TD AMERITRADE Holding Corporation (AMTD)
Q4 2009 Earnings Call Transcript
October 27, 2009 8:00 a.m. ET

Executives

William Murray – Managing Director of Investor Relations, Communications and Public Affairs
Fredric J. Tomczyk – President and Chief Executive Officer
William J. Gerber – Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Analysts

Richard Repetto – Sandler O’Neill
Richard Pfenniger – BMO Capital Markets
Daniel Harris – Goldman Sachs
Roger Freeman – Barclays Capital
Patrick O’Shaughnessy – Raymond James
Howard Chen – Credit Suisse
Michael Hecht – JMP Securities
Matthew Fischer – CLSA
Faye Elliott-Gurneys – BofA Merrill Lynch
Joel Jeffrey – Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Inc.

Presentation

Operator

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the TD Ameritrade Holding Corporation September Quarter and Full Year 2009 Earnings Results Conference Call. This call is being recorded. 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. Please go ahead, sir.

William Murray – Managing Director of Investor Relations, Communications and Public Affairs

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone and welcome to the TD Ameritrade September quarter and full year ‘09 earnings calls. If you haven’t had a chance yet our press release and today’s presentation can be found on our website at 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 media in whole or in part without prior consent of TD Ameritrade.

Today’s call is coming from 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 9:00 AM. We expect to be able to take all questions, but there may not be enough time so 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?

Fredric J. Tomczyk – President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Bill. And good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us today. 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 only 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 we’re able to take advantage of the situation to grow our business, strengthen our firm, and position ourselves for the future and future growth.

Now, 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 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.

First, we increased our investment in sales and marketing, at the same time that everyone else was pulling back. Our strong organic growth is evidence that this worked for us.

Second, we are also very thoughtful about examining our cost structure, focusing our efforts on taking costs out of non–client facing areas. We reduced our expenses without impacting service, organic growth or our strategic initiatives for the future.