I'll help you compare Schwab (SCHW) to its key competitors using operating metrics relevant to brokerages. Let me start by identifying the major players and then pull the relevant data.

Key brokerage competitors: Charles Schwab (SCHW), Morgan Stanley (MS - includes E*TRADE), Interactive Brokers (IBKR), Robinhood (HOOD), and LPL Financial (LPLA).

Let me first check what financial data is available and also search for brokerage-specific operating metrics.Now let me search for brokerage-specific operating metrics that are commonly disclosed in filings — things like total client assets, net new assets, daily average revenue trades (DARTs), active accounts, net interest margin, etc.Now let me get the LPL Financial and Morgan Stanley brokerage-specific metrics, and also load price data for valuation:Now let me compile all the operating metrics into a comprehensive comparison. Let me compute the financial ratios and price performance:Now let me present this as a comprehensive comparison. Let me show the financial data table and also create a chart:Now let me create the price performance chart:

Loading chart...Here is the brokerage competitive landscape — a comparison of Charles Schwab and its peers across the key operating metrics that matter for brokerage businesses.

Brokerage Peer Group: Operating Metrics Comparison (FY 2025)

Financial Performance Summary

Brokerage-Specific Operating KPIs

These are the operational metrics each brokerage discloses — the real-world drivers that analysts track for this industry.

Charles Schwab (SCHW) — FY 2025

• Client Assets: $11.9 trillion
• Active Brokerage Accounts: 38.5 million
• Core Net New Client Assets: $519.4B (42% growth)
• Daily Avg Revenue Trades (DARTs): 7.67 million (31% growth)
• Revenue Per Trade: $2.06
• Assets Under Advisory Services: $6.02T (50.6% of client assets)
• Pre-Tax Profit Margin: 47.9% (up from 39.2%)
• Expenses as % of Avg Client Assets: 0.12% (industry-leading efficiency)
• Tier 1 Leverage Ratio: 9.3%

Morgan Stanley (MS) — FY 2025

• Total Client Assets: ~$7.5T (Wealth + Investment Mgmt)
• Wealth Management Net New Assets: Strong inflows across E*TRADE and advisor channels
• Pre-Tax Margin (Wealth): ~26-27%
• ROTCE: ~19-20%
• MS is a full-scale investment bank; brokerage is embedded in Wealth Management (~50% of firm revenues)

Interactive Brokers (IBKR) — FY 2025

• Customer Accounts: 4.4 million (32% growth)
• Customer Equity: $779.9B (37% growth)
• Total Customer DARTs: 3.69 million (40% growth)
• Avg Commission per Cleared Order: $2.68
• Cleared Avg DARTs per Account (Annualized): 203
• Net Interest Margin (NIM): 2.08%
• Yield on Customer Margin Loans: 4.62%
• International Revenue Mix: 30%

Robinhood (HOOD) — FY 2025

• Total Platform Assets: $322.1B (includes $42.5B RIA assets from TradePMR)
• Funded Customers: 27.0 million
• Net Deposits: $68.1B (35% growth)
• Gold Subscribers: Growing subscription base
• ARPU (Avg Revenue Per User): $171 (up from $122)
• Crypto Assets: $38.2B on platform
• Primarily transactional + crypto; no legacy advisor channel

LPL Financial (LPLA) — FY 2025

• Total Advisory & Brokerage Assets: $2.37T (36% growth)
• Advisory as % of Total: 58.8%
• Advisors: 32,178
• Total Net New Assets: $431.5B / Organic: $146.5B
• Organic NNA Annualized Growth: 8.4%
• Avg Total Assets per Advisor: $73.7M
• Payout Rate: 87.4% (commission/advisory expense ratio)
• Pure independent advisor model — assets sit with advisors, not on a proprietary platform

Comparative Takeaways

Scale: SCHW dominates with $11.9T in client assets — nearly 5× LPLA, 15× IBKR, and 37× HOOD. Morgan Stanley rivals at the institutional level but is a fundamentally different business mix.

Efficiency: SCHW's 0.12% expense-to-client-assets ratio is best-in-class, driven by massive scale. IBKR's 86% operating margin is extraordinary but reflects a lean, tech-forward, low-touch model.

Growth: HOOD and LPLA lead revenue growth (52% and 37%), but HOOD's is organic digital growth while LPLA's includes major M&A (Commonwealth, Prudential). SCHW's net income grew 49% on just 6.4% revenue growth — powerful operating leverage.

Profitability: SCHW's 47.9% pre-tax margin is near the top. ROE at 17.9% trails only HOOD (20.6%). IBKR's low ROE (4.8%) reflects a very capital-conservative balance sheet.

