Earnings Labs

AMTD IDEA Group (AMTD)

Q2 2012 Earnings Call· Tue, Apr 17, 2012

$1.03

+0.00%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day everyone, and welcome to the TD Ameritrade Holding Corporation’s March Quarter Earnings Results Conference Call. This call is being recorded. With us today from the Company is President and Chief Executive Officer, Fred Tomczyk, and Chief Financial Officer, Bill Gerber. At this time, I’d like to turn the call over to Bill Murray, Managing Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Bill Murray

Management

Thanks, operator. Good morning everyone, and welcome to our March quarter earnings call. In a minute, we’ll be hearing from Fred and Bill, but first hopefully you’ve had seen our press release and located today’s slide presentation, which can be found on amtd.com. I’d also like to refer you to our Safe Harbor statement, which is on Slide 2 in the presentation and we will be referring to some forward-looking statements. We will also be discussing some non-GAAP financial measures such as EBITDA. Reconciliations of these financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures are in the slide presentation. We'd also like you to review our description of risk factors contained in our most recent financial reports Forms 10-Q and 10-K. As usual, the call is intended for the investors and analysts and may not be reproduced in the media in whole or in part without prior consent of TD Ameritrade. We have a large number of covering analysts as we normally do, please limit your questions to two, so we can cover as many analysts as possible within the allotted time. With that, we have Fred Tomczyk, our CEO and Bill Gerber, our CFO, here to review our March quarter results and major accomplishments. Fred?

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Thanks, Bill, and good morning everyone, and thanks for joining us today to discuss our March quarter results. As we cross the half way point in our 2012 fiscal year, we see several things that are worth pointing out. First, organic growth at TD Ameritrade remained strong. We continued to outpace our peers with double-digit net new client asset growth with good momentum in both our retail and institutional channels. Second, while organic growth is strong, there remains a sense of caution on the part of the retail investor, but despite the improvement in the markets over the course of the quarter. Third, we remain focused on tight operating expense management and we’re expanding initiatives to drive greater efficiency, productivity, and cost containment in order to handle our strong organic growth while keeping expenses in check. And lastly we remained financially strong and sound. Our clean balance sheet and unique business model that drives strong cash generation gives us a great deal of flexibility in a strategic and financial decision making. And while we can’t predict how the environment will change from one quarter to the next, we do know that in uncertain times you have to prioritize. Identifying those things which you can control and are most important to position your firm for long-term growth and increased shareholder value. That’s what we’ve been doing and that’s what we will continue to do at TD Ameritrade. So let’s take a look at our results on slide 3. We ended the March quarter with record client assets of $452 billion, double what we had in March of 2009, just three years ago. Earnings per share for the quarter was $0.25, down $0.02 from last quarter, due to increased marketing spend for the retirement season and the launch of our new advertising…

Bill Gerber

CFO

Thanks, Fred, and a happy tax day to everyone. A year-ago we had our best trading quarter ever, but today we’re in a very different environment. Intraday volatility is low and we continue to see retail investors waiting on the sidelines. That said, as we looked back in the March quarter, we executed well on our strategy and remain focused on managing the items within our control. Once again despite the difficult market that focus has paid off. We had four major accomplishments of note. First, our net new asset growth remained in double-digits. Second, expenses before advertising were flat sequentially. Third, the insured deposit account net yield improved. And fourth, we received a credit ratings upgrade to A by Standard & Poor’s. For a closer look at our results, let’s begin with the financial overview on Slide 7. Before we get into the detail of this insider page, the easiest way to think about the changes in our results is that year-over-year the largest driver is lower trades as March 2011 was the highest quarter in company history in trades and total revenue. Additionally, on a sequential quarter basis, the largest difference is our advertising spent being significantly higher in March versus December, primarily due to our seasonal advertising spending patterns. So with that, we’ll start with the March-to-March comparisons on the left side of the page. Transaction-based revenues in the quarter seen on line 1 were down $46 million or 14% from last year’s result due principally to 51,000 less trades per day. Commission rates were $12.15 in the quarter versus $12.42 last year. Payment for order flow actually increased, but this was offset by declines primarily in option-based rates as contracts per trade were down year-over-year. On line 2, asset-based growth – revenue, sorry, is up $13…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instruction) Our first question comes from Rich Repetto of Sandler O'Neill. Please go ahead.

