StoneX Group: Two 3-for-2 Splits in One Fiscal Year Break the EPS Series, RJO Lifts Q3 Net Income 102%, and 200bp of Rate Cuts Would Take $0.76 Off $4.19 Trailing EPS

StoneX itself is best understood as a regulated financial-intermediation network rather than a conventional broker. It earns money at several points in a client's financial workflow: advising commercial companies how to hedge commodity and FX risk, executing listed and OTC derivatives, clearing futures, holding client cash and earning a spread on that float, making markets in securities and OTC instruments, financing positions, moving cross-border payments, trading physical commodities, and providing retail/self-directed brokerage. Management's own definition of net operating revenue strips physical commodity cost of sales, transaction-based clearing charges, introducing-broker commissions and interest expense from operating revenue. That is the economically useful top line. Gross reported revenue, which reached more than $132 billion in FY2025 because physical commodity sales are included gross, is almost useless for valuation. FY2025 operating revenue was only $4.127 billion and net operating revenue $2.053 billion.

The company has moved into a new scale category. The July 31, 2025 acquisition of R.J. O'Brien added more than 75,000 client accounts, roughly 300 introducing brokers and almost $6 billion of client float. StoneX says the combination made it the largest non-bank U.S. futures commission merchant. The deal targeted $50 million of expense savings and at least $50 million of capital synergies and was partly funded with $625 million of 6.875% senior secured notes due 2032.

The immediate financial result is striking. In fiscal Q3 2026, StoneX generated $719.7 million of net operating revenue, up 47% year on year, and $127.9 million of net income, up 102%. For the trailing twelve months through June 2026, net income reached $526.9 million, diluted EPS $4.19 and ROE 20.8%. Q1 and Q2 were even stronger sequentially, with net operating revenues of $724.4 million and $829.1 million respectively.

Yet those growth percentages exaggerate the underlying run rate. Q3 included $78.8 million of net operating revenue from RJO and $29.5 million from Benchmark. Removing those two acquisitions leaves an acquisition-adjusted proxy of about $611 million versus roughly $488 million in the prior-year quarter, still approximately 25% higher. That is excellent legacy-platform growth, but it benefited from unusually strong trading conditions. Listed-derivatives volume was up 73% in Q3; RJO supplied 32.0 million of the quarter's 97.9 million contracts. Excluding RJO, legacy volume was about 65.9 million contracts, still 16% above the prior-year 56.8 million, while revenue per contract increased 23%. Securities average daily volume rose 33% and its rate per million increased 9%. Those are genuine organic gains, but they are also cyclical gains.

A second cyclical engine is client cash. StoneX's net operating revenue derived from interest and fees on client balances rose from about $309 million for the four quarters through June 2025 to approximately $447 million for the four quarters through June 2026, about 16% of current trailing net operating revenue. The increase came principally from much larger balances, particularly after RJO, rather than from higher policy rates.

The rate sensitivity is unusually transparent. StoneX calculates that every parallel 100-basis-point move in rates changes annual post-tax net income by about $46.9 million, or diluted EPS by $0.38, based on $14.1 billion of rate-sensitive investable balances after fixed-duration instruments and variable-rate debt. A 200-basis-point downward move therefore represents roughly $93.8 million of annual after-tax earnings, or $0.76 per share, other things equal. Against current trailing EPS of $4.19, that is an 18% sensitivity before considering any associated change in trading activity.

This is the central investment debate. Bulls see an acquisition-driven enlargement of a business that was already compounding: FY2021–FY2025 operating revenue rose from $1.673 billion to $4.127 billion, a 25% annualized rate, before a full year of RJO ownership. They see a larger client float, more introducing brokers, broader clearing capabilities, more cross-selling and a management team that has repeatedly bought specialist businesses and integrated them into a single network.

Bears see current earnings as the intersection of several favorable variables: acquired revenue, high client balances, strong futures and securities volumes, elevated transaction economics and a still-positive rate environment. They also see a balance sheet that expanded rapidly: total assets went from $27.5 billion at September 2024 to $45.3 billion at September 2025 and roughly $54 billion by June 2026. The balance sheet is largely client- and market-activity related rather than industrial debt, but it means the company's 20% ROE is inseparable from financial leverage and regulatory-capital constraints.

