Interactive Brokers Founder Says Legalizing Insider Trading Would Make Markets More Fair

The post Interactive Brokers Founder Says Legalizing Insider Trading Would Make Markets More Fair appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

In May, the first ever “Enhanced Games” are happening in Vegas, where athletes will be able to compete openly without steroid tests.

Unrelated…

The founder of Interactive Brokers Group (NASDAQ:IBKR) Thomas Peterffy just made a case on the Odd Lots podcast that most people in finance would consider radioactive: legalize insider trading, across all markets, including stocks.

What makes it worth taking seriously is that Peterffy isn’t arguing from a position of ignorance. He personally lost $90,000 of his initial $200,000 capital to insider trading in 1977, when he bought DuPont options the day before expiration. Options he sold at $0.375 opened at $4.50 after a major earnings announcement and stock split broke. He was on the wrong side of it. And he still thinks the laws should go.

His argument, made to hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, cuts against the conventional wisdom:

As a society, we’re better off knowing as soon as possible anything that is knowable.

Thomas Peterffy, Odd Lots podcast

He contends that insider information “eventually always filters out” through secretaries, lawyers, and their families, making enforcement “very, very difficult and cumbersome.” The prohibition, in his view, doesn’t prevent exploitation. It just extends the window for it.

When the hosts pushed back on fairness and corporate secrecy concerns, Peterffy insisted legalizing insider trading would actually reduce the advantage of “sharks” because “you could be a shark for a second or two, but that’s it. Nowadays, sharks can be around for weeks and months.”

That’s the crux of it. Faster information dissemination compresses the exploitation window. Slower, legally enforced secrecy actually creates more time for well-connected players to position themselves before the rest of the market catches up.

Whether you buy that argument or not, it’s coming from someone who built one of the most efficient electronic trading platforms in the world. IBKR’s business model is literally premised on speed and automation. The stock is up 69% over the past year, and Q4 2025 pretax profit margin came in at 79% with customer accounts growing 32% year-over-year to 4.40 million.

For retail investors, Peterffy’s argument is worth sitting with. The current system prosecutes a handful of insider traders while information asymmetry remains pervasive. His counterintuitive claim is that sunlight moves faster than a subpoena, and markets would clear more honestly if the law stopped pretending otherwise.

I’m not sure I agree with him. But he has thought more about market structure than perhaps any other human in history.

He built a platform that processes 4 million daily average revenue trades and runs a 79% pretax margin. When someone with that track record makes a provocative structural argument, the intellectually honest move is to engage with it seriously rather than dismiss it on instinct.

And look, it only took 38 years from Kevin Nealon predicting what’s happening in Vegas for it to become a reality. If Peterffy’s idea strikes you as absurd now, let’s chat in 2064. Wonder if I can put some odds on that happening… have any tips worth sharing?

The post Interactive Brokers Founder Says Legalizing Insider Trading Would Make Markets More Fair appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..