Interactive Brokers Group Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
January 21, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Interactive Brokers reported a record quarterly pre-tax income exceeding $1 billion with a 75% GAAP pretax margin, and achieved over $5 billion in net revenues and a 71% pretax margin for the full year.
  • The firm added a record 775,000 new accounts in 2024 (217,000 in Q4) and saw client equity jump 33% to $568 billion, marking its first year-end above $500 billion.
  • The company rolled out multiple global enhancements, including generative AI–powered commentary tools for financial advisors, expanded after-hours trading scanners, 13-language account applications, and new local account types like PEA in France.
  • Interactive Brokers launched Forecast X, a CFTC-regulated prediction market platform designed to trade on real-world economic, political, and climate outcomes as a new asset class.
  • Management estimates that a 25 basis-point cut in the Fed funds rate could reduce annual net interest income by $64 million, with a full 100 basis-point decline potentially shaving $339 million.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Interactive Brokers Group Q4 2024
00:00 / 00:00

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Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Interactive Brokers Group fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker for today, Nancy Stuebe. Please go ahead.

Nancy Stuebe
Nancy Stuebe
Senior Director of Investor Relations at Interactive Brokers Group

Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for our Fourth Quarter 2024 earnings call. Joining us today are Thomas Peterffy, our founder and chairman; Milan Galik, our president and CEO; and Paul Brody, our CFO. I will be presenting Milan's comments on the business, and all three will be available at our Q&A. As a reminder, today's call may include forward-looking statements which represent the company's belief regarding future events, which by their nature are not certain and are outside of the company's control. Our actual results and financial condition may differ, possibly materially, from what is indicated in these forward-looking statements. We ask that you refer to the disclaimers in our press release. You should also review a description of risk factors contained in our financial reports filed with the SEC.

Nancy Stuebe
Nancy Stuebe
Senior Director of Investor Relations at Interactive Brokers Group

In the fourth quarter, Interactive Brokers clearly demonstrated the power and leverage of a diversified, fully automated global platform. The international interest in securities markets continues. We added 775,000 accounts in 2024, a record number of annual adds. 217,000 came on board in the fourth quarter alone. Our client equity was up 33% to $568 billion, an increase of $142 billion from last year, and the first time we finished a year with over $500 billion. Rising markets and the anticipation of lower rates led clients to actively trade securities and to be comfortable with taking on risk. In addition to increasing their exposure to various markets, they chose to take on more leverage using margin loans and to take on more assertive positions, which increased our exposure fee revenue. This translated into strength in our financials.

Nancy Stuebe
Nancy Stuebe
Senior Director of Investor Relations at Interactive Brokers Group

Our quarterly pre-tax income was a record, reaching over $1 billion for the first time, while our GAAP pre-tax margin rose to 75% for the quarter. For the full year, we earned over $5 billion in net revenues for the first time and achieved a 71% pre-tax margin, by far the highest in the brokerage industry. Over the past several quarters, we have added multiple new products and enhancements worldwide. We have spent a great deal of time to understand the needs of our various client types. For financial advisor clients, we enhanced our Advisor Portal with features that improve portfolio management and client communication. We added a multi-stock tax loss harvesting tool that helps reduce clients' tax burdens. We added models and model rebalance tools that simplify applying consistent strategies across multiple accounts.

Nancy Stuebe
Nancy Stuebe
Senior Director of Investor Relations at Interactive Brokers Group

We integrated a generative AI-powered commentary builder feature, which automates the creation of personalized performance summaries and is integrated with our PortfolioAnalyst tool, allowing FAs to generate reports showing clear, detailed portfolio data and commentary. To date, thousands of our users have generated commentaries. There will be more to come here in 2025. For our clients who trade options, we have added four new liquidity providers to our options ATS, increasing its depth and capability to achieve better pricing. For our after-hours traders, our stock scanners now support price movement in the overnight trading session, so our clients can see top gainers and losers and other groupings during the session. For international individual accounts, we have previously introduced an alphabet soup of popular savings products like ISA accounts in the U.K. and TBSZ accounts in Hungary.

Nancy Stuebe
Nancy Stuebe
Senior Director of Investor Relations at Interactive Brokers Group

And this year, we added PEA accounts in France, and we are the first non-French brokers to do so. More will be coming. Broken down by geography, the majority of our accounts are based outside of the United States. To make it easier for prospective clients to come on board, we have translated our account application into more languages, including French, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Hungarian, opening doors for investors who may not be as comfortable with English. Our application is now available in 13 languages, facilitating global outreach for potential customers. By client geography, in the fourth quarter, our accounts and client equity once again grew fastest in Asia, followed by Europe, as growing numbers of investors worldwide want access to international, and in particular, U.S. markets. Of our five client segments, the fastest account growth was again seen with individuals, with introducing brokers a close second.

