Earnings Labs

AMTD IDEA Group (AMTD)

Q4 2009 Earnings Call· Tue, Oct 27, 2009

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Welcome to the TD Ameritrade Holding Corporation Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2009 Earnings Results Conference Call. With us today from the company is President and Chief Executive Officer Fred Tomczyk and Chief Financial Officer Bill Gerber. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Bill Murray, Managing Director of Investor Relations, Communications and Public Affairs.

Bill Murray

Management

Welcome to the TD Ameritrade September quarter and full year ’09 earnings call. If you haven’t had a chance yet, our press release and today’s presentation can be found on our website at www.AMTD.com. Before we begin, I'd like to refer you to our safe harbor statement which is on slide two of the presentation as we will be referring to forward looking statements in today’s presentation. We would also like to advise you to review our description of risk factors contained in our most recent annual and quarterly reports, forms 10-Q and 10-K. The call is intended for investors and analysts and may not be reproduced in the media in whole or in part without prior consent of TD Ameritrade. Today’s call is coming from the NASDAQ Market site. We’re here because we’ll be ringing the opening bell. I mention that only because we are under some time constraints for this morning’s call which is scheduled through 9:00am. We expect to be able to take all questions there may not be enough time. Please contact our Investor Relations staff with any questions you may have that was not addressed this morning. Because of these time constraints and the number of covering analysts we’d appreciate your cooperation in limiting yourself to two questions. With that we have Fred Tomczyk, President and CEO and Bill Gerber, our CFO here to review the major events of ’09 along with comments on the outlook for 2010 and beyond. Then we’ll open it up for questions.

Fred Tomczyk

President and CEO

I’m very happy to report that we had a strong fourth quarter with earnings per share of $0.26 to finish out the year with earnings of $1.10 per share. Bill will walk through the details of the quarter a little later but I want to open this morning by putting some perspective on the year. How the company is positioned for the future and our focus for the next year. As you know, last year was a very difficult one, especially for those of us in financial services. We had a banking crisis that required unprecedented government intervention, a market that was down 30% to 40% at times and short term interest rates plummeting from over 200 basis points to near zero. All in all it looked to be as about a difficult as an environment as one could imagine for our business. Looking back, I could not be more proud of how TD Ameritrade responded to this environment and our accomplishments over the last year. We made some good decisions, we avoided most of the problems, and were able to take advantage of the situation to grow our business, strengthen our firm, and position ourselves for the future and future growth. If you turn to slide three I’d like to give you a brief recap of the past year. As I said earlier, we had a great with year with strong results in all aspects of our business that were within our control. We took advantage of our strengths to capitalize on the dislocation in the market in five ways: We increased our investment in sales and marketing, at the same time that everyone else was pulling back. Our strong organic growth is evidenced that this worked for us. We were also very thoughtful about examining our cost structure,…

Bill Gerber

CFO

To echo Fred’s remarks we truly couldn’t be more pleased with our accomplishments this year. Fred has already shown you many of our year end numbers and we believe that they alone tell a very strong growth story. When you take a look at what we’ve been able to accomplish consistently on a quarter by quarter basis you’ll see that what we’ve been doing at TD Ameritrade has truly positioned our firm for continued strong financials and long term earnings potential. Let’s take a look at that starting with the September quarter on slide 10. Our EPS came in at $0.26 per share or $0.28 per share if you exclude the impact of the accounting charge on our auction rate securities buyback. This $0.28 per share would be comparable to $0.27 per share on a street estimate. Our results were principally driven by strong trading of 411,000 trades per day, our highest quarter in history. Our October trading through last Friday is 406,000 trades per day. We ended the quarter at over $31 billion in MMDA balances and margin debt has rebounded ending at $5.8 billion which is up from $5 billion at the beginning of the quarter. Net new assets were seasonally slow at $5.4 billion but still almost double the amount from the same quarter last year. New accounts of 151,000 were very solid again. Assets and cash continued to grow as well ending at $302 billion and $58 billion respectively. As we’ve been saying for the last four quarters we continue to exhibit strong business fundamentals with yet another record quarter for trading backed by strong quarterly asset and account growth. Just a quick comment on the $0.02 auction rate securities charge. The charge that we booked is lower then the $0.05 to $0.10 per share we…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Rich Repetto – Sandler O’Neill

Rich Repetto

Analyst

Could you go over the contribution from thinkorswim on revenues and expenses? I think you got around it but the general numbers.

