Interactive Brokers is an automated global broker. It makes money in two main ways: charging fees every time a customer executes a trade, and earning interest on the cash and borrowed money sitting in customer accounts. Customers range from individual investors to hedge funds, and they can trade stocks, options, futures, bonds, currencies, precious metals, and cryptocurrencies across more than 170 exchanges in 40 countries, all from a single account. The platform runs on proprietary software that requires very little human involvement, which keeps costs low and lets the company handle enormous trading volumes efficiently. The diagram below traces where the money goes.
Five years of financial data tell a clear story of acceleration. Revenue climbed from $2.7 billion in 2021 to $6.2 billion in 2025. That is more than a doubling in four years. The growth did not come from one lucky year. Each year added meaningfully to the last.
The customer count tells the same story. Total accounts grew from 2.562 million in 2023 to 4.399 million in 2025, a 72% increase in just two years. Customer equity, meaning the total value of assets held on the platform, grew from $426 billion to $779.9 billion over the same period. More accounts mean more trades and more cash sitting on the platform earning interest for the company.
The company's two revenue streams moved in the same direction in 2025. Commission revenue rose 27% to $2.149 billion, pushed by a 40% jump in daily average revenue trades. Net interest income rose 13% to $3.563 billion, driven by larger customer margin loan balances and more securities lending activity. Expenses actually fell as a share of revenue. Total non-interest expenses dropped from 29% of net revenues in 2024 to 23% in 2025. That left a pretax profit margin of 77% for 2025, up from 71% in 2024. A business collecting $6.2 billion in revenue and keeping 77 cents of every dollar before taxes is running with very high efficiency.
That dependence on interest rates is a real tension in the numbers. The U.S. Federal Reserve cut its benchmark rate three times in 2025, bringing it down to a range of 3.50% to 3.75%. The company's net interest margin, which measures how much it earns on its interest-generating assets after paying customers, fell from 2.35% in 2024 to 2.08% in 2025. Net interest income still grew in dollar terms because the pool of assets kept expanding, but the rate the company earns on each dollar of those assets is shrinking. If rates fall further and asset growth slows, those two forces could work against each other.
The documented risks go beyond interest rates. The company's technology has failed in specific, costly ways. In 2020, the trading platform could not process negative oil prices, leading to $82.57 million in customer losses that regulators ordered the company to repay. In 2024, a computer error during Berkshire Hathaway trading cost the company $48 million. The market making operation, where the company trades for its own account using a proprietary pricing model that updates thousands of times per second, carries its own technology risk. A flaw in that model, as the company acknowledges in its own risk disclosures, could cause unexpected losses.
There is also a structural complexity in how the company is owned. IBG, Inc., the publicly listed entity, owns only about 26.3% of IBG LLC, the actual operating company. The remaining 73.7% is held by a separate entity controlled by the company's founder and employees. The public company owes that entity up to 85% of tax savings from a $2.2 billion tax basis increase, and the company's own risk disclosures note that if the IRS challenges that basis, the company could owe more than the actual tax savings it received. This ownership arrangement also means that regulatory approval from agencies including FINRA and the FCA is required before any change of control transaction can proceed.
Cryptocurrency trading adds another layer of risk. The company does not hold or clear crypto itself. It relies on third-party providers. The company's own risk disclosures state that a data breach at one of those providers could result in irreversible losses of customer cryptocurrencies and create significant liability. That is a category of risk that is harder to quantify than a trading system failure.