Interactive Brokers Group, Inc.

Q2 2026 Earnings Call — July 21, 2026

Analyst Steven Schubach (Wolf Research): Hi, good afternoon, and thanks so much for taking my questions. So first I had a question on the marketing strategy. You've significantly increased the level of marketing spend in recent quarters. You also hired a new CMO, I believe, less than a year ago. That investment has coincided with a meaningful acceleration of account growth, well above the 20% normalized level that you've spoken to previously. And we're hoping you could speak to how the marketing strategy has evolved in recent quarters, whether you're seeing a higher return on marketing spend, which should support a structurally higher account growth versus that 20% normalized level that you've spoken to in the past.

Executive Thomas: Well, you are correct that we have done all these things. I do not think that the marketing yield has in fact been higher than it was before. It is roughly the same. In other words, we increased expenses and we had a corresponding increasing yield, but not more than proportionally higher.

Analyst: Understood, but has the approach to marketing changed in your view where it gives you some increased confidence around the ability to deliver better than 20% account growth in terms of the go forward?

Executive Thomas: Yes, but we don't like to promise. It was only once when I said that we will grow up 30% and immediately the growth rate went down to 20. And then everybody said 20, 20, 20. And ever since that time, we have been over 30.

Analyst: Fair enough. I appreciate the desire not necessarily to overpromise. If I could just squeeze in one more on margin balances. The growth has really been extraordinary over the last few quarters in particular, frankly, over the last couple of years. And at the same time, Thomas, I know that you've mentioned in the past that you don't necessarily like when margin loans grow too quickly and was hoping to get your perspective on whether this level of margin balance growth reflects healthy levels of client activity that appears more durable or if there are any indications of outsized risk taking on the platform that might give you pause.

Executive Thomas: Well, we are very cognizant of client risk and margins, and we're continuously monitoring it, and we feel comfortable with the current levels.

Analyst Karl: Thanks so much for taking my questions.

Our next question comes from James Yarrow with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed.

Analyst James Yarrow (Goldman Sachs): Good afternoon, and thanks for taking the question. I was hoping you might be able to update us just on your excess capital position today. I know you most recently, I believe, talked about $8 billion of excess capital, but that was a few months ago. And then maybe if you could also just update us on the potential acquisition pipeline that you see right now.

Executive Milan: The total excess at this point, if we consider the various buffers that we have in place, is around $10.3 billion, so it increased by approximately $1.1 billion from the last quarter. Nothing new to report about the acquisitions other than the number of emails we receive on a weekly basis with potential acquisition targets from the various investment banks has dramatically increased. There is a lot offered, but nothing so far stood out as worthy pursuing it. That is not to say that we do not look at them.

Analyst James Yarrow: Thanks, Milan. That's really helpful. Just a quick follow-up on a slightly different topic, but I was hoping that you might be able to just provide your thoughts on the Chinese regulatory actions related to Chinese mainland brokerage accounts and I guess the impacts on your business if there are any and whether you see any risks to the Hong Kong business.

Executive Milan: So what happened was I'm pretty sure you're referring to the Tiger Futu situation where the Chinese regulator clamped down on their activities in terms of attracting accounts from mainland China where they are not licensed to operate. That's correct. Right. So we have been in compliance with the Chinese mainland regulations for a long time. We do not advertise in mainland. We carefully check that the accounts that we accept onto our platform can demonstrate that they have a residence outside of mainland China. That is how we have been operating for a while. Now, as a consequence of the clampdown on Tiger and Futu, we have seen a clear uptick in the broker transfers from Tiger and Futu. So the number of accounts and especially assets we have received from Tiger and Futu has increased after what happened to them in May. Hard to say whether that will continue. A lot of what we have seen is accounts that we already had on our platform shifted assets away from Tiger and Futu onto Interactive Brokers platform.

Analyst James Yarrow: That's very helpful. Thank you so much, Milan.

Analyst Patrick Moley (Piper Sandler): Yes, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I just had one on prediction markets. I was curious what went into the decision to integrate CalSheet and CME into your prediction market offering alongside ForecastX contracts. And, you know, what are you seeing so far in terms of any tailwind that's provided to volumes or client adoption? Thanks.