Richard Repetto

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill. Please go ahead

Yeah. Good morning, Fred. Good morning, Bill.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Hi, Rich.

Richard Repetto

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill. Please go ahead

I guess the question first on capital return, I haven’t been able to – but if you look at estimates going forward its still $275 or around there net income for the last half. If the stock – I am sure the stock price mitigated the buyback this quarter, but would you consider other alternatives besides just buyback and the regular dividend to return capital to shareholders?

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Rich, we look at all the various alternatives to return capital to shareholders and actually I have a preference to deploy it. And so we look at both whether its an acquisition, whether it’s to pay down debt, whether its to buyback share where we’ll have a recurring dividend or a different form of return, all those things, we look at all of those. And we consider them all the time. During a fiscal year, we generally run a consistent strategy and once a year we basically do a much more robust review of where we’re at, where we see it will -- things go in the next couple of years, have that discussion with our Board and if we make any adjustments so, we’ll probably communicate those on the October call.

Richard Repetto

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill. Please go ahead

Okay. And then, my one follow-up would be; Bill you mentioned the rate on the margin loans dropping year-over-year. It seems like those are significant drop, well, there was a significant drop in the rate sequentially as well. So these – what do you call negotiated rates …

Bill Gerber

CFO

Right.

Richard Repetto

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill. Please go ahead

… did a lot occur in this calendar quarter? I guess is the question.

Bill Gerber

CFO

Well what happened Rich is that the people who continued to use margin were the – were predominantly the people who are more active and have a negotiated rate. So the drop in margin balances was really from – the shift I guess was more to the people who have negotiated rates.

Richard Repetto

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill. Please go ahead

Okay. And it happened sort of in this quarter – period?

Bill Gerber

CFO

Yes, yes.

Richard Repetto

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill. Please go ahead

Okay. That’s all I have. Go Bruins.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from William Katz of Citi. Please go ahead.

William Katz

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Hey, thanks very much. Guys, it sounds like your sort of qualification of the retailers is a bit more subdued then maybe the last update or even intra quarter, some congresses et cetera. Just sort of curious what may have changed in that survey that you’re in, have you done prior surveys with benchmark that 25%?

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Yes. Well, I don’t know about the 25%, but I think the way I look at it is, if you take the retail investor right now, the more active traders continue to be in the market and you’ve seen them go into the margin loans and that’s where the negotiator rates are, and they tend to be more engaged right now. But there has been very low volatility, both actual intraday volatility and low implied volatility is measured by the VIX and so that’s not the best trading environment, so their trades per day are [back] basically flat to just slightly up. However, what’s increased quarter-over-quarter is more of the long-term or less active investor who has started to come in the market but, if you look at what they’re doing, they’re moving in the bond funds, they’re not moving into equities. And so you’re seeing that’s just different and we continue to see them being quite cautious and quite concerned to make sure that they want to see that the economy is actually for real this time. They remember this time last year and they got burned and they don’t want to get burned twice, maybe in their perspective three times during the last three years.

William Katz

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

And just a follow-up comes back to the growth in new assets, just sort of curious, I mean, I think I know but, can you sort of review why you’re seeing such good strength in both the retail and the institutional businesses?

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

We’ve been very focused on this as an overall strategy and our business model is to drive this, it’s designed to drive this. So we have been doing it now for three and half years and we have done it through up-markets and down-markets and so we just haven’t seen anything stopping it so to speak right now, even though they maybe more cautious we have broadened out our product suite and our offerings to be able to look after investors and traders needs regardless of market condition and that’s been working for us quite well.

William Katz

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Okay. Thanks, guys.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Thank you, Bill.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Chris Harris of Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead.

Christopher Harris

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead

Hi. Good morning, guys.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Hi, Chris.

