Who is Ross Jardine?

Welcome to my blog! My name is Ross Jardine and I've been teaching and training individual investors for over a decade on how to take control of their personal investments and profit in any kind of market conditions. My introduction to investing came in the form of working in the commodities brokerage business as a fresh graduate right out of college in 1987. I was instantly hooked. While I loved investing and being a broker, I struggled with the obvious conflicts of the brokerage business and decided to pursue my passion from the "other side of the phone."

I'm an individual investor just like you. I've been active in the markets for over 20 years and teaching and training others how to succeed is my life's mission. My life took a dramatic turn in 1994 when I was introduced to the internet by a friend and neighbor. I can still remember leaving his office that day after seeing the online world for the first time and feeling like I had just been let in on the greatest secret in the world. I instantly realized this new technology would change the way business was done forever. I knew I either had to jump in or it would pass me by and I'd look back years later and say, "I wish I would have gotten involved in that earlier."

I decided to take my own business to the web. I created and marketed sports collectibles for the NFL, Indy 500, Kentucky Derby and America's Cup. My big claim to fame was minting the commemorative coin that was tossed at the start of the Super Bowl each year. It was just a few months before the Super Bowl when I discovered the internet. Coincidentally, I had just returned from a trip to Miami where the game would be played where I had the opportunity to meet the members of that year's Super Bowl host committee.

On a wild lark, I called my contact in Miami and asked if I could build a website for the Super Bowl. He said they had no money left, so I offered to do it all for free. After a few days he called back and gave me the green light. I was able to register the name superbowl.com because nobody had it. (that's a whole story in itself I'll save for another day)

We built a simple website in less than a week with all the info on the big game and an online store where fans could buy my coins as well as all the shirts, hats and programs that would be sold at the game. I set up a drawing for two tickets that I bought from a scalper and started promoting it all over the net. It was a huge success. We got over a million hits, which made us one of the busiest websites on the internet that year. But more importantly, I sold tons of coins, shirts, hats and programs to fans all over the world. I like to think I was doing ecommerce before the term was even created.

I used my success as a springboard to teach other business owners how to do business online. I offered them training and a place to put their electronic storefront. I called the business iMall and it was one of the first and most successful online shopping sites on the internet.

I soon found myself, almost by accident, travelling the country speaking in seminars on how to do business online. I ultimately sold my business to a seminar company who later sold it to Excite@Home for hundreds of millions of dollars in stock.

That experience of being a pioneer in online business exposed me to my next passion, seminars. People were starving for the knowledge to get on a path to financial independence. Live seminars were a perfect way to deliver that training. I had never done any public speaking in my life, but after overcoming the natural fears of being in front of a crowd, I fell in love with it. I love speaking and teaching. My friends used to kid me that they could put in a quarter and I could speak for 8 hours.

I decided to team up with a good friend, Scott Elder, who had helped me with my iMall business and create a new training business that was unlike anything anyone had done before. As a result of the tremendous success of my iMall business I now had more time and money to pursue my passions and that brought me right back to investing. I wanted to create seminars that really provided great value for the time and money people spent to attend them.

At that time investing online was in it's infancy. Everyone wanted to learn how to invest in the stock market. The tools and information that was now available online was far superior to anything I had access to just a few short years earlier as a broker. Unfortunately it was tough for the average person to make sense of all the information and tools that were out there. Quite simply, people were drowning in information and still starving for knowledge.

I taught Scott a few of the strategies I was using to manage my own money and showed him some of the tools that I had discovered online that made the process and decision making fast and easy. Scott made more money after a few weeks doing it himself than his broker had made for him in over ten years. He was hooked.

We decided that it was time to take this simple process to the masses of people searching for information on how to invest online. We started a new seminar business called "Online Investors Advantage." That was 1997 and we were right in the midst of the dot com boom and the stock market was on everyone's mind. Our business was a huge instant success. We revolutionize the industry by offering one of the first "money back" guarantees in the seminar business. If someone didn't think our training was worth the time and money they spent to attend, they could simply turn in their stuff at the end of the class and get 100% of their money back. If we didn't deliver value for the money, we would have been out of business the first week. Nobody at that time had the guts to offer such an amazing guarantee, but we knew our training could potentially create a return for our students many times the price of tuition, and we were right.

Within a few years we had taught tens of thousands of investors how to use our simple process and powerful tools to take control of their investments. We conducted seminars in over 20 countries around the world, including Australia, Dubai, England, Singapore, Hong Kong, Guam, and South Africa. It was so rewarding to meet thousands of individual investors from every walk of life and see their lives change as they learned to invest and started to see the fruits (profits) of their new found knowledge.