Executive: The decision wasn't really hard. If you look at what we do as a broker, we consider it to be our job to offer connectivity and access to various marketplaces globally. As the prediction markets are growing, there is no reason for us to limit our clients to only access ForecastX. Kalshi is obviously a significant player. So that is what drove the decision. We wanted to increase the access for our clients. As a result, increase the available liquidity that they can access, which makes it easier for us to attract institutions to come to us to connect and access the prediction markets through us. One thing did not change, and that is we still do not offer sports. We still do not offer entertainment contracts. We continue to focus on contracts on events that have a potential to affect our clients' portfolios.

Analyst Patrick Moley: Great. Thanks for that. And then as a follow-up, you've added 1.3 million new accounts over the last year, but darts per account and commission per order are both flat. So could you help us get a better sense for why you haven't seen dilution in either of those metrics as you've scaled? Are the new cohorts really as active as the existing base, or could the strong environment...

Executive: I think what we see is partially due to the strong environment. The darts have been increasing. This has been a volatile time period somewhat helped by the SpaceX IPO. There's a lot of interest in investing. I think that's partially what you see. Sometimes we onboard bigger hedge funds onto our platform that trade a lot. Sometimes the account growth comes from introducing brokers that bring smaller accounts. So there is some amount of fluctuation in this.

Analyst: Okay. That's it for me. Thank you.

Analyst Ben Bodish (Barclays): Hi. Good evening and thank you for taking the question. I was wondering if you could unpack the strength in SEC lending this quarter. You know, the enhanced disclosure is very helpful as always. How much of it was maybe related to SpaceX versus other activities, and what does that maybe tell us about what activity could look like into Q3 and Q4, assuming perhaps that the IPO environment remains constructive?

Executive: That's a little hard to predict into the future, Ben. So as usual, the securities lending is driven by two things: a general increase in balances as we take on more customers, more positions, more shorts, more hard to borrow stocks that we can lend out to other brokers. And then in particular, at any one time, it's driven by any specials, any hot stocks that are at very high hard to borrow rates that our customers are holding and we can lend out. And in particular, we have a fully paid lending program we call Stock Yield Enhancement, and we lend out their securities and we split the earnings with them, and that makes them quite happy that it's an enhancement on the stock yields that they're already holding. But those come and go. Our job is to build out our systems and our teams to take full advantage when those show up, and we're seeing a lot of success in doing that.

Analyst Ben Bodish: Okay, that makes sense. Maybe one follow-up on the prediction markets question. I'm curious about ForecastX in particular. When we look at the volumes, it looks like they're pretty concentrated in a couple of specific temperature contracts. And you guys have been quite clear that the goal is climate, financial indicators, economic indicators. I'm just curious, in terms of the client concentration or anything like that, is there any sort of interesting signal or is it sort of where you found most product market fit for now and maybe more to come later? But just curious if there's anything to unpack there. Thank you.

Executive: Well, we are going to continue to concentrate on weather-related contracts and we are now bringing in potential hurricane landfalls and hope to expand in that area and that also implies insurance risk.

Analyst Daniel Fannin (Jefferies): Great. Thanks. So I was hoping to just get a little bit more context around the account growth in the quarter, you know, and even, I guess, year to date. It's been, as we've already said, quite strong. But the regions maybe that are generating the bulk of the growth, if Maria was maybe an outsized...

Executive: It's very simple. We are growing everywhere globally, all the regions, all the account types, whether it's financial advisor, introducing brokers, direct accounts. We are pleased with our growth across the board. It's that simple.

Analyst Daniel Fannin: Okay. And then you did mention in your prepared remarks that the backlog for introducing brokers is still quite strong. I guess a little bit of context there. Also, just trying to get maybe the size and scope of those versus previous periods. Is it similar in terms of the size of the potential partners that are coming on and maybe how those discussions have been evolving and if there's anything different?

Executive: This quarter, it's probably the fourth or fifth straight quarter in which we had a double-digit number of integrations going online. So that's healthy. The pipeline continues to be healthy. We have more integrations in progress than we had in the previous quarter. We have a significant number of new committed integrations. So the integrations that haven't started yet, but the type of institutions we have been onboarding recently has somewhat changed. We still see some startups, some new firms, but more and more we see firms with existing business that look to expand their offering, whether it's crypto or CFD providers that decided to offer their clients listed stocks, or retail brokers looking to expand from a single offering, for example, U.S. stocks into a significantly broader one that would cover other asset classes, other regions or financial institutions that already have some type of an investment offering and decided to onboard instead with Interactive Brokers either to cut their costs or to benefit from the broad product offering we can offer them. So very healthy pipeline.