StoneX is not simply an acquisition story, however. Its regulatory infrastructure and ability to intermediate capital across futures, securities, OTC markets, payments and physical commodities are hard to replicate. Its client relationships are particularly sticky where a commercial customer needs advice, hedge execution, physical-market knowledge and clearing rather than merely a cheap screen. The company also occupies a useful gap left by large banks that increasingly reserve balance sheet and service intensity for their biggest customers. StoneX's 2025 annual report explicitly describes institutional demand from mid-tier customers receiving less bank coverage.

The weaker side of the franchise is self-directed retail. On a trailing-twelve-month basis through June 2026, Commercial and Institutional net operating revenue grew 68% and 74%, while Self-Directed/Retail fell 20%; Payments rose only 6%. The growth engine has decisively shifted toward commercial hedging, clearing, institutional execution and balance-sheet services.

Capital quality deserves equal attention. StoneX had approximately $2.081 billion of regulatory capital across its principal regulated subsidiaries against roughly $1.327 billion of required minimums at June 30, giving about $754 million of reported excess. Yet that excess sits inside regulated entities. SEC, CFTC, NFA, FCA and MAS rules constrain transfers and dividends, and UK entities must meet stressed liquidity requirements. A dollar of regulatory capital cannot be treated as freely distributable holding-company cash.

At $66.86, the stock trades at 15.96 times the company's own $4.19 trailing diluted EPS and 2.82 times June book value of $23.70 per share. That looks ordinary until earnings are normalized. Applying StoneX's own 200-basis-point rate sensitivity alone reduces current earnings power toward $3.43 per share. A moderate normalization of unusually strong volume and pricing can take a mid-cycle estimate into the low-to-high $3 range before incremental RJO synergies and organic growth rebuild it.

The market is therefore trading the proposition that RJO has permanently lifted StoneX's scale and that cross-selling, organic growth and cost savings will offset a future decline in rate- and volatility-sensitive revenue. The stock's approximately 59% one-year gain through September 15 shows how far that proposition has already been recognized, although the shares have also fallen roughly 29% from their 52-week high of about $94.64.

The qualitative portrait is company in transition. StoneX has the characteristics of a compounding financial intermediary, but its largest-ever acquisition has changed both the balance sheet and the clearing franchise at precisely the moment when market conditions are producing unusually high earnings. Distinguishing new structural earning power from cyclical windfall is the analytical task that matters most.

Company vertical history and financial review

StoneX's history has two roots that eventually became one company. The operating lineage starts in 1924 with Saul Stone's commodity business; by 1938 Saul Stone & Co. was a Chicago Mercantile Exchange clearing member. The listed corporate lineage came through International Assets. StoneX's own corporate history says International Assets listed on Nasdaq in 1994 under IACC, and that the current management group took control in 2003 with a wholesale-execution strategy.

This distinction matters because calling 1924 the "founding of the current listed registrant" would be imprecise. The modern StoneX is the product of consolidation between an international securities/FX platform and the FCStone commodity-hedging lineage. International Assets Holding and FCStone combined in 2009; the listed entity subsequently changed its name to INTL FCStone in 2011 and to StoneX Group in 2020. The business is continuous across those names.

The accessible primary corporate history establishes the 1994 Nasdaq listing but does not provide a sufficiently reliable original IPO price and capital-raise figure in the materials retrieved for this report. I therefore do not manufacture one. The important listing-path fact is that today's SNEX is the successor to the International Assets listed vehicle, rather than a 2009 FCStone IPO or later reverse merger.

The company's development breaks naturally into five stages.

The first was commodity-risk intermediation. Saul Stone and later FCStone built the expertise that still defines the Commercial segment: agricultural and commodity producers need someone who understands physical exposures, futures markets, margin mechanics and basis risk together. That is very different from simply providing electronic order entry. The long clearing history became a regulatory and relationship asset later.

The second stage began when the International Assets management team pushed into wholesale execution after 2003 and culminated in the 2009 combination with FCStone. That merger created the basic template of the modern company: physical-market knowledge plus securities, FX, clearing and cross-border capabilities. The 2011 INTL FCStone name captured that fusion.

The third stage was a long acquisition-led expansion from specialist broker into a broader financial network. StoneX says it completed more than 20 acquisitions during the decade leading into its current form. The most strategically visible pre-RJO transaction was the 2020 acquisition of GAIN Capital, which expanded retail FX and self-directed trading and was followed by the StoneX rebrand. The operating model became less dependent on one product and more dependent on cross-selling infrastructure across products.