Nancy Stuebe
Nancy Stuebe
Senior Director of Investor Relations at Interactive Brokers Group

On the client equity side, individuals again grew the fastest, followed by financial advisors and IBrokers. Commission growth was fastest for proprietary traders, while net interest income growth was led by individuals, followed by financial advisors. Overall, we experienced another productive quarter. We launched trading on the Saudi Exchange, which follows our launch in Malaysia last quarter. We added IB Algorithms for Hong Kong Exchange options. As a note, we began offering cryptocurrencies in Hong Kong also this year, back in May. We have focused on making it easier for clients to fund accounts, and this quarter began to offer eDDA for Hong Kong dollars and offshore Chinese yuan deposits, open banking for euro deposits, and Plaid for euro and British pound account funding. Our clients around the world, particularly younger ones, are used to the convenience of trading crypto 24/7 and will expect the same from other asset classes.

Nancy Stuebe
Nancy Stuebe
Senior Director of Investor Relations at Interactive Brokers Group

We consider meeting these expectations vital. We already offer over 10,000 U.S. stocks and ETFs during overnight hours, and in 2024, we expanded hours to 24/5 for corporate and government bonds in U.S. dollar, euro, British pound, and Swiss franc denominations, and expanded them for U.S. stock contracts for difference. This quarter, we also expanded our order types and introduced a new one called OVERNIGHT + SMART to specifically cover overnight trading hours. For other products like options and futures, which trade only on exchanges, we await only the willingness of the exchanges to extend trading hours. We will be ready when they are. There are at least eight different regulatory projects we are programming for around the world, as the many numerous jurisdictions we operate in create, add to, and update their regulations. We are on time, or more often, well ahead of schedule on all of them.

Nancy Stuebe
Nancy Stuebe
Senior Director of Investor Relations at Interactive Brokers Group

Our close ties to over 20 very different regulatory regimes in multiple languages and our ability to react to and program or reprogram our systems to comply on a continuous basis is one of our advantages that we take extremely seriously, with employees on the ground and programmers dedicated to these tasks. And finally, a special note on ForecastEx. We created this exchange, which is regulated by the CFTC and allows trading on predictions that have measurable, third-party verified outcomes. This is an entirely new asset class, one that provides a market-driven way to quantify real-world expectations on measures like economic, political, and climate outcomes. Another significant broker now offers access to our exchange. We were ready with election trading when it became permissible. We believe the greater ambition, ForecastEx becoming the most accurate marketplace for predicting significant events, will occur over time.

Nancy Stuebe
Nancy Stuebe
Senior Director of Investor Relations at Interactive Brokers Group

Our pipeline of new business and new initiatives remains as strong as ever, and our product set clearly has resonated with people around the globe. We are not stopping here to rest on our achievements. We have many projects to work on, goals to achieve, and together with the Interactive Brokers team, we look forward to executing on them in 2025. We are eager to share our new products and enhancements as we introduce them. With that, I will turn the call over to our CFO, Paul Brody. Paul?

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

Thanks very much, Nancy. Thank you, everybody, for joining the call. We're going to start with our revenue items on page three of the release. We're pleased with our financial results this quarter as we again produced record net revenues and pre-tax income for the quarter and also for the year. Commission revenues rose to a record $477 million this quarter. For the full year, commissions were $1.7 billion, up 25% from last year. In 2024, we saw higher trading volumes across the major product categories, as well as 24% higher DARTs per account. Net interest income also reached a quarterly record of $807 million and a yearly record of $3.1 billion, despite multiple rate cuts in nearly all the major currencies. A continued risk-on environment in the quarter led to a significant increase in margin borrowing, and strong net customer deposits led to higher segregated funds balances.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

These revenues were partially offset by the interest paid to our customers on their cash balances. Other fees and services generated $81 million for the quarter and $280 million for the year, up 47% and 42%, respectively. This was primarily driven by the continued risk-on positioning of customers, which has been reflected in rising risk exposure fees over the course of 2024, and to a lesser extent by both higher FDIC sweep fees and by higher payments for order flow from options exchange-mandated programs. Other income includes gains and losses on our investments, our currency diversification strategy, and principal transactions. The primary factor here was our previously reported October sale of a portion of our interest in Tiger Brokers, which led to a one-time realized gain of $34 million.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

