Transcript

#402 Thomas Peterffy: The $80 Billion Founder Who Automates Everything

0:00 Before a few days ago, I didn't know who Tomas Petterfeet was, and I was shocked to learn that he's eighty one years old. Eighty billion dollars and he's built his hundred and twenty billion dollar company, Interactive Brokers. into one of the most efficient companies in the world. So for example In two thousand twenty four.

0:15 They generated three point seven billion in profits. on just five point two billion in revenue. And I discovered Petrophy by reading this incredible profile about him that was written by Colossus. And I actually Couldn't put it down and immediately called my friend Patrick, who's the founder of Colossus and I told him That I wanted to make an episode

0:32 on Pederfee's incredible life story. So that is what this episode is about. I want to get right into the profile. Which will be linked below. And is written by Dom Cook. And so Dom writes I'm at the hundred and eight million dollar Aspen House of Tomas Pederfee. Once inside I find Peterfi hunched over his chair.

0:49 His piercing eyes look up at me in confusion as I was introduced. I thought we were doing this over Zoom, he said. My stomach Dropped. Where have you come from? he asked.

0:59 London. That's crazy, he said. As if I'd come by boat. To a man who has spent the past sixty years automating as much of his business as possible. To the point where interactive brokers has seventy one percent profit margins. My journey to meet him was an absurd misallocation of resources.

1:16 Pederfee is the twenty third richest person in the world. He pioneered automated trading and built one of the largest options market makers on earth. He is the reason that you can trade stocks in your pajamas. His second act, Interactive Brokers is worth over a hundred billion dollars.

1:32 I was surprised that he was surprised that anyone would travel to hear his story. He settled down in his chair and began to explain how he got his start in life by By dragging a metal bathtub Through the rubb of post war Budapest. I was born during a Soviet bombing raid.

1:49 Petter Phi began. It was September thirtieth, nineteen forty four, and the Red Army was pushing into Hungary. He remembers nothing until he was five. by which time Hungary belonged to the communists and his father had vanished. Having divorced his mother and fled the country when Pederfee was two.

2:06 I often remember my mother crying. And I'd ask Mom, why are you crying? And she'd reply. We're going to starve to death. And she was dead serious about that.

2:16 At school, Pederfee had no hope. But his grandmother's library had survived the war. And through the nineteenth century French classics written by Balzac and Hugo and Zola, He learned about capitalism. I always wanted to make some money because we didn't have any, he said.

2:31 At twelve, he went into business with a classmate who returned from Austria with packets of gum. Pederfee took out a knife, cut each stick into five pieces, and worked the schoolyard until they were sold. The principle Upon hearing about his venture, confronted him. Where is your communist conscience, he said.

2:49 A year later he was organizing platoons of children to hunt for metal. In bombed out buildings. Seventy percent of Budapest had been hit during the war. And Hungary desperately needed steel. Signs throughout the capital offered to buy scrap by the pound.

3:04 Once we found a humongous metal bathtub which was incredibly heavy. It took eight of us all afternoon to drag it to the way station. But we got a lot of money for it. When Pederfee was twenty-one, through what he call a series of very, very lucky mistakes, he managed to secure a short term visa to West Germany. On the premise of visiting distant relatives.

3:25 From there he walked into the American consulate And apply to immigrate. When the papers came through, he bought a one way ticket to New York City. Each month throughout his childhood, A letter had arrived from America. This letter was from his father.

3:38 Pederfee paid little attention to the words. What interested him Was the envelope. And in particular the green stamp showing the statue of liberty. America had those stamps for something like thirty years, he said.

3:50 That was extremely effective advertising. On december twelfth, nineteen sixty five, he landed in New York. He remembers a building in the middle of the street. It was the New York General Building and it straddled the avenue as cars moved under its arches. He learned why it was there. The New York Central Railroad had dug beneath the avenue to lay the railway.

4:12 Then they use the space above to build its headquarters. For a young man who had grown up in a world defined by limits. The building was proof. That in America someone could take an established system And simply build over it.

4:29 He soon found work at a highway engineering firm earning sixty five dollars a week drawing roadmaps. He spent his days converting surveyors' field notes to Into highway drawings, plotting elevation changes, sight lines, and banking angles for new roads. Routine calculations could take up to twenty minutes. Yet in the corner of the office sat a three thousand dollar solution that nobody wanted to touch.

