Interactive Brokers Group has announced the launch of its new feature, GlobalAnalyst.

Value stocks

GlobalAnalyst is a new tool that lets investors compare the relative valuations and financial metrics of international stocks, in one of 27 currencies of the user’s choice.

IBKR is addressing a typical challenge for investors, which is to evaluate the relative merits of stocks traded in different currencies.

The tool helps investors looking for international portfolio diversification to discover undervalued companies that may have greater growth potential.

Interactive Brokers allows suers to buy and sell and follow these stocks in the currency of their choice, all in one account on one screen.

Investors can search for stocks by region, country, industry, market capitalization and currency to identify undervalued stocks worldwide.

A number of financial metrics are at investors’ disposal, including the P/E/G Ratio: PE divided by three-year compound earnings growth rate.

PEG is an industry standard to assess how well regarded is a particular stock. PEGs below 1.0 suggest a company is undervalued, while a PEG above 1.0 suggests a company that is overvalued.

Thomas Peterffy, Chairman and Founder of Interactive Brokers, said: “In addition to offering investment choices from more than 135 global markets, we continue to provide investors with leading technology and tools to help them make informed investment decisions. GlobalAnalyst is a great tool for individual investors and sophisticated traders to begin their search, looking to take advantage of the benefits of investing globally. We emphasize that thorough analysis must always follow initial findings.”

Crypto and social investing

IBKR has made two significant product launches that aim to address what investors are now looking for, crypto and ESG investing.

In late October, the broker launched crypto for investment advisors in the United States. This means that RIAs can use the Interactive Brokers’ service to trade and custody Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) via Paxos Trust Company on behalf of clients.

From their IBKR accounts, investment advisors will be able to manage their client’s positions in cryptocurrency in addition to stocks, options, futures, bonds, mutual funds, and ETFs from a single screen.

The partnership with Paxos allows Interactive Brokers to offer its registered investment advisors commissions of 0.12% – 0.18% of trade value, depending on monthly volume with a USD 1.75 minimum per order. There are no added spreads, markups, or custodial fees.

This is in contrast with other crypto exchanges and brokers that can charge fees that as high as 2.00% of trade value or more and add spreads or markups to the price.

Interactive Brokers plans to launch the service for financial advisors in other parts of the world, in the future. For now, it is available for RIAs in the United States and the IBKR RIA platform features:

The discount brokerage counts nearly 1.49 million accounts and joined the commission-free trading app Robinhood as the only US brokers offering direct trading in cryptocurrencies.

As to ESG investing, Interactive Brokers launched IMPACT, a platform designed to help socially conscious traders and investors to align their investments according to their principles and values.

The way it works is that the users are given a choice of 13 impact values which are basically investment criteria that are in categories like environmental sustainability, LGBTQ inclusion etc.

The users would also have a choice of not having specific categories of investments to be listed. Once the investor has chosen the same, then the IMPACT app would produce a list of matching portfolios and also give reference scores of companies as against the above criteria and the user would then have a choice of choosing specific companies with very good scores and customise their portfolio based on their values.

The users of the app will have the ability to trade cryptocurrencies along with other asset classes as well as contribute to the environment as well as IB has partnered with One Tree Planted to ensure that 25 trees are planted for every $1000 investor deposit that it receives.