Together with a $10 million mark-to-market unrealized loss for the quarter, the Tiger investment contributed a net gain of $24 million to other income. Several of the items in this line are considered non-core and therefore excluded in our adjusted earnings. Without these excluded items, other income was a $59 million gain for the quarter and $132 million for the year. Turning to expenses, execution, clearing, and distribution costs were $115 million in the quarter and $447 million for the year, up versus last year due to higher trade volumes in stocks and options. Overall, commissions rose faster than execution costs, however, thanks to higher rebates earned from the exchanges that pay for liquidity-enhancing orders. Execution and clearing costs were 19% of commission revenues in the fourth quarter for a gross transactional profit margin of 81%.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

We calculate this by excluding from execution and clearing and distribution $21 million of non-transaction-based costs, mainly market data fees, which do not have a direct commission revenue component. Compensation and benefits expense was $138 million for the quarter, up slightly from the year-ago quarter. Due to the capitalization rather than expensing under GAAP of some software development this quarter, compensation expense is about $5 million lower than usual. Adjustments of this nature may be made periodically. For the quarter, the ratio of compensation expense to net revenues was 10% and would have been 10.3% had that $5 million of capitalized software been included as comp expense. For the year, this ratio was 11%, down from 12% in 2023. Our headcount at December 31st was 2,998, up 2% for the year. G&A expenses were $59 million, up from the year-ago quarter.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

For the full year, G&A was $314 million, up 49%, primarily due to a one-time litigation expense in the third quarter. Excluding this, G&A for the year was $236 million, up 12%, primarily on higher advertising expense. Our pre-tax margin was a record 75% for the quarter, as reported, and 76% as adjusted. Income taxes of $71 million reflects the sum of the public company's $34 million and the operating company's $37 million. Public company's effective tax rate was 14%, below its typical range, primarily due to a benefit from the annual revaluation of our deferred tax asset. Moving to our balance sheet on page five of the release, our total assets ended the year 17% higher than last year at $150 billion, driven by strong growth in margin lending. New account growth also helped propel our customer credit balances by 14% to a new record level.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

We believe that our strong financial standing and competitive interest rates provide customers with an attractive place to hold their uninvested cash. We continue to have no long-term debt, and healthy profitability drove our firm equity up 18% to $16.6 billion. In recognition of this growth, we allocated capital to a dividend increase in the second quarter of 2024. We maintain a balance sheet geared towards supporting growth in our existing business and helping us win new business by demonstrating our strength to prospective clients and partners. In our operating data on pages six and seven, we had record customer volume in options, with our contract volumes up 32% over the prior year and also up 32% for the full year, well ahead of industry volumes.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

Futures contract volumes declined 3% for the quarter but rose 4% for the full year, while stock share volumes rose 65% for the quarter and 22% for the full year. Stock share volume generally increased versus last year as clients gravitated to larger, higher-quality names and traded relatively less in pink sheet and some other very low-priced stocks. Growth in the notional dollar value of shares traded in the quarter was about even with the growth in our share volumes overall. On page seven, you can see that total customer DARTs were 3.1 million trades per day in the quarter, up 61% from the prior year, and commission per cleared commissionable order of $2.72 was down from last year, primarily due to smaller average order sizes across all product classes and a shift to proportionally more trading in stocks versus options and futures from last year.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

Page eight shows our net interest margin numbers. Total GAAP net interest income was $807 million for the quarter, up $77 million, or 11%, from the prior year, while our net interest margin net interest income was $830 million, or $91 million higher. In the NIM computation, we include some income that is classified as other fees or other income on our income statement, but we believe is more appropriately considered interest. Our net interest income reflects strength in margin loan interest, partially offset by lower segregated cash interest and higher interest expense on customer cash balances. Many central banks made cuts to their benchmark rates this quarter, including the U.S., Europe, the U.K., Switzerland, Canada, and Hong Kong, reflecting multiple rate cuts in most benchmark rates this year.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

Our overall segregated cash interest income declined 2%, despite a 10% increase in average balances, while margin loan interest rose by 26% on a 41% increase in average balances. The average duration of our U.S. Treasury portfolio remains at under 30 days. With the U.S. dollar yield curve continuing to be inverted during the first part of the quarter, though flattening somewhat in the medium term by quarter end, we continue to maximize what we earn by focusing on higher short-term yields rather than accepting the lower yields and added risk of longer maturities. This strategy allows us to maintain a relatively tight maturity match between our assets and liabilities. Securities lending net interest does not appear as strong as in prior years for three main reasons.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