Business Models: The group spans three distinct models — SCHW (integrated brokerage + bank + advisory), IBKR/HOOD (tech-forward electronic brokerage), and LPLA (independent advisor platform). Morgan Stanley is primarily an investment bank with a large wealth management arm.

Let me compile all the metrics I've gathered into a clean, comprehensive table.The table above is organized in four logical blocks:

Financial Scale & Growth — Revenue, net income, assets, equity, and YoY growth rates. MS dwarfs on revenue ($115B) but that includes investment banking; on pure brokerage metrics, SCHW leads.

Profitability & Efficiency — Operating margin, pre-tax margin, ROE, ROA, and the critical expense-to-client-assets ratio. SCHW's 0.12% expense ratio is best-in-class; IBKR's 86% operating margin reflects its lean electronic model; HOOD's 20.6% ROE leads the group.

Client & Platform Scale — Client assets, accounts, advisors, advisory penetration, and asset-gathering momentum. SCHW's $11.9T in client assets and $519B in core net new assets are unmatched. LPLA has the largest advisor force at 32K+. HOOD has the most accounts at 27M.

Trading & Monetization — DARTs, revenue per trade, ARPU, NIM, and margin yields. These are the real operating levers. IBKR charges $2.68/trade vs SCHW's $2.06. HOOD monetizes at $171/user annually.

Capital & Market — Tier 1 leverage ratio, stock price, and YTD returns. IBKR leads YTD at +40%; LPLA trails at −12%.

Note: "—" indicates the company does not disclose that metric in its filings. Morgan Stanley (marked with *) is an investment bank first; its brokerage metrics are embedded within Wealth Management segment disclosures and not directly comparable in all categories.

Here is the full brokerage operating metrics comparison table:

Brokerage Operating Metrics: SCHW vs. Peers (FY 2025)

"—" indicates the metric is not disclosed by that company. MS client assets are approximate across Wealth & Investment Management. MS is primarily an investment bank; pure brokerage metrics are embedded in segment disclosures.*

Sharp observation. The reason is that Interactive Brokers' income statement structure is fundamentally different from a typical brokerage.

IBKR reports net revenue as total revenues minus interest expense, not gross revenue. The 86% "operating margin" I quoted is actually operating income divided by net revenue (revenue after subtracting interest expense), which is misleading. Let me pull the actual numbers to show the real breakdown.Here's the answer. The discrepancy comes down to how IBKR classifies interest expense in its GAAP income statement:

IBKR vs. SCHW: The Interest Expense Bridge

IBKR's business is fundamentally a massive interest spread engine. It pays interest on customer cash balances and earns interest on margin loans and its investment portfolio. IBKR reports gross revenue that includes the interest income it earns but excludes the interest it pays out — that $4.22B of interest expense sits below operating income in its GAAP structure.

So you get a distorted picture: 86% "operating margin" on the headline, but after the $4.2B in interest costs are deducted, you're left with just $984M of net income (9.6% margin).

SCHW also has interest expense ($3.75B) but it's proportionally much smaller relative to its revenue (13.6%) because SCHW earns far more from asset management fees, trading revenue, and advisory services — not just net interest.

In short: IBKR's GAAP operating income sits above the interest expense line, making operating margin look spectacular, but the real economic margin after funding costs is net income margin at ~10%. That's why IBKR's 86% and 10% coexistence is not an error — it's the difference between pre-interest and post-interest profitability in a capital-intensive brokerage.

The bridge from IBKR's 86% GAAP operating margin to its 9.6% net margin sits in the gap between operating income and pre-tax income. Let me pull the full income statement to show exactly what happens between those two lines.Interesting — noninterestincome and othernonoperating_income are null, so the bridge isn't there. Let me go into IBKR's 10-K to find what sits between operating income and income before tax. There has to be other expense lines.Found it. Here is the complete bridge from IBKR's 10-K.

IBKR FY 2025: Full Bridge from Operating Margin to Net Margin

The confusion arose because I was using GAAP accounting data (Alpha Vantage) which structures the income statement differently. IBKR's own financial presentation tells the real story — and the critical item is noncontrolling interests (NCI).

The bridge has two steps, not one:

Step 1 — From Total Revenue to Pre-Tax Income: IBKR's GAAP total revenue was $10.2B, but that includes gross interest income. IBKR itself reports on a net revenue basis ($6.2B) which deducts interest expense upfront. That's why the GAAP operating margin looked 86% — interest expense was treated as an operating cost above the operating income line in the GAAP framework I pulled, but IBKR's own reporting structure nets it against revenue.

