Interactive Brokers Group, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to Interactive Brokers' fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. To remove yourself from the queue, you may press star 1-1 again. I would now like to hand the call over to Nancy Stubbe, Director of Investor Relations. Please, go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for our fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. Joining us today are Thomas Pederphy, our founder and chairman, Milan Galic, 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. In the fourth quarter, We continue to demonstrate the power and leverage of our diversified, fully automated global platform, which serves the full spectrum of investors, from those new to the markets buying their first fractional share of a magnificent seven stock and a cash account, through sophisticated traders benefiting from low cost and geographical reach, to professionals using our APIs and algorithms to execute advanced quantitative strategies in portfolio margin accounts. Many clients start gradually, and evolve into active, sophisticated traders, and our platforms are designed to support that entire journey, supporting their growth with us along the way at every stage. We continue to see strong international interest in the global securities markets on a secular basis as people around the world seek higher returns on their assets as interest rates decline and as other financial institutions pay them less. In 2025, we added more than 1 million net new accounts and annual record for the firm. Client equity rose 37% to $780 billion, an increase of more than $200 billion year over year, and the first time we've ended a year with over three-quarters of a trillion dollars in client assets. Cyclically, rising markets and expectations for lower interest rates drive increased client engagement. Clients traded actively, grew more comfortable taking on risk, increased their market exposure, and made greater use of leverage through margin loans. They also expanded beyond equities into other asset classes, including options and futures. Our client-centric focus, by which we mean delivering global market access at extremely competitive pricing on state-of-the-art platforms, is best reflected in one simple measure, our clients' performance. In 2025, the S&P 500 rose 17.9%. By comparison, our clients outperformed. Individual investors here were up on average 19.2% or 130 basis points above the S&P 500. Financial advisors were up 20.57% on average or 267 basis points above the market. Hedge fund clients were up 28.91% on average a full 11 percentage points ahead of the S&P. This performance is the direct result of our focus on empowering clients through low trade and margin pricing and less drag from costs, superior trade execution, advanced order types and algorithms, the advantage of attractive interest rates on cash and short proceeds, as well as the many advantages of our platforms from AI and research tools to comprehensive educational offerings. It is why clients come to us. No gimmicks, no games, just the best prices and the most comprehensive platforms. It is why the best informed investors choose Interactive Brokers. That client focus, combined with strong global demand for investing, translated into exceptional financial results. Quarterly adjusted pre-tax income reached a record level of more than $1 billion for the fifth consecutive quarter, despite lower interest rates. For the full year, we generated more than $6 billion in net revenues for the first time. We continually invest in improving our platform from front to back end, supported by a global team of programmers who deliver new functionality, ongoing enhancements, and client-driven improvements, while also meeting the diverse regulatory requirements across the many market centers and currencies we support. This year... Sorry throughout 2025 we introduced a wide range of new products and enhancements worldwide guided by deep engagement with and a strong understanding of the needs of our diverse client base. This year we expanded market access to Brazil, Taiwan, the UAE and Slovenia with additional countries planned for 2026. We continue to add to our ever growing list of country specific tax advantaged funds. We offer traditional and Roth IRAs in the US, as well as Canadian RRSPs and TFSAs, UK ISAs, French PEAs, and Hungarian TBSZs. This year, we added Swedish ISKs, Japan's NISA's, and Canadian FHSAs. We now have several billion dollars of client assets in these accounts and are able to support individual investors at all stages of their investment journey. From a funding perspective, clients can now fund their accounts using Stablecoin, making cross-border account funding easier and available 24-7. We doubled the amount of cash eligible for our FDIC suite program, from $2.5 to $5 million for individual accounts, and from $5 million to $10 million for joint accounts. In October, we teamed with Carta to introduce our premium charge card globally. The Carta Visa Infinite Card allows eligible clients to link their accounts and access their cash instantly anywhere in the world with no foreign transaction fees, an especially compelling benefit for our global client base. And it comes with premium cardholder benefits. Platform-wise, our GlobalTrader 2.0 mobile platform was launched with a comprehensive UI UX revamp and an all-new look and feel. Quick access trading tools accessible via a swipe or long press were added, watch list management was streamlined, and AI news summaries incorporated. Our leading edge IBKR desktop platform delivered several highly requested enhancements this year, including multi-monitor support with independent windows for charts, option chains, and more, multiple new screener filters, a named strategy selector for clients to quickly access popular combo strategy types, and a new Linux beta installer, extending IBKR Desktop into the Linux ecosystem and addressing another longstanding client request. We introduce connections where clients can enter a company's ticker and explore its broader investment ecosystem, including options, ETFs that hold the stock, forecast contracts, related economic indicators, competitors, and