Interactive Brokers grows to 5.678 million accounts as October trading slips 4% year on year

Interactive Brokers ended October 2026 with 5.678 million client accounts, 34% above a year earlier, while activity measured by daily average revenue trades was down 4% over the same period. Its 2 November operating update reports 4.306 million DARTs, a 5% increase on September. The divergence is a useful distinction for broker-industry analysis: adding customers does not automatically produce proportionate growth in trades per session, especially when market conditions and customer mix change between comparison periods.[1][2]

Customer equity stood at $928.6 billion at month-end, 19% higher than October 2025 but 4% below September 2026. Client margin loans totalled $106.8 billion, up 31% year on year and 2% month on month. Client credit balances were $180.5 billion, including $6.2 billion in insured bank-deposit sweep balances, 15% above the year-earlier level but 3% below September. These three balance-sheet-adjacent figures measure different things: a customer's asset value, customer borrowing and client cash, rather than the broker's own operating profit.[1][2]

The firm also reported an annualised average of 163 cleared DARTs per client account, using its specified convention. An annualised per-account measure must not be compared directly with a single month's absolute DART figure without accounting for trading days and the denominator. Its overall average commission per cleared commissionable order was $2.46, explicitly including exchange, clearing and regulatory fees. The product-level averages in the release are not a universal published rate card for every client or market.[1][2]

The useful business question is whether customer growth is translating into engagement and economic value. A 34% increase in accounts alongside a 4% fall in daily trades does not prove a deterioration in existing clients' trading habits, because the aggregate includes newly opened accounts, potentially less-active investors and different market volatility. The metrics also do not distinguish execution from the impact of currency translations, balance changes or securities prices. That makes a simplistic calculation of revenue per newly acquired account unreliable.[1][2]

Accounts, activity and economics are separate measures

For rivals, the most relevant data points reflect several different competitive strengths. A larger account base points to distribution and onboarding scale; increased margin borrowing suggests demand for financing; client cash balances can affect net interest economics depending on rate policy and allocation; and commission order values reveal the transaction mix under the broker's definitions. No one metric establishes overall execution quality, customer welfare or a single account's total cost.[1][2]

The release includes Regulation NMS execution statistics, which require a separate quality-of-execution interpretation from the headline activity table. The firm did not report a complete October profit-and-loss statement in the monthly metrics announcement. A proper performance assessment should pair monthly account and turnover measures with subsequent quarterly financial statements, pricing schedules and independently comparable execution-quality data, keeping client-held assets separate from the broker's own earnings. The most revealing follow-up will be engagement by account cohort rather than comparing 34% account growth with trade growth as though each account opened at the same time.[1][2]

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