Christopher Harris

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead

It’s a question here on the NIM, nice recovery in the IDA. I know this quarter and you kind of flushed that out a little bit. Just curious as to where you think kind of NIM goes from here if you get the IDA yield up towards the higher-end of your guidance, I know you’ve got a little pressure on the margin borrowing side. Is there any additional detail maybe you can give on the NIM for the balance of the year?

Bill Gerber

CFO

Yeah, we think the NIM for the – overall for the year, will probably still be in that high 130s range. So we will probably see a contraction in the rate over each of the next two quarters, but overall we’ll probably stay in the high – hopefully high 130s. I don’t see it going below 135 right now.

Christopher Harris

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead

Well, actually IDA, I mean the NIM overall …

Bill Gerber

CFO

No.

Christopher Harris

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead

… between the 170 and 185 range?

Bill Gerber

CFO

Oh, I see. Yeah, the NIM could be slightly higher prior, but I think we’ll see a little bit more in terms of product margin and the cash being invested. So I do think that we will see the NIM, I am sorry slightly increased.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Yeah, I mean the two things, there’s going to be the market. If the market goes up margin loans will drop, and if margin loan goes up in the mix and that should help the overall NIM.

Bill Gerber

CFO

Yeah.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

And the other thing is we’ve got that $2 billion moving over from …

Bill Gerber

CFO

Seg cash.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

… seg cash into the IDA which will also help.

Bill Gerber

CFO

Yeah.

Christopher Harris

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead

Okay, great. And then on the other revenue line item discussed in a little bit of detail here, you know down its kind of at a fairly low level, it sounds like prior periods maybe had some one-timers. But just kind of curious, with the strong growth you guys are getting in new accounts and new relationships, new assets, just wondering why we’re not seeing a little bit of stronger growth in the educational side of the business. Do you think its partly being driven by the cautiousness that the retail investors have and maybe as they start reengaging we’ll start seeing some growth there or is there something else really contributing to that?

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Well, I mean, just in terms of new accounts and assets and whatnot, we’ve been using our education channel and a number of the programs to give education programs as incentives. That’s worked for us. So it doesn’t show up as education revenue, but it shows up in the general brokerage revenue. And we have been – making this shift for a period of time. We are less focused on growing education revenue as much as we are enquiring new accounts and new assets and growing our brokerage business. We use the education. I hesitate to even call it a business. We look it as a channel and we use the revenue from education business because people do appreciate it more and respect it more when there some fees involved and whether we wave them or discount them and they use it to help them to be better investors. That’s really what we’re trying to do with it. Its – the education revenue we looked at is to offset the cost of the education channel.

Christopher Harris

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead

Okay, guys. Thanks a lot.

Bill Gerber

CFO

Okay, Chris.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Patrick O'Shaughnessy of Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead

Hey, good morning guys.

Bill Gerber

CFO

Hi, Patrick.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead

I think the discussion on the education revenue is interesting and it kind of brings me back to thinkorswim acquisition. So a few years, I think about three years now after that deal closed. How would you rate that acquisition, still do you feel like it’s a strong success in terms of trading activity in terms of education and the other things that have brought the TD Ameritrade?

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

That’s been - it’s worked really well for us. We’ve been extremely happy with that, just to give you a few pieces of data. We basically brought it in, we put down the three Tier platform what we’ve introduced trade architect. So now we have our standard website, Trade Architect and then we have thinkorswim, and that tiered strategy is working well for us. And we have been innovating at the top and driving down and retailizing some of the things that tossed us on to Trade Architect and in certain cases further on to our normal website. We've also been migrating plans up and that’s part of our growth and derivative trading. Just to give you one statistic, we now have more legacy TD Ameritrade clients on the thinkorswim technology than we had legacy thinkorswim clients on thinkorswim technology. So its been sold pretty aggressively into our customer base, so its gone and our derivatives trading was maybe low-teens, three and half, four years ago, three years ago. Today it’s 35%, so it’s worked quite well for us and we've been very, very happy with that acquisition.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead

Okay, great. That’s very helpful. And then, I guess my follow-up question, you talked about how the clients are moving money into bonds. Do you feel like you have the trading tools, the capabilities to monetize that client interest and fixed income right now?