more. This feature is already seeing strong engagement. We have embedded artificial intelligence throughout our organization, benefiting both clients and employees. We launched AI-powered investment themes, which allows clients to enter a concept, such as nuclear energy or quantum computing, and instantly receive a list of actionable investment ideas, significantly streamlining the research process. We also launched AI-generated news summaries, receiving FINRA approval midyear. These summaries deliver timely, relevant news directly tied to clients' portfolios, helping them stay informed more easily. Across our platforms, we launched the first version of Ask IBKR, an innovative AI-powered tool that lets our clients interact with and ask questions in plain English about their portfolios. Clients can ask about performance and allocation analysis, track their activity, and get performance attribution. They can ask to compare their performance versus various benchmarks, find their top dividend payers, calculate their capital gains and losses, and analyze sector exposure. Performance can be analyzed across flexible timeframes, one year, one month, period to date, et cetera. Staying on top of an active portfolio with rapid access to a wide breadth of data is critical for successful investors. Beyond these highlights, we have delivered a wide range of enhancements and new features. I encourage you to explore our platforms on our website, or better yet, request a demo. Seeing our offerings firsthand across a broad range of client types and experience levels is the best way to appreciate what we have accomplished. In other areas of our business, to further enhance execution quality, we expanded our network of liquidity providers across bonds, options, overnight trading, international stocks, and ETFs and ADRs. And to further support our non-US client base, we translate our investor education courses and webcasts into multiple languages, making it easier for clients around the world to get started on investing on our platform. Trading volume during our overnight hours continues to grow rapidly, up 76% from last quarter and more than 130% from the fourth quarter of last year. Providing deep, liquid markets that are not constrained by U.S. regular trading hours is critical to meeting the needs of a globally active client base. And finally, a note on ForecastX. We created this exchange, which is regulated by the CFTC, to support trading on consequential predictions that have measurable third-party verified outcomes. ForecastX traded 286 million pairs this quarter, up from 15 million pairs in the third quarter and now has four members quoting into the exchange, which has over 10,000 listed instruments. Our pipeline of new business, new initiatives, and enhancements remains as strong as ever, and our platforms resonate with people around the globe. We are not stopping here to rest on our achievements. We have many projects to work on, which we will look forward to sharing with you once they become a reality. With that, I will turn the call over to our CFO, Paul Brody. Paul?

Thank you, Nancy. Welcome, everyone, to the call. We'll start with our revenue items on page three of the release. We are pleased with our financial results this quarter as we produced near-record net revenues and pre-tax income for the quarter and record results in all the major financial categories for the year. Commission revenues rose to a record $582 million this quarter. For the full year, commissions were $2.1 billion, up 27 percent from last year, driven by higher trading volumes across the major product categories. Net interest income reached $966 million per quarter and a yearly record of $3.6 billion, despite multiple rate cuts in nearly all major currencies. The continued risk on environment during most of the year led to a significant increase in margin borrowing, while strong net customer deposits led to higher segregated funds balances. These revenues were partially offset by the interest we paid to our customers on their cash balances. We saw fewer hard-to-borrow names in securities lending than in the third quarter, but their presence across the second half drove full-year results well over the prior year. Other fees and services generated $85 million for the quarter and $291 million for the year, both up modestly versus the prior year periods. This is primarily driven by higher payments for order flow from options exchange-mandated programs and higher FDIC sweep fees, despite reductions in risk exposure fees. Other income includes gains and losses on our investments, our currency diversification strategy, and principal transactions. Note that many of these non-core items are excluded in our adjusted earnings. Other income was $10 million, as reported, and 37 million as adjusted, primarily driven by a loss in our current diversification program. Turning to expenses, execution, clearing, and distribution costs were 91 million and a quarter, down 21 percent from the year-ago quarter, primarily due to two factors. First, we had a full quarter of an SEC fee rate at zero. In the fourth quarter of 2024, SEC fees were $22 million. And second, higher volumes meant we earned higher rebates at exchanges as a result of our smart order routing optimization, particularly for options. These costs and rebates are largely passed through to customers, so these reductions don't have much impact on our profitability, but they are components of our clients' profitability, and this execution quality is one of the reasons they choose to execute with us to maximize their returns. as a percent of commission revenues execution and clearing costs were 11 percent in the fourth quarter for a gross transactional profit margin of 89 percent. We calculate this by excluding from execution and clearing and distribution $23 million of non-transaction-based costs, predominantly market data fees, which do not have a direct commission revenue component. Compensation and benefits expense was $153 million for the quarter for a ratio of compensation expense to adjusted net revenues of 9% versus 10% of the prior year quarter. As always, we remain focused on expense discipline as reflected in our moderate