The fourth stage, roughly FY2021–FY2024, paired organic expansion with an unusually helpful macro backdrop. Operating revenue rose from $1.673 billion in FY2021 to $3.436 billion in FY2024. Higher rates made client balances more valuable; volatile commodity, rate and securities markets increased demand for hedging and execution. Equity rose from $904 million to $1.709 billion over the same span. This period proved that StoneX could turn broader scale into more capital, but it also established the rate sensitivity now embedded in the earnings base.

The fifth stage began in 2025. RJO was the company's largest acquisition and changed the clearing franchise overnight. StoneX paid approximately $942 million of merger consideration in final purchase accounting, including $651.9 million of cash and roughly $300 million of shares, and assumed about $125.7 million of RJO subordinated debt. The acquired balance sheet included $6.64 billion of client payables and substantial segregated and clearing assets. Purchase accounting recognized about $410.6 million of identifiable intangible assets, primarily the client base, and roughly $167 million of goodwill after subsequent adjustments.

The rough acquisition multiple was not aggressive. RJO had generated approximately $170 million of calendar-2024 EBITDA. Treating purchase consideration plus assumed subordinated debt as an enterprise-value proxy gives roughly 6.3 times that EBITDA before synergies; including the original $50 million cost-synergy target would reduce the simple multiple further. This is only an indicative calculation because acquired cash, regulatory capital and client balances complicate conventional enterprise value, but it explains why the deal could be economically accretive even after paying 6.875% on new debt.

The debt cost is tangible. The $625 million 2032 notes require about $43 million of annual cash coupon payments before tax. That is a permanent funding charge until refinance or maturity. StoneX also has senior secured notes due 2031; combined with loans, gross interest-bearing funding has risen materially from its pre-RJO level.

Integration is progressing, but the evidence is stronger on cost savings than on cross-selling. At Q2, CEO Philip Smith said integration remained on track to be substantially completed during FY2026 and management remained confident in its synergy targets. By the August Q3 call, a transcript recap reported annualized cost savings of roughly $37–38 million exiting Q3, with management targeting $45–46 million by fiscal year-end and the original $50 million by FY2027 Q1. That means approximately three-quarters of the cost target had entered the run rate by June.

StoneX has not disclosed a clean retention percentage for the acquired 75,000 accounts or roughly 300 introducing brokers. Management said most U.S. client migrations were completed by Q3, but a quantified account-retention cohort is absent from the primary financial disclosures retrieved. Revenue cross-selling is also deliberately being treated as a longer process rather than promised on a fixed timetable. The lack of a disclosed retention KPI remains one of the report's research blind spots.

Nor has the company provided equally clear primary-source measurement of how much of the "at least $50 million" capital-synergy target has been permanently realized. Cost synergies can therefore be underwritten more confidently than capital synergies at this stage.

RJO has nevertheless contributed real earnings. The Q3 10-Q says RJO produced approximately $187.7 million of operating revenue and $10.0 million of net income in Q3; for the first nine months of FY2026, it contributed $602.3 million of operating revenue and $49.2 million of net income. Pro-forma disclosures treating RJO as though it had been owned from October 1, 2024 show FY2026 nine-month operating revenue of $4.473 billion against $3.583 billion for the comparable pro-forma prior period, a 25% increase; net income rose from $247.9 million to $441.2 million, or 78%. That comparison neutralizes acquisition timing, although it does not neutralize the unusually supportive market environment.

The financial record shows why StoneX has re-rated.

† FY2023–FY2025 EPS converted onto the final 2026 share basis; FY2026 nine-month EPS is company-reported on that final basis. FY2026 9M is not annualized. Sources: company annual and quarterly filings; calculations from filed numbers.

Operating revenue grew at about a 25% compound rate between FY2021 and FY2025. Net operating revenue grew more slowly because higher interest and transaction-related expenses are deducted before reaching that line. The distinction is central: StoneX has been getting much larger, but a growing balance sheet creates both revenue and offsetting financing/clearing costs.

The composition of operating revenue also changed. In FY2023 StoneX reported about $988 million of interest income; this increased to $1.397 billion in FY2024 and $1.734 billion in FY2025. Principal gains were approximately $1.08 billion, $1.19 billion and $1.25 billion in those same years, while commission revenue rose from about $498 million to $548 million and then $728 million. These categories are operating-revenue components rather than mutually exclusive components of net operating revenue, because financing and transaction expenses are subsequently deducted.