Analyst Brennan Hawken (BMO): Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I was curious if you could parse out if possible what the impact that you saw from the opening of trading in Korea here recently. And how should we think about margin calls that we've heard about impacting that market? As I understand, you don't offer trading to residents in Korea. So that might insulate you to some degree from that. But just curious if you could parse that out for us. Thanks.

Executive: We do not offer the level of granularity as to trading volumes exactly where they occur. What I can tell you is that our entry into the Korean market was well-timed. There is a lot of interest in the Korean stocks, especially the semiconductor ones. We had a lot of trading from day one. Then the first ADR, Korean ADR, was listed in the United States. That did not negatively impact our trading in Korea at all. So when I looked at the trading activity week over week, it has just been a line that goes straight up. And the ADR trading just added to that. So very strong start.

Analyst Brennan Hawken: Excellent. Thanks for that. For my follow-up, you now have launched agentic AI capabilities. So I'm curious what the early read is on the impact of those tools on volumes and engagement. And also, you know, as a sort of sub-question, you don't have agentic execution on offer. So is this, you know, maybe a first stage that you're thinking for the rollout of these types of tools? Just because, you know, given demand, you talk about overnight demand for trading and whatnot. It sounds like agentic would sort of solve a lot of those issues for your customers. Are you looking at that as well? Thanks.

Executive: So you may recall from our press releases that we are integrated. We have enterprise-level integration with OpenAI, Anthropic, and X. And so our customers benefit from that integration. What we see is a lot of interest. Surprisingly to us, we saw a lot of clients connecting their AI chatbots to their IBKR accounts before we even made any public announcements. So we are very visible in the dropdowns of the AI chatbots as one of the companies that you can connect the chatbot to. So we're very pleased with how our clients use their chatbots to interact with their accounts. Now as to what is it that they can do through the chatbots, we allow them to access their account data, ask questions about it. We do offer an ability to trade but we utilize the so-called human in the loop paradigm which means the AI can submit an instruction to the account but that instruction then appears on a UI in a designated area from where the client has to approve the instruction to turn into an executable order. And there is an ever-growing number of our clients that use that ability. Now, I'm going to give you a little more about this.

I'm going to go for a little longer, if you don't mind. We have been offering APIs through which our clients can connect their programs or the spreadsheets into which they can use their programs or the spreadsheets to generate trades in their account for a very long time. What changed here is those were programmers, or those were people who had somewhat of an engineering background, so they knew what they were doing much more so than the general public that finds it very easy to interact with the AI chatbots, but we have to be more careful so that the chatbot doesn't run away from them and generate a lot of bad trades. That is why we have elected the approach of having the human in the middle. Now to your question, is that going to change over time? It will. We are going to be offering at some point fully autonomous agentic trading, but we're going to be very careful about the type of guardrails that will be available for our clients. And we will submit them to some type of a test to ensure that they understand the benefits and dangers of the autonomous trading before we let them proceed autonomously. So that is something we will do in the future.

Analyst Chris Allen (KPW): Good evening, everyone. I think most things have been covered. Maybe just a quick question, just in terms of what demand you're seeing or hearing from your customers for perpetual products, obviously a hot topic of discussion these days. You noted you're offering CBOE binary options now. Are you planning any thoughts in terms of demand for 24-7 products in metals and other areas? Any call on that front would be helpful.

Executive: In terms of the perpetual futures, it is less of a demand that we hear from our clients than our willingness to offer trading instruments where we see volume and public interest in general. That is why not long ago we decided to offer cryptocurrency perpetuals that are offered by Coinbase. You may remember that it's difficult to short cryptocurrencies. It's difficult to trade cryptocurrencies on margin. And those are the two problems that the perpetual futures solve. You can short them. You can trade on leverage. So that is why we decided to offer them. And we see that as far as the crypto segment is concerned, roughly one third of the trading that we see is now coming from these perpetuals. As more outfits will be, as more exchanges will be adding them, we will be providing access for our clients to more interesting ones.

Analyst: Thanks, that's it for me.

Management: Thank you so much, and this concludes our Q&A session. I will pass it back to Nancy Stuebe for closing comments.

Management: Thank you, everyone, for participating today.

As a reminder, this call will be available for replay on our website and we will be posting a clean version of the transcript on our site tomorrow.

Thanks again and we look forward to talking to you next quarter end. This concludes our conference. Thank you for participating and you may now disconnect.