Bill Gerber

CFO

Basically thinkorswim was a push this year, as we said when we bought thinkorswim so revenues and expenses are basically equal. We still expect the 3% to 7% accretion in 2010 and the double digit accretion we talked about in 2011.

Rich Repetto

Analyst

Was it generally around $70 million then revenue and expenses?

Bill Gerber

CFO

Yes.

Rich Repetto

Analyst

To look at the expenses, if you look quarter to quarter they went up $332 million last quarter ex the auction rate securities $389 million then that’s an incremental $57 million and I know you had thinkorswim for $13 million of last quarter so that would make sense. I’m trying to see you also had some one timers about $18 million last quarter, were there any one timers in this quarter and on the expense side?

Bill Gerber

CFO

Yes, there were a couple. We had some integration costs, some profession service project about $6 million; we had some arbitration for about $4 million. There were probably a couple more after that. ARS, you already had the ARS in there.

Rich Repetto

Analyst

The sensitivities changed as far as on the balance type sensitivities, color on how that was calculated compared to what the sensitivities were prior quarter?

Bill Gerber

CFO

We look at it each quarter we reset it based upon the new balances that are out there and the rates that are prevailing at the time and trying to assess if that happened what would be the change so that’s the main driver.

Rich Repetto

Analyst

We’ve seen volatility drop literally eight or nine months in a row and your feeling on the activity rates going into at least the beginning of this year, fiscal ’10 for you.

Fred Tomczyk

President and CEO

The fix has definitely come in here and is at a low point in terms of the last 52 weeks. As Bill said, we’ve seen trading so far in October average around 406,000 trades per day which last year was the highest activity rate over the last three years so very, very healthy. I do expect the activity rate to come off somewhat but I would say so far this year is still at a decent rate and the trades have continued to be at a very good rate. Some of that is the activity rate coming off, I think some of it is the adding of thinkorswim and the capabilities, and some of that is just the fact that we’ve grown our funded account base quite strongly the last two years and that does show up on the trades per day.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Richard Salinger – BMO Capital Markets

Richard Salinger

Analyst

In the past you’ve expressed some interest in Forex market as another area for growth. Would you detail how you plan to approach that market and how you view its appropriateness for the retail investors and traders?

Fred Tomczyk

President and CEO

What we’ve expressed, I’m not sure where that comment comes from other then to say we wanted to increase the range and the breadth of our products available to our active trader client base. That means adding complex options, that means adding futures, and that means adding Forex to make sure that we have all the various products on our shelf that active traders look for. I think that’s really what we’re trying to say.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Daniel Harris – Goldman Sachs

Daniel Harris

Analyst

I want to focus on the MMDA or the IDA as you’re calling it now. I think this quarter you said that the reinvestment rate was 150 to 200 bps and I think last quarter was about 25 bps lower. Is that anything to do with strategy or just what the market is giving you on yields these days?

Bill Gerber

CFO

It’s probably a little bit of both to be honest. The duration has drifted down a little bit closer to two years. We’re certainly not getting paid for going out very far. Generally the market continues to contract. I’d say it’s maybe 50/50.

Daniel Harris

Analyst

On the advertising spend, most of your peers look like they dropped that number this quarter and I know that you guys have swim for the full quarter but was the core Ameritrade advertising up or how should we think about that? If it is up or flat versus your peers which seem like they were down what are you guys seeing in the market in terms of advertising that gives you the confidence to keep spending there to attract assets in what I think has been a pretty tough quarter for getting that new accounts?

Bill Gerber

CFO

We were flat from quarter over quarter from June to September. We talk about advertising I think almost daily but its something that we believe that if you are consistently in the market you get the type of accounts you’re looking for and we measure this metric every month. That’s really a determinant as to where we’re going to go. One of Fred’s points he made is last year when everybody was pulling back and re-trenching we accelerated and it worked out quite well in terms of our core metrics. We measure this on a month by month basis, we’ll see how it goes but that’s what happened in the September quarter.

Fred Tomczyk

President and CEO

We didn’t spend much in July and August. We definitely pulled back in those two months but we do pick it back up in September.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Roger Freeman – Barclays Capital

Roger Freeman

Analyst

I wanted to come back to the first question Rich had on activity rates, etc. You look at your activity rates remained very strong up healthily year over year and I’m trying to tie that back to what we’re seeing in the community asset management space. Funds flows into equity mutual funds have been extremely weak and actually been negative again and we’re hearing sort of a retail disengagement. I’m trying to figure out what the difference is between what you’re seeing and what we’re seeing in the fund space, are you driven more by the professional volume now then ever before?

