Posted
originally on March 22, 2011 at the Aite Group Blog
OptionsXpress agreed yesterday to an all-stock offer from Charles
Schwab, valued at US$1.0 billion. Was this a marriage of convenience, or a case
of a target in distressed situation? I’d say probably a little of both.
It was a slightly more than two years ago that TD Ameritrade
acquired options powerhouse thinkorswim for US$606 million in cash and stock.
This purchase changed the dynamics among the big stock brokerages, and Charles
Schwab has now responded in kind.
There is no doubt that optionsXpress is a clear leader in options.
A fair amount of growth has relied on picking up clients who subscribe to one
of several education and brokerage services offered by
optionsXpress; much of
this has been done during traveling seminars. Seminar selling is an expensive
proposition to organizers, which have to put up more than US$50,000 per city
and then try to sell a big-ticket service to make it up.
While it is good for Schwab to pick up a sizeable client list of
active traders that has cost tens of millions to acquire, challenges remain for
its success in the options trading scenario. According to the latest
optionsXpress’s quarterly filings and recent stock performance, the firm was
somewhat distressed, and year-end figures could have been disappointing.
Nine-month revenue was growing slightly more than 1% year over
year, while expenses were up more than 12% year over year. One theory behind
these numbers is that active traders doing options are shopping around; they
can see how sizeable players like TradeKing and OptionsHouse offer lower prices
alongside a fair amount of education for beginners.
At the end of the day, Charles Schwab and the major stock
brokerages of the world are also under pressure to show growth, even if it
means going outside of the traditional stock-trading crowd. Options traders
tend to trade more often and be more sophisticated traders (and more wealthy)
than online stock traders.
This acquisition follows a couple of weeks of rumors that Schwab
and the larger stock trading firms may be seriously looking to develop their
own retail FX offerings to participate in this larger pool of active traders.
Just how active are these traders? Ameritrade, eTrade, and Charles Schwab
clients average 6 to 12 trades per year, while the average client at FXCM (a
publicly traded retail FX broker) trades 804 times.
Besides the active-trading angle, Charles Schwab has a reputation
for making money on deposits — some estimates cite 50% of revenue as coming
from interest earnings. The OptionsXpress acquisition delivers 385,000 active
clients and US$8.1 billion in client assets for no cash outlay. If anything,
the deal supports the current price, whether it’s overvalued or not.
No comments:
Post a Comment