IBKR
#It's sophisticated options traders' accounts that have been moved over to us completely.
Those accounts are with us, and they do everything in that account.
What they needed was the ability to execute complex trades.
And instead of building the system themselves, they rather chose us to do this for them.
But since these accounts also need to have stock often, and stock is often a part of the trade, the entire account is with us.
Now, it's 1,000 accounts that came over so far, but there are about another several thousand still in the queue.
Also in the future, these kinds of accounts for sophisticated option traders will be open with us when they come to Scottrade to open a new account.
No, we're not paying them anything.
They are paying us.
So say if you ---+ for the first 10,000 option contracts, if you come to us directly, we charge you $0.75 a contract.
But if you trade over, I think, 100,000 contracts, we charge you $0.15 a contract.
So all the Scottrade accounts are looked at as though they were one account, so they get the benefit of these volume tiers.
It's a fully disclosed account, but for purposes of charging commission, we use them all as though they were an omnibus account.
Difficult in a short few sentences, but it's ---+ I think, suffice to say that the customer losses all occurred in our US broker dealer Interactive Brokers LLC.
Therefore, they would be subject ultimately to US rates, and not to anything complicated, because they're not in foreign markets.
I think I said the last earnings call that I'm thinking about selling small amounts, like 1 million shares of [Clorice] dollar are up.
So by this time, the stock is up by $350.
I may be out.
Not yet.
Haven't reached that level yet.
That's right.
It's reasonable if you look at the end of 2016, yes.
The last quarter of 2016.
That's kind of what I'm looking at.
Late Q3, Q4 of 2016.
Well, we have a team of service people around the globe, roughly 35 of them.
And their task is to approach other brokers, hedge funds and investment advisers and prop traders.
These are the four classes of clientele that we are marketing to.
And we also ---+ as there is more and more publicity about the various things we do, they often receive calls.
The conversation with one of our sales force at Scottrade has been going on for, I think, about a year and a half, before they actually decided on doing this.
You see the next idea that we're thinking about trying to get them into, is offering futures, because they do not offer futures trading right now.
As we transfer all the [optery offense or though] the options accounts, maybe we'll think about talking to them about futures and currencies.
The 3 million accounts mostly are small stock traders, and they are just as well being where they are.
I don't think the mix has changed that quickly.
It's probably the same mix going forward.
Our task is to make our platform good enough for them to say to themselves that we can offer a better service if we offer Interactive Brokers' platform, and we just do the hand-holding.
That's where we would like to get to.
And it's difficult to maintain.
It's not only the technology also the back office and the regulations, they are getting more and more complex.
So I don't think that a smaller outfits can afford the expense of keeping it up-to-date.
Thank you.
It's better technology, better sales, we are better known.
Two years ago, whenever we approached a potential client, they said ---+ Interactive Brokers, who is that.
We've never heard of them.
Now that's no longer the case.
The longer we have this, the better it will go, I think.
No.
