THE BROKER
"The computer doesn't care about your feelings. It doesn't care about tradition. It just finds the right price. That is why it always wins." — Thomas Peterffy
ONE
ESCAPE
EXT. BUDAPEST, HUNGARY - NIGHT (1956)
Chaos. Soviet tanks roll through the streets of Budapest. Buildings are on fire. Gunshots echo. The Hungarian Revolution is being crushed. In the crowd, YOUNG THOMAS PETERFFY, 12, runs with his mother through the streets, dodging debris and soldiers.
Budapest, Hungary. November 1956. The Soviet Union crushes the Hungarian Revolution. 200,000 Hungarians flee the country.
MOTHER
(pulling him along)
Thomas! Keep running! Do not look back!
They do not flee. Not yet. The Peterffys stay in Hungary. But young Thomas learns a lesson that will define his life: systems controlled by force are fragile. Systems controlled by information are unstoppable.
EXT. NEW YORK CITY, JFK AIRPORT - DAY (1965)
THOMAS PETERFFY, 21, steps off a plane at JFK. He carries a single suitcase. He speaks almost no English. He has $100 in his pocket. The immigration officer stamps his papers. Welcome to America.
New York City. 1965. Thomas Peterffy arrives in America. He speaks no English. He has $100.
IMMIGRATION OFFICER
Purpose of visit?
PETERFFY
(in broken English)
I... come... to work. To make... something.
IMMIGRATION OFFICER
(stamping his passport)
Good luck, kid. You'll need it.
PETERFFY (breaking the fourth wall)
I came to America because in Hungary, if you were smart, the state used you. In America, if you were smart, you could use yourself. I had no money. No connections. No English. But I had a brain that worked differently from other brains. I could see patterns. I could do mathematics in my head that other people needed calculators for. I did not know yet what this gift was worth. But I was about to find out.
INT. ARCHITECTURAL ENGINEERING FIRM, NEW YORK - DAY (1967)
Peterffy works as a draftsman. He is bored. He discovers the firm has an early IBM computer that nobody knows how to program. He teaches himself FORTRAN from a manual. Within weeks, he has automated several drafting calculations.
BOSS
Peterffy, how the hell did you do that? It would have taken three men a week.
PETERFFY
The computer does exactly what you tell it. The problem is that most people do not know how to tell it the right thing. I do.
INT. COMPUTER COMPANY OFFICE, NEW YORK - DAY (1973)
Peterffy now works for a technology company, programming financial models. A colleague shows him the Black-Scholes options pricing formula, just published. Peterffy stares at it. His eyes widen. He sees something that very few people on Earth can see at this moment: this equation can be computed by a machine, in real time, and whoever does it first will have an enormous advantage in options trading.
PETERFFY
(to himself, staring at the formula)
My God. This changes everything.
COLLEAGUE
It's just a formula. The traders on the floor can do it in their heads.
PETERFFY
No they cannot. They think they can. But they round. They estimate. They get emotional. A computer does none of these things. A computer computes the exact price, thousands of times per second, and it never, ever gets tired.
DISSOLVE TO:
TWO
THE PIT
INT. AMERICAN STOCK EXCHANGE (AMEX) TRADING FLOOR - DAY (1977)
The trading pit. Pandemonium. Men in colored jackets screaming, waving hand signals, scribbling on pads. This is how options have been traded for a century — by human beings, face to face, in a pit.
PETERFFY walks onto the floor for the first time. He has purchased a seat on the exchange. He looks at the chaos with the expression of an engineer inspecting an obsolete machine.
1977. Thomas Peterffy buys a seat on the American Stock Exchange. He begins trading options.
EARL
(a veteran market maker, looking Peterffy up and down)
Who the hell are you?
PETERFFY
Thomas Peterffy. I am a new member.
EARL
You don't look like a trader. You look like a math teacher.
PETERFFY
(a thin smile)
Good. Then you will not see me coming.
INT. PETERFFY'S APARTMENT, NEW YORK - NIGHT (1977)
A cramped apartment. Peterffy has set up an early personal computer. Wires everywhere. He is programming an options pricing model that incorporates Black-Scholes, volatility calculations, and real-time market data. He works through the night, every night.
