The people with their heads cut off standing around in 1920's formalwear may have something do with it.
As I suspected, there's trouble in paradise. I guess those ads haven't been working too well: Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. reported its fourth quarter and fiscal 2016 results on January 17, 2017. The electronic broker and market maker Q4 2016 earnings tumbled 72%, driven by a 29% drop in revenues, higher expenses as well as disappointing performance of its Market Making and Corporate segments.
well, first of all they are phasing out their whole market making operations, should happen this 2017. When the whole street knows about you wanting to exit a business then you are definitely not gonna be their first point of contact. Secondly, results have been pretty much baked in and the street did not see the result as any sort of surprise (stocks dropped from 38 -> 37). I would hardly call that trouble in paradise. Correlating your feelings about the ads with non-existent or at least not apparent trouble is a bit far fetched imho.
translation: "Hope I can suck up to some of their users who did not like IB's ads. Our ads are way cooler and hey, we offer 4834 different front-ends, even a platform targeting specifically orangutans".
This does not sound right. Wasn't being a broker & also a shadow money maker their edge over traditional brokers? How will they make money now other than raising fees? Ouch.
We are introducing brokers to IB for our LiveVolX software and I have accounts there that we service and support. And, I don't have to "suck up" accounts from IB, their clients come to me to either move or have a second account with us.
market making is a dying business. Markets are sufficiently efficient enough to not necessitate market makers. In the same way as specialists were never necessary, nor floor brokers. As long as there is a market place where supply can meet demand then that is all one needs. By the way, IB's Peterffy stated this exit himself in one of the more recent conf calls.