4:52 The Olivetti Programma one oh one weighed twenty pounds and looked like an oversized cash register. It was one of the first desktop computers. When Pederfee volunteered to tackle the unused machine, nobody objected. I figured it would be easier to learn than English, he said. The computer performed basic arithmetic and printed results on paper receipts. It could also store simple programs.

5:15 The first night Peterfi took the manual home and he was relieved to find it contained only a hundred English words. The rest was equations and diagrams. The machine's logic immediately appealed to him. Break each calculation into steps, record those steps on a card, feed the card into the slot. Enter the surveyor's numbers and receive an answer.

5:37 Pederfee began writing his first programs when a card finally worked. He labeled the function and added it to his growing stack. Within weeks, he had built a library of programs for the office's most common calculations, what had taken twenty minutes by hand. now took thirty seconds So, this idea of using technology to automate and improve your work is exactly what the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp, does. Ramp has an obsession.

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6:32 Get started by going to ramp.com. So let's go back to the story. Each morning, draftsmen formed a line at Pederfee's desk. as the machine chattered away next to him. It's printer unfurling solutions to his colleagues' problems. I was very proud of myself, Pederfee said. And so at this point he's just working for an engineering firm. There's a series of people that he's going to meet that is going to change the trajectory of his life. The first one was a fellow Hungarian. When someone mentioned Janos Arani, a Hungarian who's making money helping Wall Street firms learn how to use computers.

7:02 Pederfi went to Oranny's office and asked for work. The consulting work introduced Pederfi to finance. Most clients wanted the same reports that compared securities across various metrics like price to earnings book value and earning growth rates. Pederfee wrote programs and waited as the machine hummed and clicked through the calculations. The results emerge.

7:20 He organized them into folders and then delivered them to the clients each week. And so then Arani's going to introduce him to another person that's gonna change the trajectory of his life. One day Irani mentioned an unusual client. Айодис кразі психиатріст. Who wants to do some computer work, you should meet him. That psychiatrist was doctor Henry Jerecki.

7:40 A former Yale professor who had left medicine to establish the American operation of Makata and Goldsmith. One of the world's leading bullion trading firms. Pederfi arrived at Gerechy's office armed with a book called Gold. That he had been using to learn about commodities. Gerecki explained his observation that the price of silver was volatile.

8:02 But stayed within defined boundaries. He wanted somebody to write a program that could model what would happen if they bought every downtick. And sold every uptick. Profiting From Silver's nervous energy.

8:16 To answer Gerecki's question, Pederfe needed data. So he goes down to Comics, which is the commodity exchange, and this is what he finds. He found a prehistoric setup. Reporters seated in a circular pit dictating prices through radio headsets to clerks on scaffolding. Who scrawled numbers on the walls. A day's end.

8:35 The prices were copied to paper. So once I learned about Tomas Peterf not only did I read This profile but I read every interview I could find with him. And every other profile about him. And in another profile I discovered one of the most important sentences

8:49 that I think is key to understanding Petterphy and what makes him personally interesting to me. And he said on Wall Street, I feel like I'm Alice in Wonderland. Nothing makes sense. Everything is mixed up and different. than the way that I think it should be.

9:05 And so Petterfee's assignment's very simple. Trade silver and try to make money. And Pederfee has no idea how to do this. He says, I had a horrible time. How do you decide when you're gonna buy? And how do you decide when you're gonna sell? He had no framework for decisions. No system beyond intuition that he did not possess. Jureki also had a larger vision, but we will see not as large a vision as Petterphy had. Gerechi wanted his nascent business to become a boulion dealer, quoting continuous silver and gold prices to banks and traders in New York, London, and Hong Kong.

9:34 The exact problems that a computer could solve Best. Peterfi designed the system from scratch. So there's another quote. In one of these other profiles that I read about Petterphy. Where he's he talks about that he does not consider himself a traitor.

9:47 He says, I'm a computer programmer, and so are all the most important people in my company. So it says Pederfee designed the system from scratch. Peterfee's programs ran the data through proprietary equations and printed fresh Bid ask quotes on green bar paper. Runners then grab the sheets and race them to the trading pit. Where clerks gave live prices through hand signals.

10:09 Other firms relied on their traders' intuition. Pederfee built a machine that ran on math. And so keep in mind what I'm about to read to you. He's saying this. In nineteen seventy one. He is twenty seven years old.

