You know how you curb illegal insider trading? Well, according to this one mega-rich billionaire: legal insider trading.
In an interview on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, Thomas Peterffy, the founder and chairman of Interactive Brokers Group, argued that trying to stop the practice is futile, so you should let everyone do it and allow asset prices to correct themselves over time instead. He didn’t frame it as a naked ploy to allow kleptocrats to further enrich themselves, but as a legitimate boon to larger society.
“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,” Peterffy said on the podcast. “Because look, as a society, we are better off knowing as soon as possible anything that is knowable.”
The effrontery of Peterffy’s remarks can’t be overstated. His company owns and runs ForecastEx, a prediction market that lets you place bets on the outcomes of real-world events, including elections and economic indicators.
Prediction markets have faced heightened public and regulatory scrutiny for being potential hotbeds of insider trading, including, it’s widely suspected, by individuals in power. And some like Polymarket, which fields a wider range of topics than ForecastEx, have been criticized for allowing its users to profit off of all kinds of human suffering like nuclear conflict and the war in Iran.
Insider trading on these platforms gained national attention in January, when an anonymous, brand new account on Polymarket walked away with more than $400,000 after placing a large bet that Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro would be ousted by the end of the month, just hours before US troops invaded the country and abducted him. The timing and size of the bets raised questions over whether a military or government insider profited off the intervention.
The issue was brought back into the spotlight this week with reports that a cluster of over 50 new Polymarket accounts placed highly specific bets on a prediction that the US and Iran would reach a ceasefire agreement on April 7, right before the agreement was announced that evening. The bets were made despite president Donald Trump escalating his threats against Iran, ominously warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if the nation’s leaders didn’t comply with his demands. One account cashed out for a profit of over $200,000, according to the Associated Press. Another account created just twelve minutes before Trump announced the ceasefire made out with $48,500.
Peterffy didn’t comment directly on these suspicious bets, but the way he presented his argument suggested he’d be okay with all this happening out in the open. He gave an example of a hypothetical merger: “the secretaries, the lawyers, everybody knows about it. They go home, they tell their wives, their husbands. So it eventually always filters out,” he said on the podcast. “Why don’t we just do away with it and let the information come out as soon as possible?”
Bad actors are already taking advantage of inside information, he added, so it’s best to get the information out sooner so the “sharks” have fewer chances to profit. In his view, it should be every insider trader for themself. “Don’t rely on national laws to protect you,” he said on the Bloomberg podcast. “Protect them yourself.”
Peterffy, incredibly, admitted he’d been duped by insider trading back when he was an options trader in the 70s. “I was really traumatized. I lost $90,000 and it was horrible,” he said. “But I still say to you that I think the best thing we could do about inside information is just to get the news out there as fast as possible and forget about persecuting people.”
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