TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. (AMTD) on Monday announced a 13% drop in earnings for the fourth fiscal quarter due to a decline in commissions and transaction fees. The brokerage's quarterly net income was posted at $143 million, with earnings per share of $0.26, down from $164 million, or EPS of $0.29, at this time a year ago.
Profits for the full year fell 8%, totaling $586 million, or EPS of $1.06, versus $638 million a year ago, or EPS of $1.11. Net revenues fell 4% to $2.64 billion for the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30 versus $2.76 billion for fiscal 2011. Quarterly revenues came to $647 million compared with $667 million for the quarter ended June 30.
The Omaha, Neb.-based brokerage beat expectations. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected TD Ameritrade to earn $1.05 per share for the year on revenues of $2.64 billion and quarterly EPS of $0.25.
Despite a continued difficult economic environment with persistently low interest rates, the brokerage saw an 11% rise in net new client assets for the full fiscal year to $40.8 billion and 359,631 average client trades per day. That compares with a 12% rise in assets and 398,986 trades per day in the previous fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2011.
For the fiscal fourth quarter, the company had $10.1 billion in net new client assets, up from $9.7 billion in the previous quarter but down from $12.4 billion a year before. Average client trades per day for the most-recent quarter were 328,280 — down from 355,449 in the quarter ending June 30 and a big dip pfrom 415,739 from the year-ago period.