Fred Tomczyk

President and CEO

We’ve always been driven to a significant extent by the, how we define the active trader and that continues to be the case. I do think you’re seeing some differences between the firms that are leading in the active trader space versus the casual trader. The active trader stayed very engaged through this market.

Roger Freeman

Analyst

On the ARS can you give us a couple extra details, you said the uptake rates were lower then you expected what were those? What is the total balance at this point that you would be expecting to redeem? You’re showing the $260 to $320 million in your cash flow outlook is that the number? What’s the pricing implied on that now is it $0.98, $0.99?

Bill Gerber

CFO

About $0.98. We’ve had $260 million that’s been asked for and we’re looking at $260 to $320 million, it’s a little bit lower then that actually.

Roger Freeman

Analyst

Investment products, how much of the sequential decline there is money market fee waiver, what were those this quarter versus last quarter?

Bill Gerber

CFO

Money market fee waivers were $20 million this quarter, identical to last quarter. That’s the bid delta. Of course as the total amount comes down you’re seeing an absolute reduction with out fee waivers then the fee waivers were $20 million this quarter and $20 million last quarter out of the money market funds into the MMDA obviously.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Patrick O'Shaughnessy – Raymond James

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Analyst

I’m looking at your commissions per trade and given that you had a full quarter of thinkorswim and they had a lower commission per trade then legacy to the Ameritrade I would have expected that number to have come down a little bit more. It was actually surprisingly stable quarter over quarter. Can you talk about what were some of the drivers in that commission per trade this quarter and then looking forward to your outlook statement for next year it does look like you’re expecting that to come down? If you can elaborate just a little bit on your thoughts as far as pricing.

Bill Gerber

CFO

On our pricing the biggest delta this quarter was the strength of the payment for order flows so that’s what has been very resilient. Next year we’re looking at the order flow decreasing a little bit just basically on how we’re tiering and where we think the order flow is going to come from. Time will tell. That’s the difference between actually quarter September and 2010.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Analyst

The number of funded accounts that you guys had this quarter was down a little bit sequentially from last quarter, down I think 2%. Obviously your total accounts number was up, funded being down, can you talk about maybe what’s going on there?

Bill Gerber

CFO

Actually this quarter we started to try to encourage to use electronic statements, we started charging $2.00 for paper statements and so there were some clients that were getting a paper statement that had under $2.00 in their account essentially that became unfunded so that’s what caused that.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Howard Chen – Credit Suisse

Howard Chen

Analyst

On the asset gathering front the franchise has a lot of momentum within organic growth; you both touched on it in your prepared remarks. Could you provide a little bit more color on asset gathering by segment, maybe where institutional assets reside today? As you think about your outlook for the franchise for the next fiscal year do you see any potential shift in where those incremental assets come from, is it more weighted towards one side of the franchise or the other?

Fred Tomczyk

President and CEO

As you know, we don’t disclose the split between those two. Roughly assets continue to be 30% institutional and 70% retail. The reality is the year over year growth in 2009 was in 2008 we got our retail franchise really moving quite well on the asset gathering side. The institutional side was still coming out of the conversion and had Fiserv to deal with which was the second conversion. This year what we’ve really done is the retail side continues to be very healthy and is in fact up a bit further but our institutional side had come all the way back so we’re quite happy with both of them where they are. I think as we look forward next year to take it up another notch will require us to come up with some new initiatives. We have some ideas there but it’s still pretty early on some of those, education business that we think we can drive some extra lift here.

Howard Chen

Analyst

You added a Chief Risk Officer to the management bench this quarter. How should we think about David’s addition signaling any willingness to evolve the risk profile of the company, maybe take on more balance sheet or credit risk potentially in an M&A transaction?

Fred Tomczyk

President and CEO

I don’t think you should read that into it at all. I still have a very low appetite for balance sheet risk. We run a very aggressive organic growth and acquisition oriented company. We know we have high operating leverage so we think it’s important to have a prudent financial leverage and to keep the balance sheet pretty conservative. Why we hired David was clear our point of view is that given all we’ve gone through, through this cycle and when I look back at it and when the management team looks back at it and when the Board looks back at it we would say we ought to have somebody who spends all of their time on risk including the various aspects of risk whether its operational risk and making sure as the regulatory environment starts, there’s potential changes here that we have somebody who is on the compliance side, on the risk side and is spending all of their time on that. We thought that was important so that it’s not a part-time job like Bill. Having said that all of our business heads and people have to have a strong orientation to manage risk property. I think David will be much more of the oversight that and make sure that we have the appropriate focus on it.