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

It’s less into bonds. Its much more if you watched the fund flow, whether it’s in the market or inside our customer base, there’s outflows out of equities, equity funds and into bond funds, its more about bond funds right now than it is bonds. And you have seen that in the market and we see that in our customer flows as well.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead

Okay, great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Joel Jeffrey of KBW. Please go ahead.

Joel Jeffrey

Analyst · KBW. Please go ahead

Good morning, guys.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Hi, Joel.

Joel Jeffrey

Analyst · KBW. Please go ahead

I guess you mentioned that, you know part of the reason that the IDA yield win up was big. You did see RIAs move money out of cash and into the markets given the strong performance. Is that changed at all since the end of the quarter, how would RIAs think differently than sort of retail investors at this point?

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

And this is not an abnormal phenomenon. We would have expected this. The retail – historically, retail investors tend to wait to see the recovery and the uptick in the markets be real and so they missed a lot of the upside in the rally whereas advisors tend to buy into the rally’s and try to get in earlier and take advantage of it. We’ve seen this before, it’s nothing new. And the RIAs that’s why we keep the – sort of bond ladder there shorter and we keep more in floating because they move the money quicker out of cash and into the markets and our overall retail client base. And we saw that during the quarter as the market was up 12%. And the RIAs took their client cash and put it into the market and into the rally.

Joel Jeffrey

Analyst · KBW. Please go ahead

So just as a follow-up to that, I mean, if we were to get a pullback in the market, and you see RIAs sort of move money back into cash. What would be the impact on the yield on the IDA?

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

It would be probably a negative impact on the yield, but it probably helped with revenue.

Joel Jeffrey

Analyst · KBW. Please go ahead

So, overall it wouldn’t have much of an impact in terms of overall revenue?

Bill Gerber

CFO

Correct. That’s right.

Joel Jeffrey

Analyst · KBW. Please go ahead

Great. Thanks for taking my questions.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Okay, Joel.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Mac Sykes of Gabelli & Company. Please go ahead.

Mac Sykes

Analyst · Gabelli & Company. Please go ahead

Good morning, gentlemen.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Hi, Mac.

Mac Sykes

Analyst · Gabelli & Company. Please go ahead

I have two questions. I apologize for my voice here. I have two questions to be answered I think in one response. All else equal in terms of macro factors, can we expect any change I think in retail behavior ahead of the U.S. election? And then secondly, without action in Washington, the Bush tax cuts are likely to expire in 2012. So how does the advisors, they can ask for direction input on how to position the client portfolios ahead of year-end and do you think this potential fiscal cliff could change investor savings habits in the longer term? Thanks.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Yeah, that’s a hard one to predict. I would say; right now the election is really not entered into their mind. I think it will start now that we’ve seen to be down to two players and we’re in election mode now and through the primaries, even though they’re not technically over I think people, the market and the news media is assuming its over. Historically you would say that, in an election year you would expect more engagement in the market just because you got information. You’ve got change, you’ve got news and so it does have a tendency to cause some volatility in the market and some rotation of investing strategies. With respect to the expiration of tax cuts and changes like that, I think those are the same kinds of things that can cause investors, not necessarily get over the market but to adjust their investment strategies to basically, they may make a decision to be in one type of investment versus another more depending on their relative taxation of different options. But I think that’s hard to predict right now, but if anything, if you ask me and I -- this is an educated guess right now and it is a guess is that, as we get into the latter part of the year in the election and expire the tax credits, where their tax rates I think that will just cause uncertainty and volatility in market which usually bodes well for trading. Thanks, Mac.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Howard Chen of Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Howard Chen

Analyst · Credit Suisse. Please go ahead

Hi. Good morning, Fred. Good morning, Bill.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Hi, Howard.

