Popular American electronic trading platform Interactive Brokers reported single-digit month-over-month (MoM) growth in its daily average revenue trades (DARTs) and client accounts in May. While DARTs grew by 5% to 1.86 million, the platform’s client accounts rose by 2% to 2.26 million.

However, when compared to the same period last year, DARTs went down by 19% while client accounts jumped by the same measure. Interactive Brokers disclosed the figures on Thursday in its brokerage metrics for May 2023.

Despite growing the DARTs from 1.765 million in April, Interactive Broker’s performance last month stands below the 2.055 million trades per day that generated revenue through commissions or fees earlier in March.

Average Commission Drops in May

In terms of other metrics, ending client equity, or the amount of money clients had in their trading accounts at the end of the month, rose by 1% MoM to $345.1 billion and picked up by 10% compared to the same period last year.

Furthermore, the amount of money owed the brokerage by clients from leveraged trades also rose slightly by 1% to $39.5 billion. However, the ending client margin loan balance slumped by 10% year-over-year.

Unlike the ending client equity and margin loan balance, Interactive Broker’s ending client credit balances, or the amount of money clients left in their trading account after all trades have been settled and all fees and charges deducted, decreased by 1% to $98.7 billion, down from $99.2 billion in the prior month. However, the figure, which includes $2.9 billion in insured bank deposit sweeps, represents an 8% gain over the balances from the same period a year earlier.

Moreover, Interactive Broker last month generated an average commission of $3.08 per cleared commissionable orders, which is a 3% drop from previous month. The figure includes exchange, clearing and regulatory fees.

Giving a breakdown on its commissions across classes, the brokerage explained that it turned out $1.95 commission from an average of 1,013 shares, $4.43 from an average of 6.6 equity options contracts and $4.36 from an average of 3.3 futures contracts.

“Futures include options on futures,” Interactive Brokers said in the report. “We estimate exchange, clearing and regulatory fees to be 57% of the futures commissions.”

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