Steve Sanders is EVP of Marketing and Product Development at Interactive Brokers.

What were the key theme(s) for your business in 2024?

Year after year, Interactive Brokers remains focused on its core competencies and a target audience of sophisticated investors, active traders, and institutions. We continue to allow clients in over 200 countries and territories worldwide to fund accounts and trade assets in up to 28 currencies. Investors can trade globally in stocks, options, futures, currencies, bonds, funds, and more on 150 global markets from a single unified platform. With global market access, competitive pricing and advanced trading technology, our platform is designed for active traders with a range of investment objectives.

Over the last year, we enhanced our technology and further expanded the suite of tradeable products on our platform. We unveiled the IBKR Desktop trading platform and several tools and upgraded existing services to enhance our clients’ trading experience.

IBKR Desktop, one of our top initiatives from 2024, is a modern and sophisticated trading solution featuring powerful tools in a user-friendly interface. Novice and experienced investors benefit from IBKR Desktop’s streamlined design and access to tools like MultiSort, which enables users to sort data using multiple factors simultaneously and Option Lattice, a graphical options chain display highlighting potential outliers in key metrics.

We also launched many new products, including forecast contracts on election, economic, and climate events, daily options on the CAC 40® index, access to the Saudi Exchange, Malaysian Ringgit-denominated equities, ETFs and derivatives on Bursa Malaysia, CHF-denominated bonds, KOSPI and USD/KRW derivatives through the Eurex/Korea Exchange, European stock options and index futures and options on Cboe Europe Derivatives – as well as extended trading hours for US Treasuries, global corporate bonds, UK gilts, and European government bonds.

What was the highlight of 2024?

A key highlight from 2024 was the launch of forecast contracts on election, economic, and climate events through the ForecastEx exchange, a wholly owned subsidiary of Interactive Brokers.

Forecast contracts allow investors to trade their opinion on “Yes” or No” questions on political, economic, and climate indicators to express a view on a critical issue and manage portfolio risk. It is simple to take a position, investors can purchase a “yes” contract if they think an event will occur, or conversely, if they believe the event will not occur, they can buy a “no” contract. Contract prices range from $0.02 to $0.99, reflecting the market’s evolving consensus on the likelihood of each outcome. The forecast contracts also pay an interest-like incentive coupon based on the closing market value of the positions, which is currently paid at a rate of 4.08% APY.

Significant demand for election-focused contracts on the IBKR platform ahead of the 2024 Presidential election emphasized the rising significance of prediction markets. With this year’s election cycle now over, we hope that investors will come to our platform to take a position on key economic and environmental outcomes.

What surprised you in 2024?

The theme of 24/7 trading continues to grow, and we were pleased to see significant demand for Overnight Trading Hours on the Interactive Brokers platform. As of the end of November 2024, Overnight Trading on IBKR’s platform increased 543% since the beginning of 2024, representing 2.29% of all US trades. With over 85% of new client applicants from outside the US, Interactive Brokers is a truly global broker. IBKR’s Overnight Trading Hours service, which lists over 10,000 US stocks and ETFs plus US Index futures and options, is an important feature for our global client base. Clients in Asia and Europe looking to capture US trading opportunities can trade during local market hours and react immediately to market-moving news.