Finance History | Interactive Brokers — The Handheld Boxes Allowed onto the Amex Floor
· 1983-11
Unreviewed contributionBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Finance History | Interactive Brokers — The Handheld Boxes Allowed onto the Amex Floor
kevin
People treat commission-free apps as the start of electronic trading.
The argument was settled on this floor three decades earlier, with a box the size of a hardcover book.
In 1977 Thomas Peterffy left Mocatta Metals and paid $36,000 for an individual seat on the American Stock Exchange.
He had saved about $200,000 and began making markets in equity options.
The next year he formed T.P. and Co. In 1982 he renamed it Timber Hill, after a road to a property he kept in Woodstock, New York.
Fair-value sheets on the Curb were still printed once or twice a day.
Peterffy wrote the models in his head on the floor and coded them after hours.
By 1983 he was pulling Quotron pulses in an upstairs room and telephoning fills down to the pit.
The exchange did not want computers on the floor.
In November 1983 it let Timber Hill carry battery-powered handhelds with touch screens.
An assistant had been running prices over from an office in the World Trade Center until the devices were allowed inside.
Competitors complained that the first black Mylar boxes had sharp edges in a crowded pit.
The next version was rounded, like a lunchbox.
The machine took a stock price and returned option values, then kept the book.
Interactive Brokers was added in 1993 as the public broker-dealer on top of Timber Hill's market-making.
The group listed on Nasdaq on 4 May 2007.
The trading floor at 86 Trinity Place closed after NYSE Euronext bought the Amex in 2008.
The limestone building is still there.
Photo: Tdorante10, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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