10:22 And he's giving an interview to Barron's magazine about this system. That he just created. It's gonna take him more than a decade and a half of trial and error to figure out how to do what he's saying he wants to do, which is А сун із електроник брай і суттуєць войс бокс. So we can answer the phone.

10:39 Staff will be able to go on a permanent vacation. His words reveal how clearly he saw the future. As Gerecki's company became one of the most powerful commodities firms in the world. Pederfe's influence group. By nineteen seventy six, he commanded a team of eighty programmers, one of the largest financial coding operations in the world.

10:59 And Gerechi began bringing him into meetings that had nothing to do with software. Gerecki never entered an important negotiation without him in rooms full of traders and executives. Gerecki would defer to Petterphy. But their partnership began to fracture later that year. When Pederfi visited the Chicago Board Options Exchange, traders were making prices out of thin air.

11:22 Bid ass spreads stretch two to three dollars wide. Inefficiencies That dwarfed anything. In the precious metals market. And as we're about to see, the mistake that Gerecki makes is trying to constrain Pederfee's what I would say obviously unlimited ambition. When Pedrofi proposed expanding into stock options

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12:40 So Gerecki does not want to expand in options, but Pederfee does. Pederfee had used his computer to invent a partial differential equation that priced options. Based on variables such as the underlying assets price. Volatility and the options time to expiration. He had been testing the formula inside of Drecky's company. Quietly.

12:57 on silver options and making money on almost every trade. That success made Jureki's refusal more frustrating. And this is so important. The importance of seeing somebody else succeed. Ін реалізін if they figured it out, I could too. Over seven years.

13:13 Pederfee had watched his boss become known as the Dean of the American gold market. When I asked what Gerechy had taught him. Pederfee didn't hesitate. He was a very well educated man, but he was a psychiatrist. He didn't know anything about markets. I realized.

13:26 If he can figure it out. So can I. He's another great quote and another profile about Jerecki. He says I learned uh he was talking about what he learned from him. He says I learned an immense amount about how markets worked. The best lesson was to not let my mind become clouded by conventional wisdom. For the first few decades of Peterfi's career, everybody thinks he's crazy.

13:46 They say over and over again that guy's mad his ideas are too strange. So Peterfee is going to leave Directory and start on his own in nineteen seventy seven with two hundred thousand dollars in savings. Peterfi left and bought a seat on the American Stock Exchange. for thirty six thousand dollars. So he's in the pit with all the other traders and immediately he's doing things his own way.

14:05 Pederfee had folded his computer generated sheets into precise squares and distributed them among his pockets. IBM went into his breast pocket, DuPont into his left trouser pocket. Another company in his back pocket, so on and so forth. When prices moved He would duck his head

14:20 Fish into the appropriate pocket. Consult his numbers. Then surface to make his bid. The other traders watch this performance with fascination and growing unease. That That sentence.

14:32 The meaning behind that sentence was repeated over and over again throughout his early career. Some of the stories in this profile are insane. Wait till we get to them. He was treating the trading floor like a chemistry experiment. People thought I was mad, he said. Again, something he hears over and over again, but he was comfortable enough trusting his own judgment.

14:49 And thought they were the mad ones. And so of course at the beginning of anything, you're gonna make a lot of mistakes. And so he actually loses half of his capital. He's trading his own money in a few minutes on a single bad trade that he is convinced uh was actually Or the result of insider trading. And so he starts to be a lot more careful and starts hedging every single trade. Between nineteen seventy seven and nineteen eighty two, Pederfee slowly rebuilt his capital one careful trade at a time.

15:11 He stuck religiously To his fair value sheets. And made sure to hedge all of his trades. He also began hiring others to execute his IDs. By nineteen eighty two, his operation had grown large enough to deserve a name.

15:24 Timber Hill. So this is his first company. The second one is going to be interactive brokers. That same year, Pederfee tore several ligaments in his knee through a series of accidents. He found himself unable to stand on the trading floor for long periods. Confined to his office, Petrophy spent hours watching his quatron machine. A beige box that pulled up one stock price at a time.

15:47 over a dedicated phone line. He asked Clotron to sell him the data feed. And when they refused He helped himself. Cutting the wire.

15:56 And attaching An oscilloscope. I had to look this up. An a scope Is an electric test instrument. That visually displays the variation of voltage over time. So listen to this.

