Founder of Interactive Brokers (IBKR.US): Predictive markets have huge growth potential

After Interactive Brokers (IBKR.US) had success in the U.S. presidential election, the company's founder Thomas Peterffy said that the market for predictions had "enormous" growth potential. The brokerage launched a prediction service ahead of the election last month, offering "prediction contracts" that give a yes or no answer to specific political outcomes, alongside other companies. Interactive Brokers said that since its launch, as of noon on November 6, the total volume of trading in its ForecastEx prediction market product for the presidential election was over $560 million.

"We have to approach these things with a realistic, rational attitude, and we do that by letting people participate in these markets and tell us what they think," Thomas Peterffy said.

Many prediction websites closely followed the possibility of Trump winning the presidential election, despite their predictions clashing with many polls. Thomas Peterffy said understanding the public's "consensus opinion" on problematic issues helped make future decisions. "It's a better way to run the world than the way we do it now, which is trying to guess," he said.