Thomas Peterffy

“70% of Budapest had been hit during the war, and Hungary desperately needed steel.”

“What had taken 20 minutes by hand Now took 30 seconds.”

“I'm a computer programmer, and so are all the most important people in my company.”

“As soon as this electronic brain is hooked up to its voice box so it can answer the phone, staff will be able to go on a permanent vacation.”

“By 1976, he commanded a team of 80 programmers, one of the largest financial coding operations in the world.”

“Peterfi had used his computer to invent a partial differential equation that priced options based on variables, such as the underlying assets price, volatility, and the options time to expiration.”

“So Petrfi is going to leave Jarecki and start on his own in 1977 with 200,000 dollars in savings. Peterfi left and bought a seat on the American stock exchange for 36,000 dollars.”

“And so he actually loses half of his capital. He's trading his own money in a few minutes on a single bad trade that he is convinced was actually, or the result of insider trading.”

“He essentially hacked the system, cutting the wire and attaching the oscilloscope.”

“He hired six tall, beautiful women to trade for him. The specialists who had ignored his bids suddenly fought to fill his new employees' trades.”

“In 1983, 27 years before Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad. Peterfi invented the first handheld trading computer.”

“They actually passed a rule that analytical devices may not be used on the trading floors, Peterfi said.”

“On Monday morning, he rewrote the code, creating a psychedelic light show that his traders could read from across the room and put on that giant screen that's 30 feet from the action.”

“In 1987, Peterfi achieved what he had first dreamed of in 1971, so that's 16 years of trial and error. The first fully automated trading system in Wall Street history. His machines could now place trades without human intervention.”

“Timber Hill made twenty-five million dollars that year, and fifty million dollars the following year.”

“Goldman Sachs made repeated acquisition offers that climbed to as high as nine hundred million dollars. Peterfee turned them all down. When pressed for his price, he said three billion dollars, a quiet way of ending the conversation.”

“The IPO wasn't about raising capital. He owned close to a hundred percent of the business having built it with Timber Hills cashflow.”

“Rather than pay the substantial fees demanded by investment banks, he chose a Dutch auction and hired an obscure firm to list 10% of his business. This saved him eighty million dollars.”

“A pure play brokerage with four million customers, over seven hundred billion in client assets, and just 3000 employees, most of them engineers. In 2024, it generated 3.7 billion in profits on 5.2 billion in revenue. The company he took public at a twelve bill…”

“In 2019 on his 75th birthday, he stepped down as CEO, but retirement is out of the question. He's 81, chairman of Interactive Brokers, still owns nearly 70% of the business”

“During the three hours we talked, Peterfee had made 1.7 billion.”