eToro vs Interactive Brokers Group

Yoni Assia grew up in a family where investing was dinner table conversation. His father, David Assia, was the co-founder and CEO of Magic Software; he used to stop the car outside their local bank to point out the end-of-day stock market quotes displayed in the window and discuss them with his son. Yoni received shares as a bar mitzvah gift. After completing IDF military service in a technology intelligence unit and co-founding a video system startup, he returned to building what he had always wanted: a way for ordinary people to access financial markets. In 2007, aged 25, he and his brother Ronen and their colleague David Ring founded eToro in Tel Aviv — originally called RetailFX — in his parents' garage.

eToro's breakthrough innovation was the CopyTrader feature, launched in 2010 via the OpenBook platform. Users could browse the trading histories of other investors and automatically replicate their trades in real time, proportionally allocating capital to mirror their positions. The feature blended finance with social networking: successful traders became influencers with follower counts; beginners could piggyback on expert strategies without understanding the underlying instruments. CopyTrader was fundamentally different from anything that existed in finance — a genuine democratisation of institutional-quality strategy access.

eToro added cryptocurrency trading in 2017, perfectly timed for the historic Bitcoin bull run that year. Crypto trading volumes surged to become a significant share of eToro's revenue, and the platform attracted millions of retail investors who were crypto-native but wanted a regulated, familiar interface. The 2017 crypto rally drove eToro's revenue to record levels and permanently expanded its user base. Yoni Assia's early writing about the need for digital currencies — published in 2012 — had positioned him as a thoughtful voice in the space years before it went mainstream.

eToro had attempted a SPAC merger in 2021 at a $10.4 billion valuation that was cancelled amid market volatility. The company raised $250 million at a $3.5 billion valuation in March 2023 and began preparing for a traditional IPO. Revenue had reached $931 million in 2024 — up from $639 million in 2023 — driven almost entirely by a surge in crypto trading volumes ($12 billion versus $4 billion the prior year). The platform served 40 million registered users in 75+ countries, with 3.81 million funded accounts and $18.5 billion in assets under administration.

eToro completed its IPO on Nasdaq on May 14, 2025, pricing shares at $52 each — above the planned $46-50 range — and opening at $69.69. The company raised approximately $310 million and was valued at $5.64 billion at IPO. Yoni and Ronen Assia remained at the helm — Yoni as CEO, Ronen as Executive Director. The platform that Yoni had built in his parents' garage, because his father used to stop the car to read stock prices in a bank window, was now a publicly traded company on the world's most prestigious stock exchange.

Thomas Peterffy was born in Budapest in 1944 and emigrated to the United States in 1965 with $2,200 in savings. He taught himself English by watching TV and trained as a draftsman before teaching himself computer programming. In 1977, he bought a seat on the American Stock Exchange — at the time, options trading was dominated by human market makers shouting on the trading floor. Peterffy saw something others missed: options pricing was a mathematical problem, and computers were better at mathematics than human traders. He built his own pricing models and began trading.

In 1983, Peterffy built what may have been the first handheld computer used on an exchange trading floor — a device that calculated options prices in real time and fed them to his market-making team. Exchange rules required quotes to be delivered verbally; Peterffy's team used the computer to calculate prices and then shouted them out. The exchange eventually ruled that the device violated rules by displaying prices electronically; Peterffy challenged the ruling and ultimately convinced regulators that electronic pricing was the future of trading. The episode established the principle that would define Interactive Brokers: technology always beat human intuition in markets.

Peterffy's firm, Timber Hill, built one of the first fully automated, electronic market-making systems in the world, eliminating the need for human traders on the floor entirely. The system could process thousands of options contracts across hundreds of securities simultaneously, adjusting prices in milliseconds in response to market movement. The technology that other market participants found threatening, Peterffy pursued relentlessly. Interactive Brokers was founded in 1993 as the retail and institutional brokerage arm, offering access to markets globally through technology that had been developed for Timber Hill's own trading.

Interactive Brokers went public in May 2007 at a $10 billion valuation. The company had built something genuinely unique: a single brokerage account that provided access to stocks, options, futures, forex, bonds, and funds on over 150 markets in 33 countries and 25 currencies — more markets, more asset classes, and more technical sophistication than any retail or institutional competitor. Peterffy retained approximately 80% of the company after IPO, maintaining absolute control. The low commission structure and professional-grade tools attracted active traders, hedge funds, institutions, and quantitative firms who valued access over simplicity.

Interactive Brokers reported record revenues of $4.7 billion for fiscal year 2024, driven by rising interest income on client cash balances as interest rates rose. The company's market capitalisation exceeded $50 billion. In 2025, IBKR entered the prediction markets category with ForecastTrader — giving its professional client base access to event contracts alongside their existing multi-asset trading. Peterffy, now in his 80s, remained the company's controlling shareholder and philosophical anchor, still advocating for technology, low costs, and access over simplicity. The Hungarian immigrant who had arrived with $2,200 had built a $50 billion financial technology company.