Thomas Peterffy on Interactive Brokers' Plan to Professionalize Prediction Markets

“The prediction market gives them an opportunity to gather experts around who are not afraid to put their money on the line and express what they think, and to collect a consensus opinion so that we all know what we can possibly expect if it's probably a better guest than what we individually could come up with.”

“We prefer to focus and concentrate on serious questions having to do with our clients' investments. Maybe some of them would like us to have sports, but we just don't want to distract them with that. We are choosing contracts that, in our minds have questions, the answers to which have serious economic consequences.”

“We are coming out at the end of May with a consolidated feed where contracts that exist on cellular platforms we will have consolidated so that when somebody comes to us interactive brokers to look at the market. We will give them the consolidated feed just like we do on stocks there. We always have the best feed on offer and we always provide best executions.”

“I'm in favor of not having any rules against insider trading. I would like all the information out there as soon as it's available, because look, as a society, we're better off knowing as soon as possible anything that is noble. Why don't we just do away with it and let the information come out as soon as possible.”

“I think that what will happen is that economists will begin to participate in the prediction markets, and instead of issuing their predictions, they will trade their own positions, and good ones will make a lot of money and bad ones we lose. For a trader and economist is very confusing because it depends on which one you talk to. The prediction markets cure that deficiency.”

“As a computer programmer, I look at it basically as a new higher level language that is much much, much, much more powerful than anything that came before, but qualitatively is not different than the way we went from machine language to assembler language to fort Run and Cobol and eventually C and all the other languages.”