At the peak of the dot com bubble we were acquired by a small internet holding company. Our hope was to have the millions of dollars in profits we were earning be rewarded with the crazy multiples that were being lavished in the stock market on companies like Yahoo and Amazon and many others, most of which were still not making a dime. It was a great plan, but the dot com bubble burst a year later and the entire stock market slid into one of the worst bear markets since the great depression. While our business had enjoyed annual growth of 100% or more in our first three years, we were happy that we were able to sustain the business during a time when the many investors lost fortunes in a very challenging market.

During this same time the company that provided the technology and tools we used in our seminars, Telescan Inc. in Houston Texas, was on the verge of collapse and we were faced with the prospect of losing one of the key elements of our training programs, our website.

Over the course of the next year, we decided the best course of action would be to merge the two companies together, so in 2001 we created a new company called Investools and completed the merger between our company and Telescan. Our plan worked and we were able to survive the bear market with the same tools and training intact. Investools continued to flourish becoming a leader in the investor education industry. I'm very proud of what we created and the fact that we were able to touch so many people with our powerful training. Fortunately for us, the bear market soon ended and a new bull market took off and with it, the interest in investing began to grow again.

In 2003 I decided it was time for me to step back and simplify my life a little, so I resigned from Investools and spent the next couple years enjoying time with my wife and four wonderful kids doing some of the things we'd always dreamed of doing. We travelled the world, built a spectacular mountain retreat near Park City, and I played a lot of golf. I still kept active in the markets, but I retooled my approach to allow me to enjoy my new lifestyle without having to sit in front of a computer every day to track my investments. I learned a valuable lesson in my retirement, you can be an active investor AND have a great lifestyle too.

After a couple years away from the business I realized I still had a great passion for sharing my knowledge of investing and I also learned that you can only play so much golf, so I decided it was time to get back into the business of teaching investors how to succeed in today's challenging stock market. Together with my good friends Scott Elder and Mike Gillespie, we started a new business to teach investors the simple process and strategies that I had fine-tuned during my early retirement to help individual investors enjoy success in the markets without sacrificing their lifestyle. We called our new company Stock Investor.

We also started a second company to allow other companies to leverage our unique approach to training for their own methods and tools. We knew that the best way to teach an adult wasn't in a seminar where they get overloaded with the volume of information in such a short period of time. Most people are not able to remember much of what they learned in a seminar a few weeks after they return to their regular life with the responsibilities of work and family.

Our approach to training was to deliver the information in bite-sized chunks over a longer period of time with lots of practice in between lessons and a chance to review the material in a personalized session with an investing expert. It's a lot like how a person learns to play the piano. They have periodic sessions with their instructor with lots of practice in between and over time they begin to master the piano step by step. That's exactly how we teach people about investing and it works! If you haven't tried it, I'd like to teach you too.

In addition to creating a powerful new training program for Stock Investor, we also applied our unique training methodology to some of the biggest names in the world of investing, like Investors Business Daily, Zacks and OptionsXpress. Once again (for the third time in my life) I've got to enjoy the ride on a business rocket ship. It's been another great ride and thankfully it's still going.

Those who know me or have attended one of my seminars know that I'm hearing impaired. Unfortunately my hearing has deteriorated to the point that it's very challenging for me to conduct live seminars because I simply can't hear well enough. That's why I created a powerful new way to deliver my training. With the aid of modern technology, you can now bring me home and enjoy my powerful investor training programs in the comfort of your own home, at your own pace, and for a fraction of the price you would have to pay to get this level of training anywhere else in the world. Everyone wins. I get to continue doing what I'm passionate about and you get the training you need to make money in today's challenging markets.

Through this blog I'm going to periodically share some of my insights and opinions on the markets. I'll share a few of my favorite strategies for making money that I've learned over the years and help you discover how you can use them to get on the path to financial security. Investing isn't easy, but it's not as hard as most people make it out to be. I'm often asked why I do this? Why not just stay home and do my own investing, play golf and not worry about anything else.

Honestly I could do that, but I choose to do both. You see with my simple and fast 3-step approach to investing I can enjoy a wonderful blessed life AND teach you how to have it too. It's not a question of either/or as many might think. I hope you benefit from my insights and experience and you get some small measure of the success that I've been able to enjoy for yourself and your family. There is no better job than being an investor, but it's still just the best part-time job you could ever have.

If you're ready to get started, check out stockinvestor.com and I'll give you your first lesson for free. Maybe the next life I'll change for the better will be yours!

Happy Investing.

Ross