First, as benchmark interest rates rose from near zero beginning in 2022, more of what we earned from securities lending became classified as interest on segregated cash. We estimate that if the additional interest earned and paid on cash collateral were included under securities borrowed and loaned, then securities lending net revenue would have been about $182 million this quarter versus $156 million in last year's fourth quarter on the same basis. Second, we have seen strong stock market performance with the S&P up over 20% in each of the past two years, which tends to reflect a smaller proportion of clients looking to put on shorts. Third, there are fewer hard-to-borrow names industry-wide, both because the overall market is rising sharply and due to weakness in some of the typical drivers of securities lending, including IPOs, market volatility, and merger and acquisition activity.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

Despite this trend, we were successful in raising the total notional value of what we loaned out. Interest on customer credit balances, the interest we pay to our customers on the cash in their accounts, rose on higher balances from new account growth. As we have noted in the past, the high interest rates we pay on customer cash, currently 3.83% on qualified U.S. dollar balances, is a significant attraction to new customers. Fully rate-sensitive customer balances ended the current quarter at $19.1 billion versus $17.8 billion in the year-ago quarter. Now, for our estimates of the impact of changes in rates, given market expectations of further rate cuts in the future, we estimate the effect of a 25 basis points decrease in the benchmark Fed Funds Rate to be a $64 million reduction in annual net interest income.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

Note that our starting point for this estimate is December 31st, with the Fed funds effective rate at 4.33% and balances as of that date. Any growth in our balance sheet and interest-earning assets would reduce this impact. About 25% of our customer cash balances is not in U.S. dollars, so estimates of a U.S. rate change exclude those currencies. We estimate the effect of decreases in all the relevant non-USD benchmark rates would reduce annual net interest income by about $22 million for each 25 basis point decrease in those benchmarks. At a high level, a full 1% decrease in all benchmark rates would decrease our annual net interest income by about $339 million. This takes into account rate-sensitive customer balances and also firm equity. In conclusion, we posted another financially strong quarter in net revenues and pre-tax margin, leading to a record year.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

This reflects our continued ability to grow our customer base and deliver on our core value proposition to customers while simultaneously scaling the business. Our business strategy continues to be effective, automating as much of the brokerage business as possible, continuously improving and expanding on what we offer while minimizing what we charge. And with that, we will open up the line for questions.

Operator

Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone. We also ask that you please wait for your name and company to be announced before you proceed with your question. One moment while we take the first question. And our first question for the day will be coming from Craig Siegenthaler of Bank of America. Your line is open.

Craig Siegenthaler
Craig Siegenthaler
Managing Director of Equity Research at Bank of America

Hey, good morning or good evening, everyone. Hope you're all doing well.

Craig Siegenthaler
Craig Siegenthaler
Managing Director of Equity Research at Bank of America

First one, I have a modeling one on expenses. So execution, clearing, and distribution fees, as you pointed out in your prepared remarks, they did grow a lot slower than DARTs and commissions. In the press release, you kind of called out what looked like a few negatives. In the prepared remarks, you called out rebates. But how should we think about this line item heading into 1Q? And then any high-level thoughts on modeling it? Because a lot of us model it relative to commissions or DARTs. Thank you.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

Yeah, so I'll take that one. Generally, yes, it's driven by volume. Obviously, those are all the variable costs. They're per share or per contract.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

But within that, there are things like order routing changes so that our systems that provide smart routing of, say, stock orders can have many different venues to route an order to get the best price for the customer. And it can do that while maximizing rebates, which are provided by some of the venues on liquidity-enhancing orders. And then we generally pass those rebates through to the customers, and that would show up in reducing commission revenue. So they're somewhat paired. But therefore, if you only look at the expense side, it doesn't tell you the whole picture.

Craig Siegenthaler
Craig Siegenthaler
Managing Director of Equity Research at Bank of America

Got it. And then just for my follow-up, we keep watching equity build. It's almost at $17 billion now. I just wanted your thoughts on how fast we should expect this capital balance to continue building.

Craig Siegenthaler
Craig Siegenthaler
Managing Director of Equity Research at Bank of America

Is this really helping your hedge fund prime marketing after it's given the size? And any updated thoughts on share repurchase in the future?

