Last week we looked at the rise of event contracts. One of the points there was that Robinhood was offering trading in these products via ForecastEx – a subsidiary of Interactive Brokers.
So who better to learn more about this new product than the team at ForecastEx?
We caught up with Steve Sanders, Vice President of Marketing and Product Development at Interactive Brokers to find out what the company has planned for what feels like it could ultimately be a large sub-sector of the trading industry.
How did ForecastEx come about? It looks like an initiative of Thomas Peterffy?
Yes, it was his idea. He’s had a number of successes in his life. He came over to the US with no money. He started an options market maker, which was incredibly successful. He then started his second endeavour, which was Interactive Brokers.
ForecastEx is his next brainchild. He is a believer that event contracts, not just for elections but for economics and other areas, are the future and that they’ll grow over time.
Two things are unique about this, which is the structure of the contract. One is the simplicity. So you have, for example, a $0.40 contract on an outcome like the election. You pay $0.40, you get $1.00 back. It’s something that’s very intuitive.
The other innovation was the nature of the underlying. We’ve never had things like the election before, but also economic events like the CPI or other events like climate change statistics.
One thing I wondered is how you make a market in these because the way they are structured is different to Polymarket. On Polymarket you can buy and sell one side of the contract. So I can buy and sell ‘yes’ contracts for example. ForecastEx does not allow that, right?
That’s half right, because on ForecastEx you can effectively have two different questions but about the same outcome. So you could use the two questions ‘will Trump be president’ or ‘will Kamala be president’ in the same way.
Maybe this is a dumb question but I noticed on the website that when you look at open interest, the number of contracts can be an odd number. But if you look through the rulebook of the exchange, it says contracts can only execute if there is a matching, opposing contract. So what’s going on there?
If you look at what is listed on the website, it is not really contracts – it is pairs of contracts. So if you see 100m contracts traded on ForecastEx, that means there were 200m individual contracts. That is also the dollar value because if you think one pair of contracts adds up to $1.
On the market making point, how often does the LP that Interactive Brokers operates actually interact with the market? For example, I noticed on the election night that, even adjusting for trading costs, there were disparities between the Trump and Kamala contracts, which in theory should have had the same values but on opposite answers. So if an arbitrage opportunity like that exists will IBKR step in until that gap closes? Are you regularly taking the other side of orders, regardless of that?
We have a ‘Chinese Wall’ between ourselves and the market making operation, so I can’t say what they are doing. The broad understanding we have is that the market maker sets the initial pricing but that the large majority of trading after that initial point consists of traders matching against one another.
You obviously have a few peers and this seems to be a growing market. Do you plan on offering this in other countries?
One point I’d make is that we see this as part of a person’s wider trading activity. I think that makes us quite different from the others, who are more standalone products, with some other differences, which you already highlighted, on how trading takes place.
To answer your question though, yes, we will absolutely try to add these in other countries. We are already speaking to regulators around the world about doing that. It’s also in our interest to do that. Today about 80% of Interactive Brokers’ new accounts come from outside the US. If we can also offer local contracts that would also be very helpful, so that’s also in our plans.
In Europe are you worried you are going to run up against restrictions on binary options?
Of course it’s a worry but that does not mean we are not going to try or that we are not going to try and come up with an acceptable solution for the regulators.
When I was reading through some commentary about this on your website, someone said something like, ‘this is an investment product, it’s not gambling’. But let’s say you had an event contract on the Super Bowl and you had one side on $0.20 and the other is $0.81. Another way of putting that might just be 5/1 and 4/5. Is that not just gambling?
All of this is based on probabilities. Options trading is based on probabilities, as are many other investment models.
Prior to going live with ForecastEx we had actually had a paper trading sports market, to test how it would function. So there is some similarity. Ultimately it comes down to the regulator saying this is what you can do and this is what you can’t do.
Something else is that sports betting is actually regulated on a state level in the US, so each state has different rules. ForecastEx operates under a federal regulatory body.
Whether or not it’s genuine, a lot of your peers have founders and backers who purport to be genuinely interested in the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ input that events contracts generate. Do you think there is value here beyond just speculating on a specific outcome?
Absolutely. I mean look at the election. Imagine if we had approval for it, not the week before the election, but a year or more before then.
A lot of the contracts were on state outcomes. So imagine you are a party member or campaigner and you are seeing swings in the market for a given state that you need to win. That information is very valuable.
The other thought I have is that people are saying Biden would have actually had a better chance than Harris. If you think back and imagine there was some kind of market on that, perhaps there would have been a different outcome there as well.
One question I missed – on the LP and broker side, are you trying to get other market participants in both of those areas?
Absolutely, ForecastEx is like any other exchange. We are happy to take any market makers that show up and want to join, and we’re happy to take any broker that wants to participate in the market.
Robinhood is obviously plugged in, are there any other brokers joining in the near future?
Yes, there has been interest. I can’t reveal details of those at the moment but it is there.