staff increase of 6% over the prior year. For the full year, this ratio was 10% down from 11% in 2024. Our headcount at December 31st was 3,182. G&A expenses were $62 million, up 5% from the year-ago quarter, primarily from increasing spending on advertising. For the full year, G&A was 247 million, down from last year, which included a legal settlement that added $78 million and a one-time charge of $12 million to consolidate our European operations. Excluding those items, G&A for the year was up 10%, predominantly on higher advertising expense. Our pre-tax margin matched the third quarter record 79% and achieved a new record 77% for the year, both as reported and as adjusted. Income taxes of $99 million reflects the sum of the public company's 39 million and the operating company's 60 million. The public company's effective tax rate was 12 percent below its typical range, primarily due to tax benefits we were able to capture in 2025. Moving to our balance sheet on page five of the release, our total assets ended the year 35 percent higher than the prior year at $203 billion, with growth driven by higher margin lending and segregated cash balances. New account growth also helped drive our record customer credit balances. We continue to have no long-term debt, and profit growth drove our firm equity up 23% for the year to exceed $20 billion for the first time. 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 while also considering overall capital allocation. In our operating data on pages six and seven, We had record customer activity and options with our contract volumes up 27% over the prior year quarter and up 26% for the full year, in line with industry volumes. Futures contract volumes rose 22% for the quarter to a near record and were up 12% for the full year, well above industry volumes. Stock share volumes rose 16% for the quarter and 38% 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 significantly higher than the growth in share volumes combined with the rise in major equity indices worldwide. On page seven, you can see that Total customer darts were 4 million trades per day in the quarter, up 30 percent from the prior year. Commission per clear commissionable order of $2.64 was down from last year, primarily due to a mix of smaller average order sizes in stocks and futures and slightly higher in options. And the previously mentioned SEC fee rate moving to zero, which lowered commissions as well as execution and clearing expense. Page 8 shows our net interest margin numbers. Total GAAP net interest income was up 20 percent from the year-ago quarter to $966 million, just one million shy of third quarter's record, despite benchmark rate cuts in multiple countries. Adjusted for NIM presentation, net interest income was just over $1 billion for the first time. We include for NIM purposes certain income that is more appropriately considered interest, but that for gap purposes is classified as other fees and services or as other income. Our net interest income reflects strength in margin loan interest and securities lending partially offset by a modest increase in interest expense on customer cash balances despite lower benchmark interest rates. Many central banks, including the UK, Canada, Hong Kong, and the U.S., reduced rates this quarter, while others, including Australia, Europe, and Switzerland, held steady. Year on year, the average U.S. Fed funds rate fell 75 basis points, or by 16%. Despite this decline, our margin loan interest was up 17%, and our segregated cash interest was down only 3%, both bolstered by higher balances. The average duration of our investment portfolio remained at less than 30 days. During this quarter, the U.S. dollar yield curve remained flat to inverted from the short to medium term, so we continued to maximize what we earned by focusing on short-term yields rather than accepting the lower yields and higher duration risk of longer maturities. This strategy also allows us to maintain a relatively tight maturity match between our assets and liabilities. The securities lending net interest was higher than last year, though we did not see as much activity in hard-to-borrow names as in the third quarter. Contributors to annual growth included several factors. Our growing account base, which increases our inventory of attractive stocks to lend, including international securities. The interest we pay on short cash balances, which makes us attractive to investors who utilize short selling. Our fully paid lending program shares proceeds with clients generally on a 50-50 basis, which appeals to investors looking to maximize the return on their portfolios. And finally, activity has picked up in some of the typical drivers of securities lending, including IPOs and merger and acquisition activity. As most benchmark interest rates are now sufficiently above zero, A portion of what we earn from securities lending is 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 total net revenue related to securities lending would have been $290 million this quarter, up 58% over the prior year quarter. Fully rate-sensitive customer balances ended the current quarter at $24.7 billion versus $19.1 billion in the year-ago quarter. Now, for the estimates of the impact of changes in rates, we estimate the effect of a 25 basis point decrease in the benchmark Fed funds rate to be a $77 million reduction in annual net interest income. Note that our starting point for this estimate is December 31st. with the Fed Fund's effective rate at 3.64% and balances as of that date. Any growth in our balance sheet and interest-earning assets would reduce this impact. About 29% of our customer interest-sensitive balances is not in U.S. dollars, so estimates of a U.S. rate change exclude those currencies. We estimate the effect of a 25 basis point decrease in all the relevant non-USD benchmark rates would reduce annual net interest income by $31 million. In conclusion, we posted another financially strong quarter in net revenues and pre-tax margin, leading to a record year. 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 what we offer while minimizing what we charge. And with that, we'll turn it over to the moderator and open up for questions.