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

There's no plan to do any type of share repurchasing. We will, in the future, consider increasing the dividend, but that, of course, assumes that the stock price will be about $200 and it will remain there. As far as the strong capital, we like it that way for a couple of different reasons. For hedge fund clients, for institutional clients, we compete with large banks that have been in business for more than 100 years. They obviously have an established reputation, and by many managers, they're considered to be the safe choice. They will never be blamed if something were to go wrong with a bulge bracket competing bank. We have to work hard to earn our reputation.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

We have been consistently growing the company and our capital base. It's visible. Our balance sheet is strong. That is one way we signal to the marketplace that we are a serious player, and they should consider us for custodying their assets. The other way the very high capital base is benefiting us is that, unlike in the United States, where we can fund the margin loans using other customers' uninvested cash, only banks are able to do so outside of the United States. So we fund a large portion of those loans by our own capital. Those are the two reasons why we like the number to be ever-growing.

Craig Siegenthaler
Craig Siegenthaler
Managing Director of Equity Research at Bank of America

Thank you, Milan.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for the next question. And our next question will be coming from the line of Benjamin Budish of Barclays. Your line is open.

Benjamin Budish
Benjamin Budish
VP of Equity Research at Barclays

Hi, good evening, and thanks for taking the question.

Benjamin Budish
Benjamin Budish
VP of Equity Research at Barclays

Maybe first, just I was curious to get your thoughts on what account growth could look like in 2025. I know you tend not to kind of give guidance on a per-year basis, but it's just kind of remarkable the momentum we've seen over the course of the year and kind of accelerating as you're growing larger. So just curious, what do you think are the key factors in 2025? Can you maybe talk about the word-of-mouth momentum you're seeing, and can you maybe unpack a little bit of kind of where you're leaning? And I think in the prepared remarks and in the press, you called out a bit of a pickup in advertising spend. So just curious what your thoughts there are on what account growth could look like this year.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

Well, our marketing spend will be slowly increasing.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

Obviously, it's necessary to attract the individual accounts, so that's why it's going to go up. We expect a steady growth in the number of accounts. As you could see this past quarter, we really enjoyed a high number. There is a lot of enthusiasm in the market, partially related to the ever-increasing prices in the market, stock prices in the market, partially related to the change of the administration that is largely considered to be pro-business, and the U.S. markets, as a result, are expected to continue to do well, so there are a lot of accounts, new accounts being opened. Some investors who were sitting on the sidelines decided to open an account and start investing. So we are bullish on the continued growth of the accounts.

Benjamin Budish
Benjamin Budish
VP of Equity Research at Barclays

Got it. Maybe one quick modeling follow-up for Paul.

Benjamin Budish
Benjamin Budish
VP of Equity Research at Barclays

I think for the employee comp and benefits line, you called out a capitalized expense. Just curious, in Q1 and kind of going into the year, should we think about the level and kind of the first couple of quarters of 2024 as the starting point, or does it kind of reset lower? Just any guidance you could give there would be helpful. Thank you.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

Right. Well, it does go along with our hiring, which was only 2% higher than the prior year. I think the best way to look at it is on the full year because the capitalization is measured only periodically and can be added in a given quarter. Our average for all of 2024 was $143 million a quarter, and that's probably your best starting point for going forward.

Benjamin Budish
Benjamin Budish
VP of Equity Research at Barclays

Okay. All right. Great. Thanks so much.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for the next question.

Operator

Our next question will be coming from the line of James Yaro of Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

James Yaro
James Yaro
Managing Director of Equity Research at Goldman Sachs

Thanks, Milan and Paul, for taking the questions here. Maybe just starting on aspirations in the high-touch part of the prime brokerage offering, which you've obviously expanded in 2024. If there's deregulation of the bulge bracket prime brokers, which the market clearly expects, could this present a more meaningful threat to growth of the business? And then just what is on the product roadmap for this business in 2025?

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

I would not expect the deregulation to really have an impact. As I explained a bit earlier, what we're dealing with is competing with very large established banks, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley. I cannot see how a small newcomer would really be able to make a significant dent in our business.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

So deregulation, I do not think, would impact our business that way. As far as the products, did you mean within this white glove offering for the hedge funds?

