Film producer Aaron Russo bet Tomas Peterffy $10,000 that filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles couldn't last a year as a trader. Van Peebles succeeded, and Russo, inspired by the experience of a novice thriving in finance, produced the movie "Trading Places" a year later, based on the premise.
Owning nearly 100% of his cash-flow-positive company, Tomas Peterffy took Interactive Brokers public purely for advertising purposes. He viewed the IPO as a way to get "the company's name in the public domain" and even used a Dutch auction to save $80 million on banking fees.
Peterffy saw Wall Street's manual, intuition-based systems as nonsensical. This outsider's perspective, viewing the industry as an illogical 'Wonderland,' allowed him to identify and exploit massive inefficiencies with technology and math, even when others thought his ideas were crazy.
Despite building Timber Hill into the world's largest options market maker, Tomas Peterffy shut it down. He pivoted to Interactive Brokers because the market-making game became an uninteresting speed contest, while the challenge of building the best trading platform for others remained compelling.
When NASDAQ mandated that all trades be entered manually via keyboard, Peterffy didn't argue. Instead, he built a mechanical spider with metal fingers to automatically type orders onto the keyboard, satisfying the letter of the absurd rule while preserving his automated system's efficiency.
Peterffy saw his boss, a psychiatrist with no market background, become a gold trading expert. This observation, combined with his boss's refusal to expand into new areas, gave Peterffy the confidence to leave and start his own firm, believing "if he can figure it out, so can I."