Interactive Brokers Stock (IBKR): Commissions, Interest and Valuation

Michael Whitman · Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020 · YouTube creator, 137K subscribers · Published 2026-11-07

Interactive Brokers stock (IBKR) is the Class A share of Interactive Brokers Group, the company behind the broker. It does not cover opening an account, fees or order routing. This page is about the shares: where the money comes from, how much of it rides on the Fed’s rate, what the stock costs on the latest filing, and how hard it has moved on results days.

IBKR at a glance

Every ratio below pairs one price, the closing price on Friday, November 6, 2026, with the third-quarter 10-Q that Interactive Brokers filed two days earlier, on November 5. The new dividend and the ownership split come from the results release of October 15.

IBKR closed 2025 at $64.31, so it was up 17.9% in 2026 to November 6. Its highest close on record was $98.19 on August 25, 2026. Every price on this page is adjusted for the four-for-one stock split that took effect in June 2025.

How it works

Two income streams. Interactive Brokers charges a commission when a client trades, and it earns interest on the cash clients leave in their accounts and on the money it lends them on margin, minus the interest it pays back to clients. The second stream is called net interest income. Our margin account page explains the lending side from the client’s point of view.

Why the rate matters. When the Fed’s policy rate rises, the broker earns more on client cash and charges more on margin loans. It passes part of that on to clients, but not all of it, so the gap it keeps tends to widen. When the Fed cuts, the opposite pressure applies. The interest rate page covers the policy rate itself.

Why balances matter just as much. Net interest income is a rate times a balance. If clients add cash and borrow more, the balance can grow faster than the rate shrinks. In the third quarter of 2026 the company reported customer margin loans up 36% from a year earlier to $105.2 billion and customer credit balances up 20% to $186.2 billion.

An unusual share structure. The public owns Interactive Brokers Group, Inc., which holds 26.6% of the operating company, IBG LLC. The other 73.4% belongs to IBG Holdings LLC and shows up in the accounts as a noncontrolling interest. The public company held 453,172,548 IBG LLC units on September 30, and the 10-Q cover lists 453,103,399 Class A shares on November 3, so one Class A share lines up with one unit. That is why the per-share numbers work out the same whichever way you count.

Commissions vs net interest income since 2018

The swing year was 2020. The Fed cut to near zero in March, so net interest income fell 19.5% while a wave of new retail traders pushed commissions up 57.5%. For two years commissions were the larger line. Then the Fed started hiking in 2022 and the order flipped back for good: interest has been more than half of net revenues every year since.

A worked example: the P/E, book value and two market caps

Every input below is in the 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026, or the October 15 results release.

1. Trailing earnings. Diluted EPS was $1.98 for January to September 2026, $2.22 for all of 2025 and $1.58 for January to September 2025. Trailing EPS = $1.98 + $2.22 − $1.58 = $2.62.
2. P/E. $75.82 ÷ $2.62 = 28.9.
3. Book value per Class A share. Equity belonging to Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. was $6.215 billion. Divided by the 453,172,548 IBG LLC units it held, one per Class A share, that is $13.71. $75.82 ÷ $13.71 = 5.53.
4. The same thing for the whole company. Total equity including the noncontrolling interest was $23.251 billion across 1,701,410,397 IBG LLC units, or $13.67 a unit, a price-to-book of 5.55. Close to the Class A figure, as it should be.
5. Market value. $75.82 × 453,172,548 Class A shares = $34.36 billion. $75.82 × 1,701,410,397 units = $129.0 billion. Quote sites that show $34 billion and sites that show $129 billion are counting different things, and the second is the value of the whole business at the Class A price.
6. Yield. The new $0.15 quarterly dividend × 4 = $0.60 a year. $0.60 ÷ $75.82 = 0.79%. On the old $0.0875 it would have been 0.46%, which is why some quote pages still show a lower yield. The dividend takes 22.9% of trailing earnings.

How the P/E ratio and price-to-book work in general is covered on their own pages, and dividend yield has the general arithmetic.

The original data

Net interest income and the Fed funds rate, quarter by quarter. From the XBRL figures in each 10-Q and 10-K we took net interest income for every quarter from the first quarter of 2019 (the fourth quarter is the full year minus the first nine months) and set it beside the average effective federal funds rate for the same three months from FRED.

The low was $195 million in the third quarter of 2020, when the Fed funds rate averaged 0.09%. From the first quarter of 2022 to the third quarter of 2023, the rate rose from 0.12% to 5.26% and quarterly net interest income went from $282 million to $733 million, 2.6 times as much. That is the rate effect at full strength.

