| 17 March 2010

OptionsXpress Holdings (OXPS) reported their February monthly metrics today and continued the trend we've seen with other brokers: a decrease in trading activity while holding steady on accounts. We reported similar results from TD Ameritrade (AMTD) yesterday and from Charles Schwab (SCHW) on Friday.

OptionsXpress reported a 17% dip in trading activity as compared with January, while new accounts ended just slightly higher than January. But rather than bore you with the numbers we decided to start a new feature on the BNB: tracking key brokerage metrics over time. Hit the jump to see our first set of performance charts on optionsXpress.

This is our first effort to start tracking certain key metrics, so any comments or suggestions you have would be welcome. We thought it would be interesting to start showing trends over time rather than just compare to last month or last year. We chose to start with three of the most basic metrics: DARTs (Daily Average Revenue Trades), new accounts, and total assets.

In February optionsXpress DARTs decreased 17% versus January. We saw similar dips from TD Ameritrade (18%) and Schwab (14%). You can see, however, that this trading activity is at historic low levels (within the last year anyway).



In terms of net new accounts, can see the firm is in danger of slipping back to historic lows. We'll track advertising spend on a quarterly basis (the only time brokers release this information) and this should help us understand how much spend the brokers are putting behind these numbers.



When we look at total customer assets we see continued growth. The dip in Dec/Jan is reflective of the dip we saw in the S&P 500 during the same time period.



We always recommend you compare this performance with the performance of the S&P 500 as we've found the two to be highly correlated, all else equal. Any significant delta from the overall performance of the market can possibly point to more interesting positive or negative performance as compared with other brokers in the space

Source: company press releases.