16:07 I wanna buy your data. You say no. And says he helped himself. Essentially hacked the system, cutting the wire and attaching the oscilloscope. The oscilloscope scat on sat on his desk. Like a small television with a grid hashed over its face. When he attached the probes to the severed line, green traces swept across the screen. Displaying the electrical pulses carrying each stock price. This

16:28 Is insane. Every number. Had its own signature in spikes and dips. He studied the patterns. Matching each trace to the prices appearing on his quotron.

16:39 Maybe They were right. He this is he he was like a he was a mad scientist, or he is a mad scientist. Soon his computer was being fed price changes across the entire market in real time. This is the early nineteen eighties. With that stream of data, his algorithms could spot profitable options trades.

16:57 Faster than anyone else. But he still needed humans to execute the instructions on the floor. Which meant dealing with the specialists Who controlled order flow. And in that clubby world

17:10 Peterphy was not one of the boys. His solution was calculated. He hired six Tall. beautiful women to trade for him.

17:20 The specialist who had ignored his bids suddenly fought to fill his new employees traits. Which Petterphy was delivering by phone. Everybody loved the women, he said. We were making money hand over fist. And so there's I know Dom Cook, the the writer of This profile.

17:38 And so I asked Dom to send me as much background information on pedophy as possible to help me make this episode. There is a story that did not make it in the profile, which is nuts, and it's exactly It's about This time in Peterfee's career. So it says in nineteen eighty two, Pederfee was out to dinner on the Upper East Side with a friend.

17:56 When they walked into the restaurant, three men at a table near the entrance spotted his friend and invited them over. All three of the men sitting at the table. Worked in show business. Peterphy knew none of them. One was Aaron Russo, the film producer, another was Melvin Van Peebles, the filmmaker.

18:12 Russo turned to Pederfi, so what do you do? Pederfee explained that he was a traitor. But that he had injured his knee and couldn't stand on the floor anymore. So he hired attractive women to execute his trades. They took instructions over the phone and relayed them to specialists on the exchange floor.

18:26 You mean anybody could do this? Russo asked. Pederfee shrugged. Theoretically, yes. Russo put his hand on Van Peeble's shoulder, the filmmaker, okay? You mean Melvin here could do it. I think so.

18:39 I'll make you a ten thousand dollar bet, said Russo. You hire Melvin. If he lasts a year, I'll pay you. Peterfee agreed. Melvin went through Timber Hill's two week training course, learning to take Petropice instructions and relay orders to specialists.

18:53 Then he was sent to the American stock exchange floor. Where he quickly gained popularity. He spent a full year trading for Timber Hill and did a fantastic job. Head or feet. Collected Russo's ten thousand dollars. Here's the insane part.

19:07 A year later, Russo produced the movie Trading Places. Starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd. Which is about a wealthy broker and a street hustler. Whose lives are switched as part of a bet. By two rich financiers.

19:23 The film Earned a hundred and twenty million dollars in its first year. That takes place exactly where we are in the story. Back to the story. The honeymoon ended. When the specialists finally grocked what was going on.

19:35 They delivered an ultimatum. If Pefferty wanted to keep trading, he would have to become a market maker. Maintaining constant bid and offer prices instead of cherry picking only the most profitable options to trade. Market making required split second responses to price movements. But his traders took their orders from algorithms running in his office.

19:54 How could they make markets without direct access? And as he does with almost every problem throughout his career, he comes up with a novel solution in nineteen eighty three, twenty seven years. before Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad. Pederfee invented the first handheld trading computer. He built rectangular boxes each about the size of a hardcover encyclopedia.

20:13 Inside were rows of transistors and circuit boards powered by a crude. Touch screen. Each morning, Petterfi lined up the devices along his desk, plugged them in, and uploaded fresh market data and options prices. Then he handed them off. On the floor when specialists demanded quotes.

20:28 His traders glanced at their screens. Answered with prices. And tapped again to log the traits. But the cycle required constant feeding. After five trades, the devices had to be updated. The clerks would sprint the two blocks between the American stock exchange floor and Pederfee's office.

20:44 Carrying the computers in satchels. He would upload the trades, recalculate exposures, feed in new prices, and then send them racing back. The American Stock Exchange reluctantly agreed to allow the devices. But when he attempted to bring the tablets to the Chicago Board Options Exchange, the response was unequivocal. They actually passed a rule that analytical devices may not be used on the trading floors, Pederfee said. I mean, how can you say such a thing?