What happened next is the part most summaries miss. Between the third quarter of 2024 and the third quarter of 2026 the rate fell from 5.26% to 3.67%, yet quarterly net interest income rose 43.9%, from $802 million to $1,154 million, a record. Bigger client balances outran the cuts. Year by year:

Earnings days. Since its May 2007 listing, Interactive Brokers Group has sent the SEC 85 current reports tagged Item 2.02, the item a company uses when it announces quarterly results; the last one arrived in October 2026. We timed each one by the SEC’s acceptance stamp. A report stamped during market hours counts on that day; one stamped at 4 p.m. New York time or later counts on the following session. Results almost always land just after the bell here, so 81 of the 85 reactions were next-day moves.

The median move on those 85 days was 3.23%, against 1.06% on the 4,793 other trading days in the same span, about three times as large. A move of 5% or more happened on 24 earnings days (28.2%) but on only 3.1% of other days. Direction leaned down: IBKR closed higher on 34 of 85 earnings days, against 51.2% of other days. If an earnings day were an ordinary day, a split that lopsided would show up about 5% of the time, so it sits at the edge of what chance alone produces. The largest moves came in the 2008 crisis: down 19.2% on July 25, 2008, and up 14.7% on September 26, 2008. Since 2021 the median earnings-day move has been smaller, 2.31% across 24 reports, 11 of them up. The four 2026 reports gave +6.0% on January 21, −1.9% on April 22, −1.0% on July 22 and −3.9% on October 16.

Get the files: the yearly revenue split with the Fed funds average, and all 85 earnings days with acceptance times. Anyone may reuse them, crediting this page with a link, under the site license.

What drives the share price besides rates

Trading activity. Commissions follow how much clients trade. The company reported 4.27 million daily average revenue trades (DARTs) in the third quarter of 2026, up 18% on a year earlier, and commission revenue up 12% to $602 million.

Account growth. Accounts rose 35% to 5.58 million and client equity 27% to $964.7 billion in the year to the third quarter of 2026. More accounts mean more cash to earn on and more trades to charge for, which is why both income lines grew together in 2024 and 2025.

What the multiple already prices in. Both income lines grew in each of the last three periods in the table above, commissions by more than 20% each time. A market that expects that to continue pays up for it: nearly 29 times earnings for IBKR, against the 11.8x to 14.9x that the four big banks on our bank stocks page traded at on the October 30, 2026 close.

When it fails

Rate cuts can still bite. The 2024 to 2026 run shows balance growth beating cuts, but 2020 shows the other case: a fast drop to near zero cut net interest income by a fifth in a year. A deep cutting cycle with falling client balances would hit both parts of the formula at once.

Commission booms fade. The 2020 and 2021 surge in trading did not repeat in 2022, when commissions slipped 2.1% as markets fell. Trading activity rises and falls with market mood.

A high multiple has less room for error. At 28.9 times earnings the price already assumes strong growth. On results days the stock fell on four of the last six reports, including October 2026, when quarterly net interest income was the highest on record.

Our ratios age fast. One closing price and one 10-Q sit behind every ratio here, and the dividend changed in October. Each row in the first table carries its date for that reason.

Questions people ask

Is IBKR stock the same as having an Interactive Brokers account?

No. An account is a place to hold investments. IBKR stock is a share of the company that runs the broker. You can own the shares through any broker, and owning them gives no account benefits.

Does Interactive Brokers stock pay a dividend?

Yes. In October 2026 the company raised the quarterly dividend from $0.0875 to $0.15 a share, payable on December 14 to holders of record on December 1. That is a 0.79% yield at the November 6 close.

Why do quote sites show two different market caps for IBKR?

One multiplies the price by the 453 million Class A shares only, about $34 billion. The other counts all 1.70 billion IBG LLC units, about $129 billion. The Class A shares are 26.6% of the business.

How do Fed rate cuts affect Interactive Brokers?

Lower rates shrink the margin it keeps on client cash and loans, so net interest income falls unless balances grow. From 2024 to 2026 balances grew faster than rates fell, so the line kept rising.

When does Interactive Brokers report earnings?

In the middle or second half of January, April, July and October, usually just after 4 p.m. New York time. The last four filings were January 20, April 21, July 21 and October 15, 2026.

Related

The valuation tools on this page are P/E ratio and price-to-book, and the rate side is covered in rate cuts. If you want the same filing-based look at lenders and investment banks, bank stocks runs it for BAC, WFC, GS and MS. The lending that drives so much of IBKR’s interest income is explained from the client’s side on the margin account page.

This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.