Interactive Brokers First Quarter

Seeking Alpha (www.seekingalpha.com) just published a transcript of the first quarter 2010 conference call for Interactive Brokers, IBKR. This is of interest to me since I'm a customer. The whole thing is pretty long but here's a few highlights I found interesting (from http://seekingalpha.com/article/200629-interactive-brokers-group-inc-q1-2010-earnings-call-transcript?source=email&page=1):

"Year-over-year customer accounts increased by 21% to 140,000.
...
"This is evidenced by the fact that year-over-year equity per client account grew over 43% to an average of $119,000 per account even though more than 60% of our customer accounts are still small, having less than $25,000.
...
"Customer equity grew to $16.7 billion, up 74% from the year ago quarter and up 10% sequentially. The source of this growth continues to be a steady inflow of new accounts and customer deposits and, to some extent, customer profit." (emphasis mine).

IBKR took a huge pop after this, closing at $17.01 on Friday, a 5.33% gain.

It's interesting to note that over 60% of their accounts are under $25K, ie. they're not daytraders. It provides a nice benchmark for our own account siez, as individual traders. Of course, the average is $119K, meaning there's some heavy hitters in the mix. I'd love to see a curve of the account size distribution over there. I'd also like to know to just what extent "customer profit" contributed to their numbers. Remember, it's said that 80% of all traders lose money.

Anyway, I view all these numbers as positive news for the markets and the recovery in general. There's a lot of talk about us being in "a cyclical bull market in a secular bear market". That may be, but my own guess is that the bull still has some room to run. With "sell in May and go away" time approaching soon, I'll be moving my view to the longer charts to try and figure out when and if a correction might come.