Thomas Peterffy is the founder and chairman of Interactive Brokers, a Greenwich, Connecticut, online broker that gives investors access to many of the world's exchanges from one account. “We built a robot that types,” he told NPR in 2015, recalling how his firm answered Nasdaq’s rule that every order be entered through a keyboard. Read our review of Interactive Brokers.
Pricing Options by Computer on the Exchange Floor
He emigrated to the US from Hungary in 1965 and worked as a computer programmer.
In 1977 he bought a seat on the American Stock Exchange and traded equity options as a market maker, and he was among the first to price options with a computer model. In 1983 he built a handheld tablet computer for his traders on the exchange floor.
Wiring Computers to Nasdaq in 1987
In 1987 Nasdaq, then the first electronic stock exchange, had no trading floor, and orders were typed into a terminal. His engineers wired one terminal to the firm’s computer so that it could trade without a person, until a Nasdaq official told them the rulebook required every order to be entered through the keyboard. They had one week to comply, so they built a machine to do the typing. He described it to NPR in 2015: “they were rubber fingers that are typing.”
Building the Brokerage
Interactive Brokers was formed in 1993 to connect customers to the electronic exchanges his trading systems used. The company went public in 2007. Milan Galik succeeded him as chief executive in 2019, and he remains chairman.