Howard Chen

Analyst · Credit Suisse. Please go ahead

Hi. You continue to grow the net new assets at a great double-digit rate. Can you just speak to how you grade yourself on the quality assets you’re bringing in, are you satisfied and how is that evolving, three plus years into this Fred. Thanks.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Well, there is -- and I would say we’re quite happy with how the asset gatherings worked. We've had very good balance growth, you can see now that Howard that $452 billion of client assets, that’s double what it was three years ago. We’ve gathered in excess of $100 billion of new assets. Now when you go back to that people normally talk about quality, they talk about annuitize versus non-annuitized. First point would be that if you look at our overall assets and you look at the revenue yield on what you would call annuitize versus non-annuitized, the yield on non-annuitized assets is actually quite strong for us. We have very strong yields there. Second on annuitized assets, we do measure that internally. We do track it and we’ve been growing those rates well in excess of our annual organic growth rate, so we’ve been growing those as well; but we really don’t try to do one at the expense of the other, that well I understand people might like it as it has a higher PE and it’s more recurring in nature. The reality is if you do the math, it doesn’t work, it’s best just to continue to grow both. And we’ve been very focused on bringing those assets in, but also making sure there is much of them are as productive as they can and that we grow all sources of revenue that we can. And in the kind of environment we’re in, that’s the only way you’ll hold your earnings relatively flat in a phase of such low interest rates.

Howard Chen

Analyst · Credit Suisse. Please go ahead

Okay, thanks, Fred. That’s interesting. And then, Bill, there is a lot of dynamics impacting the IDA balances, new money coming into the firm, the impact of the transfers you’re doing and then client re-engagement, I know you touched a bit of this in your prepared remarks, but could you just breakout some of the ebb and flow of – like those items just to give us a better feel for that?

Bill Gerber

CFO

There are a lot of moving part here, you’re right about that. If we had in the quarter the biggest thing that happened was the reduction in float, two pieces there, one we extended a lot more and two which was planned and two, the institutional money is, as we talked earlier is more invested. So that reduced the float quite a bit. Obviously, new money is coming in at the same time and so it’s just it is an approval and the money keeps going. We would expect for the balance of the year excluding the $2 billion that’s going to come in from seg cash as I mentioned, we’d expect just normal growth in there and we’ll see how the institutional moneys react if they’re going to come out of the market and go back into IDA or if they’re going to stay in the markets, but those are probably the biggest drivers of what is going to move yield. All of being equal, new money comes in, as I mentioned in my remarks, the overall yield will come down as the percentage will come down, but we do expect our income to go up, some.

Howard Chen

Analyst · Credit Suisse. Please go ahead

Just a quick follow-up, Bill, if I may, just could you wrap a bit more number around just the new money into firm in the IDA and then in terms of the institutional client-base, are they now – where are they as a percentage of cash relative to where they were?

Bill Gerber

CFO

The overall -- let me put it in different way, the overall institutional money right now is 22% of the portfolio. So, that’s down from a 23% to 27%. So -- and the float balances right now are $6 billion. So it’s -- oh, 6%, sorry, 6% of the overall portfolio. And let’s say it’s probably -- that’s probably split by close to 50/50 retail institutional.

Howard Chen

Analyst · Credit Suisse. Please go ahead

Okay. Thanks so much.

Bill Gerber

CFO

Okay, Howard.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Alex Kramm of UBS. Please go ahead.

Alex Kramm

Analyst · UBS. Please go ahead

Nice work on my name there. Anyways, good morning. Just to touch the -- it’s a follow-up on Howard’s and I apologize if I missed that, but you did just briefly say you extended it always more, can you just say exactly where you were, I remember in the fall, you said you wanted to extend a lot of the duration, then the environment obviously did not work in your favor and I think you stopped, that’s like $5 billion to $6 billion left, did you -- how much more did you actually do or how much is left and what does it take in terms of the environment for you to get more aggressive?

Bill Gerber

CFO

Yeah, the RIA balances are still not done, in terms we didn’t extend anymore of those. So we still have about $3 billion left to get to that, the 40% that we talked about in the past of the institutional monies that were more like retail. So that actually, none of that has moved yet this quarter. So we still have that to go. But the other extensions were, the normal extension as money was maturing we were able to get that back out in the yield curve more quickly. That was part of what happened in the quarter.

