money manager, a securities analyst, a college professor, or a stockbroker. In fact, I don’t even have a degree! I did attend college, but I dropped out of Harvard when the Korean War broke out in 1951. Determined to postpone my education until I could figure out what I really wanted to do for a living, I applied for both the Air Force and the Navy pilot training programs and opted to train with the Navy. Later I took my commission in the U.S. Marine Corps, with which I served in the Korean theater as an all-weather fighter pilot. Fortunately for me, the war ended before I saw any serious action. I returned to school in 1956, this time to Cornell University, where I studied hotel administration. Again my interests changed, and although I was on the dean’s list, I left to fly for Eastern Airlines, embarking on a career that spanned the next 31 years. I also became a spokesman for the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) and handled public relations for that organization in South Florida for 14 years. Frustrated by the responses that I received from management when I tried to suggest ideas to improve the company’s operations, I started a movement to infuse participative management into Eastern’s corporate culture. When Frank Borman, then Eastern’s chairman and CEO, later made the effort to effect such a cultural change, I worked actively with Eastern’s consultants, picking up yet another set of skills. Eventually disheartened by the continuing impasse between labor and management, and dismayed at the direction that my cherished profession had taken, I retired from Eastern in 1988, three years before my age would have forced me to. Armed with glowing testimonials from both Borman and his adversary, Charles Bryan, the head of the combative machinists’ union, I hung out my shingle as a management consultant in labor relations, community relations, and conflict management. It was at that point that I again made a midcourse correction in my eclectic career and discovered the investment philosophy that changed my life forever. My past investing experience had been nothing short of a disaster. Years earlier, in 1972, with four sons nearing college age, I had realized that my savings were inadequate to finance their education. I had neither put aside enough money to provide for it, nor properly managed the money I had saved. Nineteen seventy-two was an election year, and I had become actively interested in the presidential campaign. One of the campaign workers I met was a stockbroker for a major firm. Thinking that he might be able to help with my financial predicament, I asked my new friend for some guidance. His advice was this: “Since it’s an election year, you should invest your savings in a hot stock and hold it until about two weeks before the election. The incumbents will do everything in their power to keep the economy strong as long as possible, so you can’t go wrong. Sell your stock just before the election, and you’ll be in clover!” I not only invested all of my savings in a rapidly rising stock, I borrowed on those holdings to buy more, and then borrowed more money on my signature to put into my prize investment. What did I know! Of course I had gambled and I lost. When shortly before the election I finally sold my holdings, I, along with half of Wall Street, found that I had taken a bath. All I had left was my considerable debt, my house, and, fortunately, a good job. Worst of all, the experience scared me out of the stock market for the next 15 years. Fortunately, I didn’t have access to my retirement fund in 1972, or I might have lost all of that as well. When I left Eastern many years later, most of my pension was intact, and I elected to accept it as a lump sum. Once again, I ventured into the stock market. This time, I was intent on learning what I needed to know to be successful. So I formed a committee consisting of two other people and myself. One member was another young, but far more knowledgeable and ethical, stockbroker. The second was my accountant. The modus operandi was to be that we would make no decision unless it was unanimous. I believed that I could learn something from discussions involving the pros. As it worked out in practice, however, I would receive a call from Bill (the accountant) saying that he thought I should buy a certain stock. I would then call John (the broker) and ask what he thought. John would say, “Sounds like a good idea to me!” So I would buy the stock. Not much of an education there! After about a year and a half of this process, and with all of my money invested, I sat at my computer to assess my progress and plot the trend. Sadly I discovered that if I continued to invest as I had been, in about nine years I’d be living under a bridge! This happened on a Saturday. On the following day, serendipitously, an article appeared in the paper, written by Jim Russell, then the financial editor for the Miami Herald. At the end of the article Russell mentioned that on the following Saturday the National Association of Investors Corporation (NAIC) was to offer a seminar on how to evaluate common stocks. (NAIC is a nonprofit membership organization whose goal is to empower both investment club members and individual investors to invest successfully in common stocks.) That next Saturday my life radically changed. I spent four hours listening to Phil Keating, an investment professional and one of the 3,000-plus volunteers across the country who unselfishly donate their time to NAIC, talk about the organization’s methodology. Amazed at the method’s elegant simplicity and at the cross section of people who attended and learned (there were no rocket scientists there), I sat entranced. When I returned home that afternoon, I sat at my computer and entered all of the formulas and calculations I had just learned into a spreadsheet. By that night I was able to duplicate the tasks required to analyze a stock for prospective purchase. From then on I was hooked. I attended workshops, learned the methodology well enough to teach it, and then volunteered to instruct others. My computer spreadsheet became more and more elaborate until it grew into a program called Take $tock, which embraced the NAIC methodology and included a few embellishments of my own. Not long thereafter I was invited to join NAIC’s national computer organization, and NAIC asked me to let the organization market my software to its members. Take $tock was so successful that NAIC invited me to develop its own official software product, and the Investor’s Toolkit was born. Today about 50,000 investors use the toolkit, and each day another 20 to 30 join their ranks. I continue to serve NAIC, now about a 265,000-member organization, as a volunteer and as a frequent speaker at its events across the country. In 1999 I was privileged to be the closing speaker at both of NAIC’s national conventions. Whereas once I was concerned about how long I might live before my funds ran out, now I could live forever—at least in terms of financial security. And today I chalk it all up to what I learned from NAIC. Since the last writing, Inve$tWare Corporation, the company I founded and which served NAIC for so long, has merged with another company, ICLUBcentral of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that company now provides all of the stock analysis software and club accounting software used by NAIC’s members. I have written this book hoping that the hundreds of thousands of others who know no more than I did back in 1972 might learn how to “Take $tock” and be successful investors without having to experience the angst that I did. So that’s who I am and why you have this book in your hand. Education, after all, is nothing more than a jump start on experience. It allows us to learn from others’ experiences so that we don’t have to start from scratch. I hope that what I’ve written here will serve that purpose for you.