Howard Chen

Analyst

You noted the stock lending yields have dropped back to historical levels, contribution from the business continues to be well above average though, and short interest levels were low. Just curious if you could give a little bit more color on stock lending in general?

Bill Gerber

CFO

There was one particular trade that was very powerful in the June quarter and it continued over into the month of July before it evaporated and that was really the driving force behind the lift that we saw in stock lending. Today again the stock lending levels are back to normal but that’s really the delta that you see between the June and the September quarter. Something a little unrelated but I want to clarify something I said earlier. The discount on the auction rate securities is just under 5%. I think is misquoted that when I was asked previously. I want to squeeze that in too.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Michael Hecht – JMP Securities

Michael Hecht

Analyst

On the 2010 guidance I’m looking at the ad spend specifically and it looks kind of like a mid 20% growth rate for next year versus what you spent this year. I get that some of that’s thinkorswim but it seems kind of aggressive almost 9% of revenues which is twice the levels of Schwab and what historically had been 7% to 8% for you guys. I hear you guys are pleased with the organic growth but with the big ramp in ad spend the mid point of net new assets is $27 billion so the same as last year which seems pretty conservative. How do we think about that?

Bill Gerber

CFO

The vast majority of the change in the advertising comes from advertising for the education part of the business. That is the biggest delta between the two years. It’s a success metric so if the clients don’t sign up for education the fee obviously becomes much less. At any rate that singularly is the biggest difference year over year.

Michael Hecht

Analyst

Following up on the guidance, how do we think about tax rate guidance within the 2010 numbers and share count, is it flat versus this year, as part of what you guys, assuming there’s a baseline? A little bit more on the outlook for capital management and more color on how you’re thinking about the potential cash dividend. Is that mutually exclusive to making acquisitions and what types of assets are you looking at, at this point, key product areas, what’s the appetite for a deal like eTrade?

Bill Gerber

CFO

There’s about 22 parts to that question. 39% is the tax rate; 595 million is our assumed number of shares.

Fred Tomczyk

President and CEO

On the capital plan if you think back to 2009 we said very similar things throughout the year. The reality is we deployed basically 100% of the cash that we earned in 2009 through the combination if you actually put it in the cash portion of the thinkorswim acquisition and the share buyback we effectively deployed all of the cash we generated, to the benefit of our shareholders. Obviously we continue to look at that, different alternatives. We are thinking it through; we have not landed at this point. We are significant cash generator; we have a conservative balance sheet. We’re weighing all of our options and when we have something further to say on that I’m sure we’ll come out like we always do and be quite transparent of our thinking and why we’re doing what we’re doing. Whatever has value to our shareholders is what we’ll do.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Matt Fischer – CLSA

Matt Fischer

Analyst

On the sensitivity when I look at the 25 basis point shift in fed fund does that $0.07 include anything from the fee waivers?

Bill Gerber

CFO

Yes it does.

Matt Fischer

Analyst

How do we think about this first 25 basis points and the impact from fee waivers? Then the second 25 basis points?

Bill Gerber

CFO

The fee waivers, we earned 16 basis points and in a normal period we earn about lets say 86 make it nice easy round numbers so we’ve been waiving about 70 bps right now. The first 70 bps of increase we’re not sure, we’ll have to look at the market to determine what we share with the client etc. we would probably give the vast majority of that back to get our fee waivers back. If that’s what you’re driving at that’s what our initial thinking is right now.

Matt Fischer

Analyst

Back to the net new assets, new versus existing customer any color there?

Fred Tomczyk

President and CEO

It is a combination of both. Anytime you’re an asset gatherer you have to; you look at your ins and you look at your outs. If you look at our ins there’s a good chunk that comes from new clients and there’s also a good chunk that comes from existing clients. In fact I think it’s roughly equal in the past year. You work very hard at retention and that’s really the retention of assets on your existing clients which we’ve significantly improved the last couple of years. A number of our things like the sales to service initiative and some of our campaigns to generate increased share of wallet have clearly worked for us. Our attrition is down and our ins are up both as a result of new accounts and from existing clients through share of wallet programs and our sales and service initiatives.

Matt Fischer

Analyst

I just missed what you said on the share count.