Alex Kramm

Analyst · UBS. Please go ahead

Okay, great. And then, coming back to may be ad spending more broadly speaking, I think when we look out and look at some of the competition it just appears like you hear more about the giving away -- free of trading and other things to get customers into the door. So, just wondering if you get the same sense that the competition to planned acquisition is just heating up a little bit and that might increase your ad spend little bit more or keep it at higher levels, and obviously you’re growing new accounts pretty nicely as it doesn’t seem like it’s hurting you, but just may be a general comment about where you’re relative to your competition? Thank you.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

I – we’ve commented on this in the past, that we’ve seen everybody increased their advertising spending and the industry has definitely moved to much more aggressive promotional offers. I remind you that I mean it is -- this year is more aggressive than we’ve seen -- I’ve seen since I’ve been here, but it is retirement season, and so I wouldn’t assume that what goes on during the retirement season happens off-retirement season. So it tends to have a seasonal pattern to us. This tends to be the quarter where the ad spending is always the highest, and we see the most aggressive promotions and offers. We’ve done and we try to be very discipline when it starts to get from our way of thinking a little too aggressive, we just – we don’t go there, we try to do other things that tended to work for us.

Bill Gerber

CFO

And Alex I’d expect that we’re going to be looking at the lower half of the range for -- as I said, in advertising spend for the year, so which would tell you that maybe we are going to be between 50 and 60 roughly each quarter for the next two quarters.

Alex Kramm

Analyst · UBS. Please go ahead

All right. It sounds good, thank you.

Bill Gerber

CFO

Okay, Alex.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Alex Blostein of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Alexander Blostein

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead

Thanks, guys. Good morning. Just one more follow-up on the IDA block, I guess could you talk about the overall duration of the portfolio today and then outside of the $2 billion that you’ll transfer from the broker dealer, is there any more kind of duration extension that we could take because if you look at the guidance, 130 to 140, it feels like even the five-year swap curve right now has like a 120 or so yield, so just help us understand a little better current duration and where do you see the lower duration going over the next couple of years?

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Well, right now, Alex we’re about 2.8 years in the overall portfolio. We’ve always said we wanted to be between two and three years. So we’re going to stay in that range probably for a while. I’d expect the extensions and to your point, as money is being turned out on the curve we’d expect that it will continue to compress rate for the next indefinite period, but all in for the year, we’d expect the total rate to be between -- in the 135 to 140.

Alexander Blostein

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead

Got you. Thanks. And then just a quick follow-up on the margin balances, you guys talked about the trading dynamics and so far enable, could you just talk a little bit about how the margin balances look so far in the quarter and if you’ve seen any sign of risk appetite for maybe some of the more actively traded investors in April?

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Actually they were pretty stable from the -- end of the quarter, up slightly, but -- so there has been little bit more risk and I think again I would -- I think this is more from the skilled investors than the overall investors.

Alexander Blostein

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead

Okay, thanks.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Okay.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Michael Carrier of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Michael Carrier

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead

Thanks, guys. First is a question on expenses, so in terms of the outlook, you’re saying flat-to-down from the current run rate, I guess if we do get into an environment where just during the summer you say we get more seasonality because of retail not being as engaged, when we think about the efficiencies that you’re generating from project lean and then that being reinvested in the business, where are some areas that you could pullback or based on the net new asset growth that you’re, is there less flexibility or less area that you would really want to, because you continue to organically grow the business?

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Yeah, I mean, you made a comment that we reinvested in the business. Well, that’s not automatic. I think the first thing is that we’ve been growing at pretty strong rate. So, we want to keep the growth up, improve the client experience and be able to handle that growth without adding much expense. That’s really part of our core strategy. If we have additional savings then we sit down and make a decision whether we invest that or allocate that to another area that maybe growing faster or we see an opportunity to grow faster, and if we can’t – if we don’t see that then we will take it to the bottom line. And we think we’re pretty good at managing that. I think the main thing is to handle the extra growth and also when we make investments in the future which we make on a regular basis and for the last three years as we’ve transitioned to the asset gathering strategy, we’ve been making those investments and they have been incremental to expense. We are trying to be much more disciplined now that as we make those continued investments in the future that we find ways to self-finance them as opposed to look at them as incremental.