Q1 2026 Earnings Call — April 21, 2026

Analyst Patrick Molley (Piper Sandler): Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. So last week, the SEC eliminated the pattern day trader rule. It seems like it could be a pretty significant structural change for the industry, and it will make more active day trading available to far more retail investors. So I was just curious, you know, how you're thinking about the strategic opportunity here, if you think that there's – you know, any, you know, avenue for increased account growth because of this and how you're just thinking about the overall opportunity to attract some of these smaller wallet retail investors. Thanks.

Executive Name (Title): Well, we welcome the change. The regulators are basically replacing an outdated concept of counting trades and an arbitrary equity threshold for account size with a risk-based system, real-time intraday margin requirements. The expectation is that it will broaden the retail access, increase the trading frequency and engagement, and also liquidity in the markets. The rule will probably speed up the outcomes. The disciplined participants who have experienced some well-tried trading methodology will probably end up growing their accounts faster, whereas those that trade in a more haphazard fashion will probably realize their losses faster.

Okay, so you're viewing this as an opportunity for IBKL, I guess, any color on, you know, the strategic opportunity here?

Executive Name (Title): It is an opportunity in the sense that the majority of our accounts are individual accounts. Many of these individual accounts are smaller accounts, and they will be able to trade frequently. So in that sense, it is an opportunity.

Okay. All right, thanks. And then maybe just if you could help us break down the account growth that you saw in the first quarter. It seems like it's a pretty two-sided thing. market for the business. You know, on one hand, you have the war and you have an energy market volatility that I think is bringing people to the market and wanting to trade. And then on the other hand, I think that there's some concern about what this could mean, you know, for the rest of the year and whether it could create some frictions, I guess, in terms of new account formation, particularly internationally. So any thoughts on just the current environment and, you know, just account growth through the storm here as we enter into the, you know, the back half of the year? Thanks.

Executive Name (Title): No, I don't think we need to expect anything different from what we have seen in the past. What tends to happen is that the equity market prices are increasing. More and more of the public wants to participate on the run-up, and we see strong account openings, whereas as the volatility increases, that may discourage newcomers from joining the markets, but that gets offset by an increase in the darts, increase in the trading. So, as I said, the increased volatility is something that we have seen before for different reasons. I would expect things to continue the way we have seen over the past several years.

Okay. Appreciate it, Moran. That's it for me.

Analyst James Yarrow (Goldman Sachs): Good afternoon, and thanks for taking the question. I wanted to return to a topic discussed on last quarter's call on your focus on accelerating marketing spend to support account growth. Is there any way you could provide a bit more detail on what marketing spend trends might have looked like either historically or perhaps both historically and today, and maybe if you could just provide a little bit more color on how you would think about scaling marketing going forward.

Executive Name (Title): Well, we are hell-bent on trying to increase our marketing spend, but we are also very strict about getting the required minimum return on every additional marketing dollar. So as a result, while we keep trying to increase the spend, it is going very slowly. So what we are really doing is we're trying to find additional marketing assets that are going to hopefully give us more opportunity to spend more.

Thanks, Thomas. That's very clear. As my follow-up, there has been discussion among U.S. brokers and banks recently around potential AI-enabled cash optimization tools, which I think the idea is that they could ensure that customers receive yields on their deposits that are closer to Fed funds. I'm curious if you have any views on these sorts of tools, and I guess is there any consideration – that this could affect your pricing on deposits.

Executive Name (Title): So we're not happy about these tools because we have always been paying close to market rates, and if these tools force other brokers to do the same, then we're going to have more competition. But I don't think they will do that. I mean, it is somewhat ironic that we hear these noises about using AI in the area of cash optimization from the banks, banks that have been paying very, very little on the uninvested cash. And if you think about it, there isn't that much that AI needs to do here. It's really the brokers or the banks' decision of how much of the interest income they want the client to enjoy versus how much of it they want to keep to themselves. We have historically been on the forefront of the industry. Our costs have been low, and that has helped us maximize the outcome for our clients.

Thanks a lot, Thomas, very clear. Thank you.

Analyst Ben (Barclays): Hi, good evening, and thank you for taking the question. Maybe to start following up on Patrick's second question, I'm just curious. I remember a year ago the markets were selling off quite a bit in April, and you gave us an update on your margin balances, which tend to follow the S&P. It seems like we're seeing the opposite this month where the end of March, since then the markets are up fairly meaningfully. I'm just curious if you can give any more of a detailed update. What are margin balances looking like intra-month? Are we seeing this sort of, you know, S&P growth supported, you know, reacceleration of account growth? I'm particularly curious on the margins because that seemed to be such an interesting topic last year, and I would think, you know, you'd see a bit of a rebound, but just curious any details you could share there.