Step 2 — The NCI Hammer: The real answer to your question is noncontrolling interests. After $414M of taxes, IBKR's consolidated net income is $4.36B — a very healthy 70% net margin on net revenues. But IBKR is structured as a master partnership (IBG LLC). The public company (IBKR) owns only ~26% of it. The remaining 74% goes to noncontrolling interests — mostly founder Thomas Peterffy and other insiders. That $3.37B deduction takes the bottom line down to $984M available for common shareholders.

So the correct margins for IBKR (FY25) are:

The 86% figure I originally quoted was wrong. It was a GAAP artifact from the Alpha Vantage data structure. IBKR's true pre-tax margin is ~77% on net revenue, and the plunge from 77% pre-tax to ~16% net-to-common is almost entirely the noncontrolling interest deduction — not interest expense.

Good question — that's an unusually high noncontrolling interest deduction. Let me verify the exact numbers from the 10-K and explain the ownership structure behind it.The data is confirmed. Here's the explanation:

Why IBKR's Noncontrolling Interest is 77% of Net Income

IBKR is not a normal C-corporation where public shareholders own the entire business. It's an Up-C structure — the operating business is held in a master limited liability company (IBG LLC), and the public company (Interactive Brokers Group, Inc.) owns only a fraction of it.

The ownership math at December 31, 2025:

The public company (IBG, Inc.) owns just 26.3% of the actual operating entity. So when IBG LLC earns $4.36B in net income, only 26.3% — or roughly $1.15B — is attributable to the public shareholders. The remaining 73.7%, or ~$3.2B, goes to "Holdings."

Who is "Holdings"? It's the entity controlled by founder and Chairman Thomas Peterffy and other early insiders. When IBKR went public in 2007, it didn't do a traditional IPO where the entire company became a public corporation. Instead, Peterffy kept the operating company as an LLC and floated only a minority stake through IBG, Inc., which is structured as a C-corp that holds interests in the LLC. This is the classic Up-C ("umbrella partnership C-corporation") structure.

The flow of income: IBG LLC earns profit → 73.7% is allocated to Holdings as noncontrolling interest → 26.3% flows through to IBG, Inc. → after corporate taxes at IBG, Inc., the remainder is available to common stockholders.

Why this matters for analysis:

The 73.7%/26.3% split means you should always look at IBKR on a consolidated basis for economic analysis. The consolidated pre-tax margin of ~77% and net margin of 70% are the right measures of the franchise's true profitability. The $984M "net income available to common" reflects only the public float's share.

It also means that over time, "Holdings" can exchange its LLC interests for IBKR Class A shares (those 165M shares issued since 2011 reflect this), gradually increasing the public float — but at a measured pace that keeps insiders in control.

This is also why IBKR's balance sheet shows $15.1B in noncontrolling interests against just $5.4B in stockholders' equity — that $15.1B is the 73.7% of IBG LLC's net assets belonging to Holdings, not to public shareholders.

The TTM and annual are missing for many years. Let me take a different approach — compute TTM net income for each quarter and match to prices more carefully.Good, the TTM NI data is clean now. Now let me create the two charts — one for TTM Net Income and one for the price trend (which will serve as a proxy for PE direction since market cap follows price):Now let me chart both:

Loading chart...

Loading chart...Two charts above. Here's a summary of what they show, plus the annual net income table with approximate P/E context:

TTM Net Income (Trailing 4 Quarters)

SCHW is on a completely different scale ($5-9B TTM) — left axis. IBKR and HOOD are shown in the hundreds of millions. SCHW's net income dipped in 2023-24 as higher rates compressed its net interest margin and client cash sorting hurt earnings, but it recovered strongly through 2025 to $8.85B. HOOD turned the corner from losses in 2023 to consistent profitability by 2024-25 ($1.9B TTM). IBKR steadily grew TTM NI from $254M (mid-2022) to $984M by end-2025.

Price (Share Price at Quarter-End)

HOOD went from $8 (Dec 2022) to $113 (Dec 2025) — a 14x return. IBKR rose from $13.50 to $64. SCHW has been the laggard, moving from $60 (mid-2022) to $99 (Dec 2025) with a sharp dip in early 2023 during the regional banking crisis.

Annual Net Income & Approximate P/E Context

Without shares outstanding data, a precise P/E can't be calculated in the tool, but directionally: IBKR's price rose ~3.3× while net income rose ~3.2× — roughly constant multiple. HOOD's price went exponential as it swung from losses to profits. SCHW's price barely moved until 2025 while earnings were volatile, so its P/E compressed then expanded.