Michael Carrier

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead

Okay, thanks. It’s helpful. And then just as a follow-up – just on the margin balances, so the yield on those products, you’re seeing across the peers some pressure there on the commission side. Now there are other things going on there, but not as much pressure. So, when you look at the industry trends, is there more pressure just throughout the industry on margin pricing versus commissions and is there anything more recent that really stepped that up just because it seems like the trend has been a little bit more severe recently and it’s not you guys; it’s throughout the industry?

Bill Gerber

CFO

Yeah. I don’t think that there has been any incremental pressure in terms of margin rates. I do think that what you’re seeing is people who are the more skilled investors who do have negotiated rates are the predominant users of margin these days. So, that’s I think really what’s going on, but I think there hasn’t been an unusual push or shift or – for negotiated rates from clients. It’s just what we are seeing is a mix shift between the everyday investor, if you will and the more skilled investors.

Michael Carrier

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead

Okay. Got it. Thanks a lot.

Bill Gerber

CFO

Okay.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Keith Murray of Nomura. Please go ahead.

Keith Murray

Analyst · Nomura. Please go ahead

Good morning, guys.

Bill Gerber

CFO

Hi, Keith.

Keith Murray

Analyst · Nomura. Please go ahead

Just a question on the economics of the RIA business, as investors use more pass-through products with lower fees, competition remains intense. Can you just talk about sort of the return on assets of that business now maybe versus three, four years ago? Have you seen a change?

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Yes, you have. I think you’ve seen it across both our retail and institutional businesses. We’ve always said that the retail business if everybody defines return differently, but if you take it, whether you want to take revenue or pre-tax, the reality is the retail business has a much higher return than the institutional business as a percentage of assets, it’s just – it’s significantly higher. Having said that, what’s driven things down for the most part here is the industry makes a lot of money on client cash and lot of that economics is basically come away. We’ve held in pretty well on the retail side by using our client cash strategy and putting them into the IDA. But on the institutional side, because we use the five to seven-year ladder there, but if you come into the institutional side, we use the two-year ladder more in flow. So, while it’s better than money market funds, it’s not that much better, and so they have been hit pretty hard on the cash profits. Unlike the retail side, you don’t have as many – you don’t have as much trading, you don’t have as much marginal loans and so you tend to have more trailing revenue, which is just lower margin. So, the return on assets in the institutional side has been hit harder than on the retail side on a relative [basis].

Keith Murray

Analyst · Nomura. Please go ahead

Okay. Just a follow-up, in the past you’ve talked about looking at scale deals or product deals as acquisitions. I’m just curious are you looking your product lineup today, are there areas that you look at it and say, well, we need to get bigger here and which are those areas?

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

I think on the trading side of the business, we’re pretty comfortable with our product range here. I don’t see us – we haven’t seen in quite a while anything on the trading side from a capability point of view that we think we either can’t build or don’t already have or have built that we want or need. So, on that side, it’s much more about consolidation, cost synergies, and economics and just establishing your position in the industry. If you look at the other side on the long-term investor, we really – again, we haven’t seen much that would make a lot of interest to what we looked at or thought about asset management, we just don’t see that making sense for us. We think we capture most of the economics of retail money management versus institutional money management to some of programs that we run like Amerivest and whatnot. And so – we really don’t see the advantage to doing that and we – the open architecture strategies worked quite well for us. There is adjacent businesses that we continue to look at, but we just haven’t seen anything that is really compelling to us at this point.

Keith Murray

Analyst · Nomura. Please go ahead

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

I’m showing no further questions at this time. I’d like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Fred Tomczyk for any closing remarks.

Fred Tomczyk

CEO

Well, thank you for joining us today. As you can see for the quarter, we were pretty much on street expectations. We continue to deliver double-digit asset gathering and we’re well on our way to what we hope will be the fourth year in a row of double-digit asset gathering and that’s despite what I’d consider to be a cautious retail investor and we will hope to see you next quarter. Take care.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today’s conference. You may all disconnect and have a wonderful day.