Interactive Brokers Review 2026: The Pro Broker's Moat
IBKR set a fresh all-time high at $83.83 on May 5, 2026 — the third record close in less than three weeks and a +85% move from the year-ago lows. The Q1 earnings print on April 21 explained why: 4.75 million customer accounts (+31% year-over-year), Daily Average Revenue Trades up 24% to 4.4 million per day, $169 billion of uninvested client cash (+35%), and a 77% pretax margin. The board raised the dividend from $0.08 to $0.0875 a share. Adjusted EPS of $0.60 narrowly missed the $0.61 consensus and the stock rallied anyway, because the operating story is simply too obvious to argue with: Interactive Brokers is taking share from the zero-commission pioneers it was supposed to be left behind by. The pitch has not changed since we first reviewed IBKR. Two pricing tiers, one for casual investors (IBKR Lite, $0 US stock commissions) and one for serious traders (IBKR Pro, sub-penny per-share pricing, the lowest published margin rates in the US). One account, 170 markets, 40 countries, 29 currencies. Nobody else offers that. What has changed is that the macro backdrop has been kind to IBKR's most profitable lever. The Fed's March cut to 3.64% Fed funds reset every IBKR rate by the same amount, but uninvested cash balances kept growing — the $169 billion record print is a 35% YoY increase, and IBKR's spread between what it earns on that cash and what it pays out to clients is the structural reason its margins keep compounding. Add 4.4 million DARTs and the case for paying 31x earnings is not a stretch. The catch is the same one we flagged in the prior review: dense platforms, layered fees, expensive international data. The right broker for you turns on what kind of investor you actually are — not what kind you aspire to be.