PETERFFY
(V.O.)
The traders in the pit used intuition. They had years of experience. They could feel when a price was wrong. But feeling is not math. And math does not have bad days. I built a system that computed the fair value of every option on the exchange, in real time, and told me exactly when the market price deviated from the true price. Every deviation was profit. Every deviation was invisible to the human eye but glowing on my screen like a neon sign.
INT. AMEX TRADING FLOOR - DAY (1979)
Peterffy stands in the pit with a sheet of computer printouts. While other traders shout and wave, he calmly reads his printed prices and makes trades. He is making money. Consistently. Systematically. The other traders notice.
EARL
(to another trader)
That Hungarian kid is killing us. He's got some kind of cheat sheet. He knows the right price on every option before we can even calculate it.
CATHERINE
(a floor broker)
He's not cheating. He's computing. There's a difference.
EARL
Not to me there isn't.
INT. AMEX TRADING FLOOR - DAY (1983)
Peterffy arrives on the floor with a handheld computer — a custom-built device with a touchscreen, wirelessly connected to his pricing models. It is the first electronic trading device ever brought onto an exchange floor.
DAVID KRELL, the AMEX president, spots it immediately.
KRELL
(storming over)
Peterffy! What the hell is that device?
PETERFFY
It is a computer. It tells me the fair price of options.
KRELL
Computers are not allowed on the trading floor! This is a man's game, Peterffy. Hands and voices. That's how we trade.
PETERFFY
Show me the rule that prohibits it.
Krell sputters. There is no rule — because no one ever imagined someone would bring a computer to the floor.
KRELL
I'll write one. Give me twenty-four hours.
The exchange bans handheld computers. Peterffy responds by programming his computer to print trading instructions on paper, in green ink, and reads from the printouts. Technically, he is reading paper, not using a computer. The exchange is furious but powerless.
PETERFFY (breaking the fourth wall)
They banned my computer. So I printed the answers on paper. They banned the paper. So I memorized the answers. They could not ban my brain. Every time they wrote a new rule to stop me, I found a way around it. Not because I was a rebel. Because I was right. The computer was better than the human. And progress cannot be stopped by writing rules against it. It can only be delayed.
CUT TO:
THREE
THE MACHINE
INT. TIMBER HILL OFFICES, GREENWICH, CT - DAY (1993)
Peterffy has founded Timber Hill, an electronic market-making firm. The office looks nothing like a Wall Street firm. It looks like a NASA control room. Screens everywhere. No shouting. No paper. Just the hum of servers and the click of keyboards.
1993. Timber Hill becomes one of the largest electronic market makers in the world. Peterffy trades options on every major exchange simultaneously, using algorithms he wrote himself.
PETERFFY
(to a room of programmers)
The trading floor is dead. It just doesn't know it yet. Within ten years, every exchange in the world will be electronic. Our job is to be ready on day one of each one. If we are first, we win. If we are second, we lose.
INT. INTERACTIVE BROKERS OFFICES - DAY (1997)
Peterffy has launched Interactive Brokers, a brokerage that allows individual investors to trade electronically on exchanges worldwide. The interface is utilitarian. Functional. No frills. Just data, prices, and execution speed.
MARKETING VP
Thomas, the interface is... intimidating. Retail investors want something friendly. Something with graphics. Something that feels easy.
PETERFFY
I do not want retail investors who need graphics. I want serious traders who need execution speed and low commissions. If someone wants pretty pictures, they can use another broker. If they want the best price, they use us.
MARKETING VP
But the market for serious traders is small —
PETERFFY
The market for serious traders is every trader who has ever paid too much in commissions. Which is every trader on Earth. Build the best platform. The customers will come.
INT. NYSE TRADING FLOOR - DAY (2005)
The New York Stock Exchange trading floor. Once the epicenter of global capitalism. Now, it is half-empty. Electronic trading has replaced most floor operations. Peterffy visits as a guest. He walks across the floor he was once banned from. EARL, now retired, sits in the gallery watching.
EARL
(calling out)
Peterffy! You did this. You killed the floor.
PETERFFY
(stopping)
Earl. The floor was already dying. I just showed it the future.
