Interactive Brokers Group, Inc.

Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. is an automated global electronic broker that executes, clears, and settles trades across stocks, options, futures, forex, bonds, and other instruments on more than 170 exchanges and market centers in 40 countries, generating $6,205 million in total net revenues in fiscal 2025. The company traces its roots to the market-making operation Thomas Peterffy founded on the American Stock Exchange floor in 1977, and today serves approximately 4.75 million customer accounts holding $789 billion in customer equity.

This is a story about a technology company that happens to hold a broker-dealer license. IBKR has spent five decades building an integrated, proprietary software stack that automates virtually every function of the brokerage business — order routing, execution, clearing, margining, securities lending, compliance, and customer service — and that automation produces a pretax profit margin of 77%, a figure that would be remarkable in any industry and is nearly unheard of in financial services. The file turns on a single question: whether the current margin structure represents a cyclical peak riding elevated interest rates and buoyant trading volumes, or a durable competitive advantage that will persist — and perhaps strengthen — as the platform scales and new initiatives like prediction markets, crypto, and AI-powered trading mature into material revenue streams.