The DivGro Weekly—04.09.26
223 Consecutive dividend increases
Weekly Dividend Progress
This week we received further real-time, tangible evidence of outstanding business progress when Intuit increased its dividend by 15%. We also collected our quarterly dividends from MSCI and Visa and became entitled to our quarterly dividend from Interactive Brokers, all meaningfully higher than this time last year.
How We Are Tracking
Since DivGro's inception we have predicted and benefited from 223 consecutive dividend increases across our portfolio companies, with no decreases. The average rate of these dividend increases is 13.9%.
Interactive Brokers
Interactive Brokers (IBKR), the leading online trading platform, is in the early stages of building an impressive and ascendant dividend record. This is reflective of its fast-growing underlying business; in the first half of this year, IBKR grew sales by 25%, and has been growing accounts on its platform by circa 30% per year for the last several years. Uniquely, IBKR understood at the outset that by investing primarily in engineering talent and technology, it could create a better and lower-cost platform than traditional rivals — such as brokerage houses and banks — which are burdened by high fixed costs, including expensive premises and salespeople which force them to price higher to overcome their cost structures. As Amazon liked to say, their margins became one’s opportunity. Traders or investors who migrate from traditional broker or bank frameworks to IBKR will find that trading with IBKR feels essentially ‘free’, because IBKR chooses to share much of its cost savings with customers. This decision — similar to that made by sister DivGro holding Costco — makes effective competition extremely difficult for incumbent rivals. With its industry-leading platform versatility, efficiency and low cost, it’s unsurprising that the utmost sophisticated traders and hedge funds are the first to move to IBKR, paving the way for mainstream users to follow. With more than 4.5 million accounts already, IBKR enjoys a vast runway of prospective accounts to get and grow into, foreshadowing a long dividend growth trajectory.