21:11 In nineteen eighty five, Petterfire turned to the New York Stock Exchange struggling options division. They were hungry. For volume and open to concessions. Pederfee's devices were banned in the pits, but he could install monitors. So long as they were mounted along the back wall of the trading floor. Thirty feet from the action. So

21:29 There's so many times when you're reading this profile. We just realize that one of his gifts is created because of the absurdity of these arbitrary rules that are constantly put upon him. Pederfi has to successfully navigate multiple different environments full of arbitrary illogical rules. And so they throw up another impediment and he figures out a way to route around it. The distance made real time trading impossible. I was desperate at this time, Pederfe said.

21:54 That weekend at his house he sat alone on his kitchen table, staring into a mug of colored pencils. He pick one up and set it back down. Red, then green, then blue. What if each digit flashed as a color, he wondered. On Monday morning he rewrote the code, creating a psychedelic light show.

22:11 that his traders could read from across the room and put on that giant Screen that's thirty feet from the action. People took a day or two to learn the colors, he told me. There's actually a picture of this screen. In the profile. It looks incredibly confusing to me.

22:25 In nineteen eighty seven. Pederfee achieved what he had first dreamed of in nineteen seventy one. So that's sixteen years of trial and error. The first fully automated trading system in Wall Street history. His machines could now place trades without human intervention. An achievement made possible not on the floor of a traditional exchange, but through the NASDAQ.

22:47 A new quote driven network that operated without pits or clerks. And just screens and a central matching engine. Now the way he built the very first automated trading system in Wall Street history is going to be very familiar to you and I. He's going to hijack.

23:01 The data. So a Nasdaq employee who is making a routine visit to one of its fastest growing clients office. Sees that there's no human in sight. Unbeknownst to Nasdaq, Pederfee had hijacked the terminal's data line.

23:15 For most traders the terminal was just a screen and a keyboard. A way to type in orders one at a time. But Peterphy had wired it into his own computer, pulling live prices straight from the feed, running them through his algorithms, and sending trades back out through the same cable. The Nasdaq employee gave him one week to make it right. All trades, he insisted,

23:36 Had to be entered by a keyboard. And typed. One after another just like everyone else. And so go back to his quote about Alice in Wonderland. He says on Wall Street, I feel like I'm Alice in Wonderland. Nothing makes sense. Everything is mixed up.

23:49 And different than I think it should be. And so in Pedophy's view, he has Nasdaq trying to make his system worse. Listen to what he does here. This is this is probably the funniest thing that he ever does. This guy is so crazy. Pederfey and his team. Worked every night for a week. They mounted a camera above the terminal screen to read the prices.

24:06 Then built a frame of metal arms and tiny motors. Suspended above a keyboard. When the computer spotted a trade, signals fired through his invention. And the metal fingers began to type like a mechanical spider. When the Nasdaq man returned, he found an office transformed.

24:24 The suspicious silence was gone. Replaced by the violent percussion of automated typing. Pederphy's creation attack the keyboard in burst. Rad a tat? Pause.

24:36 Red a tat? Pause. Rata tat. Each sequence Spelling out buy and sell orders faster than any human could think.

24:45 Let alone tight. The employee watched in silence. And then left without a word. He did not like this one bit recalled Pederfee, who offered Who offered to install a mannequin operator complete with moving arms?

25:00 The system survived and despite a few hiccups, including a three million dollar loss. When a drafty door triggered phantades on a backup device. Timber Hill made twenty five million dollars that year. And fifty miljones the following year.

25:15 Remember, this is in the eighties. By the end of the decade. Pederfee's market making network stretched from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, then overseas to Frankfurt. London and Hong Kong. Goldman Sachs made repeated acquisition offers that climbed to as high as nine hundred million dollars.

25:32 Petrophy turn them all down. When pressed for his price. He said Three billion dollars. A quiet way of ending the conversation. He wasn't selling.

25:43 He was building his mousse hack yet. A platform That would give ordinary investors the same technological advantages he had created for himself. In nineteen ninety three, he launched Interactive Brokers. This is one of the craziest lines in the entire profile for the better part of the nineteen nineties.

26:01 Interactive brokers was an elegant solution to a problem that didn't yet exist. The infrastructure was ready. The technology was sophisticated, but the market, particularly in the United States, remained stubbornly analogue. Around the turn of the millennium the great automation of American exchanges began to accelerate. Nasdaq had been born electronic. But now the most traditional bound exchanges were surrendering.

