Company profile
- Industry
- Financial services
- Founded
- 1971
- Headquarters
- Westlake, United States
- Ownership
- Publicly traded
Profiles are auto-generated and infrequently updated.
The analyses
The Loss Leader · Business Model
Schwab Made Trades Free, Then Bought Its Wounded Rival 54 Days Later for $26 Billion
On October 7, 2019, Schwab made stock trades free. The story is democratization. The reality: commissions were 3-4% of Schwab's revenue but 15-16% of TD Ameritrade's, and 54 days later Schwab bought its crippled rival for $26 billion.
7 min
The Money Machine · Business Model
Charles Schwab Gives Away Trading Because the Real Money Is in Your Idle Cash
Everyone thinks Schwab is a brokerage. It's a bank-scale interest-rate machine — net interest revenue hit $10.7 billion in 2022, while the commissions it scrapped were only ~4% of revenue. Free trading is the funnel. The cash you forgot about is the product.
8 min
The Crisis Response · Crisis & Reinvention
Schwab Looked Like the Next SVB. The Numbers Were Telling a Completely Different Story.
In March 2023 Schwab's stock fell 33% — its worst month since 1987 — and $47 billion in market value vanished as investors braced for a bank run. The deposit drain was real. But it wasn't a panic. It was math the company had already modeled.
8 min