When asked if IB was considering allowing bitcoin trading , he said no, not until he US Govt allows you to pay your taxes with it. He's worth 1000x what every poster here put together is worth , and trades anything and everything on TWS, but not BTC. Wonder why?
First of all, he himself does not trade anything, he’s a bookie. His success, while admirable is as much product of luck as his brains and hard work. Second of all, the fact the he personally does not like/understand some particular product(s) does not mean that there is no future for it. He’s a normal fallible human being. Lastly, he’s a stakeholder in the status quo and it’s in his best interest to steer the public opinion against anything that might threaten it.
He just doesn't want to be linked to a non-regulated exchange... probably creates unnecessary risks for the broker with minimal revenue... it's volatile as f^&ck and likely margin calls galore, which is something IB doesn't want, since they're very risk-averse compared to other brokers.
What margin calls, all you have to do it trade it cash only. If he thought it was legit, he could easily let you trade it through IB. He knows its a scam. Scam might blow up in a year, or never. Still a scam
Trading involves shorting... cash only doesn't matter, to short you will need some kind of margin. Unless you're advocating a long only rule... which doesn't agree with your idea that it's a scam... But hey, in the mean time... Herbalife is also touching all-time highs.... scams-galore! That's the problem with a bubble... they are all completely different... and nobody knows when they pop. But pop they will
Interactive brokers allow access to GBTC on US exchanges and Bitcoinxb on the Swedish exchange so you can already trade bitcoin in your account.
So basically inventing electronic trading and an option market making where he made his first billion using high level math before anyone else was luck? LOL indeed. I get the fascination with bitcoin but for a broker these days, I would think it would be an AML and regualtory nightmare. Do any regulated US brokers allow bitcoin trading on their platform?
Yeah, could you elaborate on that “high level math”, I never heard of it? As a general statement, its hard to overstate the role of luck when it comes to making it into the top X standard deviations. Brains, hard work, connections and all that good stuff will only take you thus far.
Google is a really cool tool. Try a search for Thomas Peterffy Black-Scholes. You'll get a quote like this from an interview: From there I moved to a commodity trading firm (a gold and silver trader by the name of Mocatta) and my job was to figure out how to price options. That was a very, very interesting job because in those days people were trading options by the seat of their pants because nobody understood the mathematics. And after a very long period of ruminating and running simulations on my computer, I eventually came up with a model that is very similar to what today is known as the Black-Scholes formula. Given the fact that I was the only one at the time who had that formula I saved my money. I bought a seat at the American Stock Exchange and I became a market maker. There is a ton of articles on his background. Here's another one: But working at night Peterffy had developed his own algorithms (similar to the Black-Scholes model) to determine the best price to buy each particular option and then brought cheat sheets with him to the floor. By 1979 he had four traders, all working off his models. and this Peterffy expanded his handhelds and algorithm-driven trading to exchanges across the country. "He was a very farsighted guy, probably the smartest guy in the securities business when I knew him on the American Stock Exchange," says Arthur Levitt Jr., who chaired Amex in the 1980s and the SEC in the 1990s.
LOL indeed. Various modifications/variations of the Bachelier formula were used in the options pits way before him, in the 20s (“delta sheets” was a common tool). There were a couple firms that have invented models that were pretty much identical to BSM was before too and kept it a secret. I am not denying that he is a smart guy, but he wasn’t the first one to do something in this business. Just like people who started Google weren’t the first search engine, just found a successful business model.