Executive Name (Title): So, our margin loans are precisely at the end of the quarter, $86.6 billion, but that's part of our, every month's end, we release our margin balances. So if anybody cares to look at that, they could see what's happening.

All right, fair enough. And then maybe just a higher-level topic on prediction markets. Just curious, any updates you can share in terms of, you know, any updates you can share in terms of conversations with institutions that may be interested in onboarding to ForecastX, you know, any progress there? Thank you.

Executive Name (Title): ForecastX is receiving more and more inquiries from people who have sworn months ago that they will never enter the financial markets, and now more and more of them are curious and are considering becoming members, yes. So I think this is going to be a huge thing, as I have said before, and it's going to be, you know, a lot of prediction trading.

All right. I think we're taking questions. Thank you.

Analyst Brennan Hawken (BMO Capital Markets): Hi. Thanks for answering my question. You touched on the non-U.S. dollar sensitivity to rates with a third of those balances there. Is it possible to get a currency breakdown for those balances and maybe which of those currencies are growing the fastest?

Executive Name (Title): Yeah, we don't really get into it at that granular level, Brennan. You know, we make that differentiation between USD and non-USD because, of course, the bulk is in USD, but we want to make sure that, in your mind, there's a differentiation when you see the benchmark rates change. What can you expect?

Okay. Thanks, Paul. And then, is it still fair to assume you framed the changes in rates as a drop in those policy rates, but are the upside and downside scenarios symmetrical, or do they differ if rates are moving up?

Executive Name (Title): They're roughly symmetrical. There are some low-rate non-US dollar currencies, as we saw when rates here went near zero. There's a little bit of asymmetry when you go from positive to negative territory, but it's fairly minor. So, other than that, they are pretty symmetrical.

Great. Thanks for taking my question.

Analyst Chris Allen (KBW): Yeah, afternoon, everyone. I just want to ask about crypto. You continue to build out capabilities there. You announced the transfer capabilities in crypto. I know it's just been a few weeks, but I'm wondering if you've seen any clients proactively transfer positions to IBKR since you offered that capability.

Executive Name (Title): We indeed have. We released it only a couple of weeks ago. We do see amounts coming in. It's mostly United States, but internationally we see that as well. And the other thing that we announced not long ago was launching our European offering. We have done that in cooperation with our partner, ZeroHash. We have so far been under soft release. We have issued a press release about it. We have sent an email notification to existing clients. We have not yet been marketing it externally.

Got it. And maybe just following up on that, anything else you think you need to offer right now to increase or accelerate your digital asset penetration, or you think you're kind of already there with your product solutions offering? I know you've got coins and things along those lines.

Executive Name (Title): There are a couple of things we still need to do. We are not covering all the geographies. We are working on that in Singapore, for example. And the other thing that we need to work on is the staking. As you know, some of the cryptocurrencies use the proof-of-stake concept, which allows the holders of those currencies to earn very significant interest income. And our partner, ZeroHash, is working on that capability. And as soon as they have it, we're going to integrate it into our offering.

Great. Thanks.

Analyst Karim Sif (Bank of America): Hi. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you very much for taking my question. Just one question, actually, on the crypto business. If you could talk a little bit more about that agreement or partnership that you've had with Coinbase Derivatives, you know, maybe around like, you know, the client demand there and how we should kind of like, you know, think about the potential revenue opportunity and any of the, you know, the economics that you could share with us. Thank you.

Executive Name (Title): So the agreement that we have with them is very simple. The Coinbase Derivatives Exchange lists a number of cryptocurrency futures. Most of them are different in terms of size from what the large exchanges offer. They're significantly smaller contracts, so they are geared towards retail traders. There is one particular instrument type that is interesting to the traders. Those are the so-called perpetual futures. That was the main reason why we have decided to integrate that offering into ours. The perpetual cryptocurrency futures, they command very, very significant volumes, and that is why we joined the exchange and now offering it to our clients. Our clients trade it. It's not a very large number of accounts yet, but the ones that are trading it are trading it in big numbers.

Got it. Thank you very much for taking my question.

Executive Name (Title): Thank you, and ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our Q&A session, and I will pass it back to Nancy Stubbe for closing comments. Thank you, everyone, for participating today.

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. And this concludes our conference. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.