Interactive Brokers' October Metrics Up, Trades Improve - Analyst Blog

Interactive Brokers Group, Inc.'s (IBKR) Electronic Brokerage segment recorded a year-over-year as well as sequential increase in brokerage metrics for Oct 2014. The segment deals with clearance and settling of trades for both individual and institutional clients on a global basis.

Total customer Daily Average Revenue Trades (DARTs) were 680,000, up 33% from Oct 2013 and 18% from Sep 2014. Moreover, total customer accounts grew 18% from the prior-year month and 1% from the preceding month to 275,700.

Interactive Brokers recorded Cleared Customer DARTs of 620,000, increasing 34% from Oct 2013 and 19% from Sep 2014. Further, on an annualized basis, Cleared Average DARTs per customer account of 567,000 increased 14% from the comparable prior-year period and 17% from the prior-month level.

Interactive Brokers' total option contracts came in at 32.2 million, up 27% from the year-ago month and up 34% from the prior-month level. Future contracts increased 36% from both Oct 2013 and Sep 2014 to 12.6 million.

Interactive Brokers has also provided data related to period-end statistics for customer equity, credit balances and margin loan balances. For the period ended Oct 2014, customer equity was $55.7 billion, rising 29% year over year and 1% sequentially.

Further, Interactive Brokers recorded customer credit balances of $30.6 billion in the reported month, up 20% from Oct 2013 and 3% from Sep 2014. Moreover, the company's customer margin loan balance of $16.9 billion rose 34% from the prior-year month but decreased 2% from the previous month.

We believe that Interactive Brokers is well positioned to gain from the innate volatility of the equity market. Therefore, expecting such a market scenario to prevail, trading activities of Interactive Brokers will continue to support its top-line growth.

Currently, Interactive Brokers carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Some better-ranked investment brokers include Arlington Asset Investment Corp. (AI), BGC Partners, Inc. (BGCP) and FXCM Inc. (FXCM). While Arlington Asset Investment sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), both BGC Partners and FXCM hold a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

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