James Yaro
James Yaro
Managing Director of Equity Research at Goldman Sachs

That's right.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

Well, I can tell you that one of the things that we have done is we have revamped the way we do the capital introduction events in the past quarter. We do those events approximately once every three months. We changed the name of the event. We changed the way it's organized. We advertise it better. And the result of that was that the last event, we had double the number of participants. Instead of 120, we had 240 accredited investors participating in the capital introduction event. Otherwise, we are pleased with how the white glove offering is going. We have 34 hedge funds onboarded with the average assets of $160 million.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

The goal here is to provide them with better service. They all appreciate direct access to the subject matter experts. They like talking to us. We handle approximately 50 different issues on a particular week, and as we talk to them more, we make adjustments. For example, just recently, we have started offering algorithms, VWAP, and similar algorithms for the stocks in APAC region and then posted directly due to the fact that the hedge funds that are now more openly talking to us were requesting that feature. We're pleased with the way it's going so far.

James Yaro
James Yaro
Managing Director of Equity Research at Goldman Sachs

Excellent. That's very clear. Maybe just turning to the margins. Your adjusted margin did rise to best in class, 75.6%. Can it continue to rise off of these levels? Is there an inflection horizon that you see for the margin?

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

Well, I would not expect that number to go up.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

That is not the number that we're optimizing for. What we're trying to do is delivering value to our clients. We obviously have to pay attention to not just automating everything we can so that we can offer our services at the lowest prices, but we also have to make sure that when our clients need help, we have sufficient personnel to answer their questions, to help them on the customer service line. And there are obviously the ongoing costs of the compliance, which are ever-increasing given the very large number of jurisdictions where we operate. So I would not expect that number to go higher.

James Yaro
James Yaro
Managing Director of Equity Research at Goldman Sachs

Okay. That's very clear. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for the next question. And our next question will be coming from the line of Brennan Hawken of UBS. Your line is open.

Brennan Hawken
Brennan Hawken
Senior Equity Research Analyst at UBS

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question.

Brennan Hawken
Brennan Hawken
Senior Equity Research Analyst at UBS

Margin balances have really shown very, very solid growth despite the volatility in the market. So how should we be thinking about that on a go-forward basis? What trends have you seen quarter to date? And maybe taking a step back, when you think about how your customer base has changed in recent years, how should we be thinking about margin penetration for you versus history?

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

Margin balances have been increasing. That's due to the risk-on appetite of our clients. Their positions have been more assertive, not only by trading stocks on margin, but by putting on aggressive positions in the derivatives. We remember back in August of last year that there was a rather sharp sell-off, and we quickly saw our clients reducing their risk positions. But as the stock market turned and things calmed down, they quickly came back on.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

So I would expect some amount of correlation with what the stock market is doing. But for now, we seem to be in the risk-on mode because of the change over the administration, for example. So margin balance, all things being equal, I think will be maintained at this level or slightly go higher.

Brennan Hawken
Brennan Hawken
Senior Equity Research Analyst at UBS

And when you think about some of the different cohorts of your customer base, advisors are a larger portion. When we think about penetration versus prior cycles and we compare margin balances maybe to client equity, what impact do you expect that could have on those metrics?

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

Well, financial advisors, some of them obviously trade on margin. The majority of them do not. We have the prop traders. I would expect them to continue to trade aggressively. We have all sorts of individual accounts, small ones, large ones, more sophisticated ones, less sophisticated ones.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

So obviously, the more sophisticated ones, I would expect to continue to deploy leverage. And then you have the hedge funds, which, again, I would expect to continue aggressively.

Brennan Hawken
Brennan Hawken
Senior Equity Research Analyst at UBS

Thanks for taking my questions.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for the next question. And our next question will be coming from the line of Dan Fannon of Jefferies. Your line is open.

Dan Fannon
Dan Fannon
Managing Director of Equity Research at Jefferies

Thanks. Good evening. So just following up on areas of investment and product development as you think about 2025, you've talked a bit about the prime brokerage as well as some of the things that you've come to market with here in the fourth quarter. So curious just about the areas of investment and really on that product development side for the individual that you see or are focused on into 2025.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

All the time we look at all the client segments that we service. We carefully listen to the feedback we're receiving from them. What is it that they're looking for? We continuously parse that feedback and ask ourselves the question, how is it that we can improve our offering? That is what really a bulk of the work goes into when we're discussing the client-facing investments. There is obviously a lot of work that we're doing on the back end. The number of accounts is increasing fast. The trading activity is going up fast. We have to make sure that our systems can handle the load, spiky, which can be very often in spikes.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

You can have a normal day, and all of a sudden, you can have a really busy day when all the computers are running hot, so to speak. We have to pay attention to making sure that our systems are reliable, that we have no outages, that we have very significant backups, and then we have to work on systems that our operators use, both the client service and our compliance departments, significant number of employees working those departments, and so that we do not have to hire as many of them as a less automated competing firm would, we have to give them the right tools, so that is sort of where the attention is being paid to all these different directions.