26:25 Even the New York stock exchange was giving way to the home of computer servers. Wall Street was becoming a screen based business. The floor traders who had once mocked Pederfee's folded sheets and handheld computers Staring into obsolescence.

26:41 This worked to Pederfee's advantage. They knew that I was an honest business person and they needed a way to continue their business on a computer from their office. So they became our customers. And that is how interactive brokers became the broker For professional traders. As interactive brokers began its ascent.

26:59 Timber Hill entered in its twilight. The technological and analytical revolution that Peterfi had pioneered. was evolving beyond his original vision. To become a speed contest. By the mid two thousand, market makers like Citadel were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on microwave towers.

27:16 and fiber optic cables in a bid to shave microseconds off execution times. Timber Hill. was left with their exhaust fumes. When I asked why someone who had spent his entire career Pushing technological boundaries suddenly refuse to push further.

27:33 Pederphy first offered a practical explanation. I thought it would cost me billions of dollars, he said. Before something more honest emerge. I also felt that I knew everything there is to know about market making. It was not interesting to me anymore.

27:48 His eyes then brightened as he continued. But how to build the best platform for people to trade. That was a challenge. In May two thousand seven, when Pederfee took Interactive Brokers public. Timber Hill still generated eighty percent.

28:02 of the company's revenue. The IPO wasn't about raising capital, he owned close to a hundred percent of the business. Having built it with Timberhill's cash flow. We needed advertising for interactive brokers, he said. I thought it would put the company's name in the public domain.

28:19 And so when he says putting your company name in the public domain, he's talking about advertising. He's talking about marketing and the best marketing and advertising is storytelling. That is exactly what my partner, Collateral, does. Learning to tell a story is incredibly important because that's how the money works. The money flow as a function of the stories. And that is where collateral comes in. Collateral transforms your company's complex ideas into compelling narratives. Collateral crafts institutional grade marketing collateral, and they do this for private equity, private credit, real estate, venture capital, family offices, hedge funds. Oil and gas companies, all kinds of corporations. I have friends that have used collateral for their marketing collateral and have raised billions of dollars of capital.

28:55 And have made hundreds of millions of dollars. Make sure you go to collateral dot com. and improve the way that your company tells its own story. Storytelling is one of the highest forms of leverage and you should invest heavily in it. And you can do that by going to collateral dot com. So now we go back to Pederfee taking his company public.

29:13 And of course he's going to do it in his own way. Rather than pay the substantial fees demanded by investment banks, he chose a Dutch auction. And hired an obscure firm. to list ten percent of his business. This saved him eighty miljonar.

29:28 It also meant No road show. He then kept building. By twenty seventeen, interactive brokers had so thoroughly eclipsed Timber Hill that That Petterfi shut down the market making operation entirely. Ending a forty year run.

29:44 That had once made it the world's largest options market maker. What remains is a tightly engineered machine. A peer play brokerage with four million customers, over seven hundred billion in client assets, and just three thousand employees. Most of them engineers. In two thousand twenty four it generated three point seven billion in profits on five point two billion in revenue.

30:09 The company he took public at a twelve billion dollar valuation is now worth over a hundred and twenty billion. The firm runs on Pederfee's original premise. Automate everything. That ethos drives the business to charge fees so low. That rivals no longer try to compete on price. Interactive brokers remains the platform of choice for hedge funds and professional traders.

30:32 What's the secret, I asked, as our discussion wound down. It's all common sense, Pederfee said. Hard work and common sense is my story. I brought up Costco, a comparison that investors like to make. Both companies are built on the radical notion that you can make more money by charging less.

30:49 Peterfi replied. I've never been to Costco, he said. I've never read a business book. In two thousand nineteen on his seventy fifth birthday. He stepped down as CEO.

31:00 But retirement is out of the question. He's eighty one. Chairman of Internet Architect Brokers still owns nearly seventy percent of the business. And said he's sort of running the sales and marketing department because nobody wants to do it. I really know nothing about it, he said.

31:15 So I'm learning as I go. When I asked him what he's most proud of, he thought for a moment. the money that we save people in getting markets to be more efficient. Then Petrophy suddenly straightened. I hadn't checked the markets, he said, turning towards his screen.

31:29 We're up a buck forty four, he announced. Not bad. I stood up. Thanked him for the time. And let myself out of the house.

31:35 Doing the math in my head. During the three hours we talked. Pederfee had made. One point seven billion.