Dana Blankenhorn calls Charles Schwab the new kings of Wall Street:

The value of Schwab stock is practically unchanged since the start of the year. (I don’t own any but I do keep my money there.) In the present environment this is an immense achievement.

Schwab himself finally retired recently at age 70, for the second time. Hopefully the new guy, Walter Bettinger, whose former retirement planning outfit was acquired by Schwab in 1995, has learned the lessons and will stick to his knitting.

The reason you won’t hear about this on CNBC is precisely why Schwab is so strong. As with Seinfeld, this is a story about nothing.

Schwab doesn’t play with its customers’ money. It offers a selection of mutual funds, mostly index funds, and invests customer cash conservatively. It offers advice, but that advice is simply to diversify. It doesn’t make extra money if you take its advice, and it doesn’t make more if you don’t.

I like to call Schwab my "bookie" and that’s a pretty good description of the business model. Schwab doesn’t have a horse in the race. Schwab gets its vig no matter who wins.