Dan Fannon
Dan Fannon
Managing Director of Equity Research at Jefferies

Understood, and then as a follow-up, Milan, you've talked at previous periods about M&A and kind of inorganic growth.

Dan Fannon
Dan Fannon
Managing Director of Equity Research at Jefferies

Can you give us an update on your thoughts today and maybe kind of the current market opportunity for inorganic potential combinations?

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

We remain open to M&A so far. As you know, we have not been really successful. There was one significant competitor we were looking at in the last quarter of last year. We did not succeed in completing a transaction, but we remained open to it. We will consider any opportunity that comes our way.

Dan Fannon
Dan Fannon
Managing Director of Equity Research at Jefferies

Understood. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for the next question, please. And our next question will be coming from the line of Patrick Moley of Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Patrick Moley
Patrick Moley
Director of Equity Research at Piper Sandler

Yeah. Good evening. Thanks for taking the question. So I had one on just prediction markets and the ForecastEx platform. It seemed like the election brought a lot of people into the prediction markets.

Patrick Moley
Patrick Moley
Director of Equity Research at Piper Sandler

So, just was hoping you could give us an update on kind of the traction that you're seeing there, your outlook for next year, and whether there's any kind of milestones or things we should be looking out for on the product roadmap there. Thanks.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

Well, the prediction markets are going slowly. We are being very careful not to step on the wrong foot. And we believe that this is going to be a huge market, but we want to do it slowly and carefully and build out our personnel and our systems so that we can do it in a really, really big way. And that's what we are. That's what I'm devoting my time to.

Patrick Moley
Patrick Moley
Director of Equity Research at Piper Sandler

All right. Great. Thanks. And then maybe just to follow up on crypto, there's a lot of excitement around crypto here.

Patrick Moley
Patrick Moley
Director of Equity Research at Piper Sandler

It seems like the incoming administration, the change in leadership in the SEC is going to foster a new kind of era more favorable to the crypto trading firms, I guess, if you will. Your offering right now is relatively robust compared to some of the others. How are you feeling right now about that offering? And if there was to be more comprehensive legislation, what areas, if at all, would you look to expand the offering? Thanks.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

Our immediate plan is to offer cryptocurrency trading to the customers in the European Union, but that's obviously not affected by the changes in the administration. I'm cautiously optimistic about what's going to happen next.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

I think the regulations in this area need to be firmed up, and the task force was announced today, and I think they will work hard to make sure that the rules are clear, and that will obviously improve the area for the investors as well as the companies that service them like ours. There are obviously things that are somewhat concerning. There are these meme coins, for example. There have been two of them issued just in the last few days. I'm not really pleased with that development. I think it looks a little strange. It may give the cryptocurrency industry somewhat of a bad name if things like that continue to happen. But overall, I'm optimistic about the regulation that is going to be clarified and firmed up.

Patrick Moley
Patrick Moley
Director of Equity Research at Piper Sandler

All right. Thanks for that. That's it for me.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for the next question.

Operator

And our next question will be coming from the line of Chris Allen of Citi. Your line is open. Chris, your line is open.

Chris Allen
Chris Allen
Managing Director of Equity Research at Citi

Oh, apologies. My headphones out. Evening, everyone. Maybe to just follow up on the crypto question, any color you could provide in terms of your customer base, how many percent, rough percentage that is actually trading crypto on your platform currently, and if there was irregularity, where would be the opportunity set to expand in the US, maybe from a product offering perspective?

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

At the moment, there are four coins that are really heavily traded on our platform, if I can call it heavily. It's the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Stablecoin then, and Bitcoin Cash. I would expect us to increase the number of tokens we would make available on the platform, which would make our platform more attractive to the run-of-the-mill cryptocurrency traders.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

They have interest in trading, for example, Solana, which we are currently not able to offer because there wasn't sufficient regulatory clarity as to whether that would be considered a security or not. So those kinds of questions will get clarified. So as a result, I expect us to be able to list more tokens in the future and attract cryptocurrency traders who really focus on trading cryptocurrencies. Another thing that I would expect is for us to be able to increase the percentage of assets we allow a single account to invest in the crypto assets. At the moment, that number is set to 1%. It's a very conservative figure, but as the crypto assets become more widely accepted, we would raise that number higher.