Bill Gerber

CFO

595 million.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Faye Elliott – Bank of America/Merrill Lynch

Faye Elliott

Analyst

Can you go over one more time the ARS cost? In the quarter were we looking for $57 million or $0.05 to $0.10 in the quarter?

Bill Gerber

CFO

What we had said last quarter when this was fairly fresh and there was certainly a lot more uncertainty is that we thought it could be a $0.05 to $0.10 affect on our auction rate securities. During the quarter there were significant redemptions by the issuer. There were less clients that we thought were actually going to take the offer then what we had anticipated. The estimated market values of those assets strengthened pretty dramatically. The combination of those three cause all in about a $14.5 million charge. You’ll see the $13 million plus on the face of the income statement and the other piece is up in the revenue section because that was the effect on Ameritrade owned auction rate securities from when we bought back some auction rate securities form other clients in the past. That’s the total effect.

Faye Elliott

Analyst

There were numbers, I’m not sure I caught necessarily the significant, sorry to make you repeat it. There was a $260 to $320 million is the delta what you expect you could have to pay going forward?

Bill Gerber

CFO

What we have said we have received tender requests from clients for about $260 million. The program for certain clients can continue through March 2010. Yesterday was the cutoff for certain clients, other clients continue on through March 2010. It might still continue to trickle in here for a while. Our estimate of that range is $260 to $320 million based upon what we’re seeing right now.

Faye Elliott

Analyst

Back to the MMDA I know that you are moving balances from the money market funds. In the quarter what were the dynamics there with the MMDA balance? Was most of the growth in the balance from the planned shift or was the growth in the balance from just net new assets?

Bill Gerber

CFO

$6 billion of it was the shift from clients who were in the money market funds to the MMDA. The rest would have been organic.

Faye Elliott

Analyst

The rest of the shift comes through in the first quarter?

Bill Gerber

CFO

Yes, January 2010 we have about $4.5 billion that’s sitting on our balance sheet and we will be moving that off of our balance sheet into the MMDA program in January 2010.

Faye Elliott

Analyst

For the investment products is that mostly, sorry I’m somewhat new to the story, MMS or is there?

Bill Gerber

CFO

Its mutual funds and the money market funds.

Faye Elliott

Analyst

Is there a percentage breakdown?

Bill Gerber

CFO

I’m not sure we have that out there. Why don’t you call Bill Murray after and you can go through that.

Faye Elliott

Analyst

Compensation expense probably sustainable based on thinkorswim at this level and same with we’ve already gone over advertising then the higher amortization levels sustainable?

Bill Gerber

CFO

The amortization is principally due to the thinkorswim purchase price and I’m writing down the client list on thinkorswim.

Faye Elliott

Analyst

Would that be a one time increase over your more normal level or will it stay at this level?

Bill Gerber

CFO

That will stay at that level for several years.

Operator

Operator

Your last question comes from Joel Jeffrey – KBW

Joel Jeffrey

Analyst

How much of your dark volume is comprised of your top ten percent of your clients?

Fred Tomczyk

President and CEO

We don’t disclose at that level of detail. Any player in financial services is going to get a good chunk of their revenue or their profits from 20% of their clients. I think that’s very common in financial services.

Joel Jeffrey

Analyst

Excluding saying that, have you seen that percentage increase or decrease recently? Just trying to figure out again how much of the active trader business is really driving your results.

Fred Tomczyk

President and CEO

The reality is there’s no standard definition of active trader so it’s all in how you personally define it. We haven’t really seen a change over the course of the year. You can see changes in very short period of times but over any 12 month period it tends to be pretty constant.

Joel Jeffrey

Analyst

You commented that your options volume account for 10% of the options clearing volume. Is that a number you expect to see growing or is that something we should look at in terms of thinking about the business going forward?

Fred Tomczyk

President and CEO

It’d be nice to see it grow but traders do move around to different products depending on certain dynamics in the market at any given time. The only thing that can happen is when the Fix is very high people will move out of options into other products and visa versa when the fix comes in sometimes they go back to options. We certainly hope to grow it and we like the options business we’re big at it and we just hope to grow it. If we can increase our percentage of OCC volume that would be great. Thank you everybody for joining us this morning. As we said, we finished the year with a strong quarter. We’re very happy with our organic growth. We set records pretty much in all of our core metrics and that combined with our balance sheet and cash position. I continue to believe that the company is very well positioned strategically for continued growth and to take advantage of opportunities to deliver increased shareholder value. Thank you and we look forward to seeing you next quarter.

Operator

Operator

That concludes our conference for today. Thank you for your participation.