EARL
The future is a bunch of computers in a room. No people. No shouting. No soul.
PETERFFY
(sitting beside him)
Do you know what trading commissions were when I started? $100 per trade. Now they are $1. Sometimes zero. The average investor saves thousands of dollars a year because of electronic trading. That money stays in their pockets. In their retirement accounts. In their children's education funds. The floor had soul. But the floor was expensive. And expensive hurts ordinary people more than it hurts people like us.
Earl says nothing. He stares at the nearly empty floor. He knows Peterffy is right. He hates that Peterffy is right.
INT. INTERACTIVE BROKERS HEADQUARTERS - DAY (2007)
Peterffy takes Interactive Brokers public. The IPO raises $1.2 billion. He retains majority control. The company processes millions of trades per day across 150 markets in 33 countries.
2007. Interactive Brokers IPO. Market capitalization: $12 billion. Thomas Peterffy's personal stake: $8 billion. The Hungarian refugee who arrived with $100 is one of the richest people in America.
CUT TO:
FOUR
THE REVOLUTION
INT. PETERFFY'S HOME, PALM BEACH - DAY (2020)
Peterffy, 76, sits at his home desk watching the GameStop short squeeze unfold. Retail traders on Reddit are using zero-commission brokerages to drive the stock price to absurd levels. The brokerages they are using — Robinhood and others — exist because Peterffy proved that electronic trading was possible. He is watching his own revolution eat itself.
PETERFFY
(watching the chaos, to himself)
I built the tools that made this possible. Zero commissions. Instant execution. Access for everyone. And now they are using those tools to manipulate prices. This is not investing. This is a casino. And I built the casino.
He goes on CNBC.
PETERFFY
(on CNBC)
The system came very close to breaking. If GameStop had continued to rise, the short sellers would have defaulted, the clearing houses would have been at risk, and we could have seen a cascading failure across the entire financial system. Electronic trading democratized markets. That was my life's work. But democratization without regulation is anarchy.
INT. INTERACTIVE BROKERS OFFICES - DAY (2023)
Peterffy tours the newest data center. Rows of servers. Fiber optic cables. The speed of light, harnessed for trading. He is 79 years old but walks the floor with the energy of a young engineer.
2023. Interactive Brokers processes over 3 million trades per day. Client assets exceed $400 billion. The platform operates in 150 markets across 33 countries.
PETERFFY
(to a young engineer)
When I started, trading was men shouting at each other in a pit. Now it is photons traveling through glass at 186,000 miles per second. The pit is gone. The shouting is gone. But the goal is the same: find the right price, faster than anyone else, and take the other side of the trade. The technology changes. The mathematics do not.
EXT. BUDAPEST, HUNGARY - DAY (PRESENT)
Peterffy returns to Budapest. He walks through the streets where he ran from Soviet tanks as a child. The buildings have been restored. Cafés line the Danube. Hungary is free, prosperous, transformed.
PETERFFY
(V.O.)
I left this city with nothing. No money. No language. No connections. I came to America and I found something that did not exist in communist Hungary: a market. A place where information is priced, where risk is traded, and where anyone — anyone — with a better idea can win. I did not just build a brokerage. I built a bridge between the old world and the new. Between human judgment and machine intelligence. Between the floor and the screen. And now the screen is everywhere. In every phone. In every hand. And any person, anywhere in the world, can do what only a few hundred men in a trading pit could do fifty years ago. That is the revolution. Not the technology. The access. The radical, transformative idea that markets belong to everyone.
He stands on the Chain Bridge over the Danube. The sun sets over the Parliament building. The boy who fled has come home.
FADE TO BLACK.
Thomas Peterffy is worth approximately $25 billion, making him one of the wealthiest people in America. Interactive Brokers processes millions of trades per day and is considered the most sophisticated electronic brokerage in the world. Peterffy pioneered the use of computers in options trading, electronic market making, and low-cost brokerage. He is widely regarded as the father of electronic trading. The open-outcry trading floors he competed against have largely ceased to exist. Peterffy still comes to the office every day. He still writes code. He still believes that the computer always finds the right price. And he still speaks English with a Hungarian accent.
THE END