Chris Allen
Chris Allen
Managing Director of Equity Research at Citi

Thanks. And just as a follow-up, on securities lending, recognize the headwinds from low levels of IPO and M&A activity.

Chris Allen
Chris Allen
Managing Director of Equity Research at Citi

Just kind of curious, how does your capacity to lend for securities lending compare now versus the end of 2023 and year-end 2022? Has it expanded with the account growth? I'm just trying to think about what the potential could look like in a better environment, which many expect as we move through 2025 and into 2026.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

Yes, it absolutely expands with our account growth and simply more participation in the markets by our clients who tend to go long and hold the stocks that are attractive for lending out, primarily to other broker dealers and banks. And yeah, we would expect that to continue to rise because our customer base is simply going to hold more of those positions.

Chris Allen
Chris Allen
Managing Director of Equity Research at Citi

Got it. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question will be coming from the line of Kyle Voigt of KBW.

Operator

Your line is open.

Kyle Voigt
Kyle Voigt
Managing Director of Equity Research at KBW

Hi, good evening. So I know you gave some commentary on pre-tax margin and investments for 2025, but maybe I could just ask a question specifically on fixed expense growth. If we exclude some of the one-time items that you had in the third quarter and even the $5 million of 4Q Comp that you noted earlier in the call, we're kind of calculating fixed expense growth of roughly 12% for the full year of 2024. So I think that's generally in line with that low double-digit expense growth rate you posted historically. I guess relative to that, Brody, is there any way to frame whether core fixed expense growth should accelerate or decelerate versus that low double-digit level as we look out into 2025?

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

I would not expect it to accelerate.

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

I think you are likely to see in next year what you have just seen. That obviously assumes that the inflation doesn't kick in and we will have to pay more for the human resources than before. We will obviously remain competitive. It is our job to attract the best talent that we can. We pay attention to the market rates, and we either pay market rates or above to attract the best talent, and we will continue to do that. Given our focus on automation, we do not have a choice just to do that.

Paul Brody
Paul Brody
CFO at Interactive Brokers Group

I might just add to that that advertising is a component of that, and so to the extent that we expect to do more, that will be somewhat of a driver.

Kyle Voigt
Kyle Voigt
Managing Director of Equity Research at KBW

Thank you.

Kyle Voigt
Kyle Voigt
Managing Director of Equity Research at KBW

For my follow-up, and I know this was asked last quarter as well, but the stock continues to perform very strongly even since then. But for Thomas, just curious as to whether you would consider any stock sales to help increase the public float. And if so, would that still only be in blocks and not in open market transactions?

Milan Galik
Milan Galik
President and CEO at Interactive Brokers Group

I don't know. Thomas.

Thomas Peterffy
Thomas Peterffy
Founder and Chairman at Interactive Brokers Group

It would be in blocks, and I will do that when the price reaches what I believe is the right price.

Kyle Voigt
Kyle Voigt
Managing Director of Equity Research at KBW

Understood. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. And that does conclude today's question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the call back over to Nancy for closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Nancy Stuebe
Nancy Stuebe
Senior Director of Investor Relations at Interactive Brokers Group

Thank you, everyone, for participating today.

Nancy Stuebe
Nancy Stuebe
Senior Director of Investor Relations at Interactive Brokers Group

As a reminder, this call will be available for replay on our website, and we will also be posting a clean version of our transcript on the site tomorrow. Thank you again, and we will talk to you next quarter-end.

Operator

Thank you for joining today's conference call. You may now disconnect. Have a good evening.

Executives
    • Milan Galik
      Milan Galik
      President and CEO
    • Nancy Stuebe
      Nancy Stuebe
      Senior Director of Investor Relations
    • Paul Brody
      Paul Brody
      CFO
    • Thomas Peterffy
      Thomas Peterffy
      Founder and Chairman
Analysts
    • James Yaro
      Managing Director of Equity Research at Goldman Sachs
    • Dan Fannon
      Managing Director of Equity Research at Jefferies
    • Patrick Moley
      Director of Equity Research at Piper Sandler
    • Kyle Voigt
      Managing Director of Equity Research at KBW
    • Chris Allen
      Managing Director of Equity Research at Citi
    • Craig Siegenthaler
      Managing Director of Equity Research at Bank of America
    • Brennan Hawken
      Senior Equity Research Analyst at UBS
    • Benjamin Budish
      VP of Equity Research at Barclays
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