Interactive Brokers Posts 20% MoM Decline in December DARTs

US-headquartered Interactive Brokers has released the key metrics of its trading platform for December 2021, reporting a 20 percent decline in the Daily Average Revenue Trades (DARTs) from the previous month.

In absolute terms, the electronic trading platform reported 2.229 million in DARTs for the last month of 2021. Additionally, the figure dropped by 3 percent when compared with the same month of the prior year.

Impressive Client Onboarding

Despite the drop in DARTs, the American brokerage ended the year with 1.68 million client accounts. Moreover, this figure jumped by 56 percent from the end of the previous year and 2 percent from the prior month.

With this, each of Interactive Brokers clients averaged at 299 annualized cleared DARTs.

The official press release further revealed that the broker ended the month with a 30 percent higher client equity from the prior year at $373.8 billion. In addition, the client margin loan balance on the platform jumped by 40 percent from the previous year to $54.6 billion. However, both these figures remain almost even when compared with November 2021.

As well as that, the client credit balance came in at $87.1 billion, which is again 12 percent higher than the same month of the previous year.

Also, the average commission charged per cleared commissionable order came in at $2.37, which includes exchange, clearing and regulatory fees. Furthermore, the platform estimates that the exchange, clearing and regulatory fees came to 55 percent of the futures commissions.

Meanwhile, the trading platform is expanding its services and launched a personalized mobile trading platform recently, along with requests for payments services. Additionally, the established platform added cryptocurrencies to its offerings as well.