Nearly a decade ago, at the height of the dotcom bubble, I joined a band of my fellow Vancouver Island schoolteachers in a quest for riches. We formed an investment club, pooled our money and started to buy Internet stocks. We thought we were canny investors speeding down the highway to wealth.

In fact, we were drunks careening along the edge of a cliff called Nasdaq. When the market crashed, we fell and fell. Then we fell some more. Rock bottom didn’t come until our account dropped 60% below what we had initially invested.

Our story could have ended there. We might have resolved never again to touch the stock market. We might have gone back to sticking our money in GICs and bank accounts.

But we didn’t. Once our groans subsided, we decided to get a lot smarter about how we invested. We eventually crawled our way back to profitability. By 2004, we had caught up with the S&P 500 index of blue-chip U.S. stocks. Since then, we’ve pulled farther and farther ahead.

Smart investing isn’t easy. It is, however, more straightforward than you think. Let me explain how we turned around our portfolio — and how you can too.

Our investing club was started by Grant, an intense math teacher. After watching the market surge in the craziness of the late ’90s, he decided to cash in his underperforming mutual funds. He told his financial adviser, “I think I can beat you on my own.”

To join him in his assault on the stock market, Grant recruited 14 of his fellow teachers. We were a diverse lot: four women and 10 men who taught subjects ranging from English to physics. Two of us were just starting out; two others were on the verge of retirement. What we shared was a burning desire to make bucket loads of money.

In 1999, as we started our careers as investors, our ambitions seemed reasonable. Every stock we bought shot upward and our fellow teachers dubbed us the Millionaires Club. We trumpeted our success in the staff room and we subjected our less fortunate peers to play-by-play details of our big wins with stars such as Nortel Networks, Global Crossing and JDS Uniphase.

The staff room had the last laugh. About a year after we launched the club, the dotcom bubble began to deflate. It burst in late 2000. Rather than winding up rich, we wound up bitter, embarrassed — and poorer than we had been two years earlier.