The cleaner measure of float economics is management's "net interest/fee income from client balances." On that basis, trailing client-balance net operating revenue through June 2026 was approximately $447 million, up about 45% from the prior trailing period. The figure has settled around $108–116 million per quarter since RJO came into the group.

Principal gains require different treatment. They reflect market-making and client facilitation across OTC derivatives, FX, securities and physical markets, but management states that it does not initiate speculative proprietary positions based on anticipated price movements. That lowers, but does not remove, market-risk exposure: positions can remain temporarily unmatched, client defaults can occur during gaps, and mark-to-market revenue can swing. StoneX itself treats daily-revenue volatility as a risk-management indicator.

The quality of operating cash flow cannot be analyzed like an industrial company. Reported cash from operating activities was about negative $24 million in FY2023, positive $507 million in FY2024 and positive $4.39 billion in FY2025. Against net income of $239 million, $261 million and $306 million, the apparent conversion ratios are about -0.1 times, 1.9 times and 14.3 times. The enormous variation comes principally from changes in client balances, securities financing, segregated assets, receivables and payables, not from deterioration followed by miraculous recovery in core cash economics.

A five-year operating-cash-flow/net-income ratio is the conventional cash-conversion test. The current filing excerpts retrieved allow clean primary-source reconstruction for FY2023–FY2025 but not FY2021–FY2022 without splicing in an unverified secondary cash-flow series. I decline to present false five-year precision. The deeper problem is that even a complete five-year ratio would be economically misleading for StoneX. The three-year aggregate operating cash flow is roughly six times aggregate net income because client-money movements dominate the calculation. The correct cash-generation test is whether earnings add regulatory capital, tangible book value and liquid resources without persistent external equity issuance.

On that test, the record is stronger. Equity rose from $1.379 billion in FY2023 to $2.844 billion by June 2026, helped by retained earnings and acquisition shares. Book value per share on the final share basis reached $23.70 at June 2026, up 32% year on year despite the RJO equity issuance.

Capital expenditure is small compared with a manufacturer. Property, equipment and software investment was approximately $46.9 million in FY2023, $65.2 million in FY2024 and $65.4 million in FY2025. StoneX does not disclose a maintenance/growth split. A reasonable research assumption is that roughly $50–60 million represents annual maintenance technology and infrastructure spending, with spending above that level treated as growth investment. This is an assumption, not company guidance.

Using an intentionally conservative owner-earnings floor of trailing net income minus $55 million of maintenance capex, without adding back depreciation and amortization, gives about $472 million, or roughly $3.75 per diluted share. At $66.86 that is an owner-earnings P/E around 17.8 times and a 5.6% owner-earnings yield. The roughly 12% difference from the headline 15.96-times P/E is small enough that owner earnings do not force rejection of earnings-based valuation. The much larger adjustment required is cyclicality, not capex.

The ROE decomposition makes the same point.

Trailing net income of $526.9 million is about 18.4% of trailing net operating revenue. Using average assets of approximately $49.6 billion between September 2025 and June 2026 gives net-operating-revenue/asset turnover near 5.8%. Average assets were approximately 19 times average common equity. Multiplying those components produces an approximate ROE around 20%, close to the reported 20.8%. The calculation is deliberately approximate because StoneX's official ROE uses its own average-equity convention, but the economic message holds: high margins matter, yet balance-sheet leverage is essential to the result.

This leverage should not be confused with uncontrolled borrowing. Much of the asset base is highly liquid and offset by client obligations, repo liabilities or trading positions. StoneX reported approximately $3.47 billion of cash plus undrawn committed facilities at June quarter-end. The principal regulated subsidiaries collectively held approximately $2.081 billion of regulatory capital against $1.327 billion of minimum requirements.

Those requirements are the binding constraint on distributable ROE. StoneX Financial Inc. is subject to SEC net-capital and customer-protection rules as well as CFTC FCM rules; GAIN is regulated as an FCM and retail FX dealer; StoneX Markets is a swap dealer; StoneX Financial Ltd operates under FCA and UK client-asset rules; and the Singapore operations are subject to MAS capital requirements. These regimes require capital and liquid assets inside the operating companies and can restrict transfers to the parent.

The capital-market story has accelerated with the earnings story. StoneX's September 15 close of $66.86 was approximately 59% above its level one year earlier and 58% higher year to date, but roughly 29% below the 52-week high around $94.64. The stock therefore has already experienced both a major re-rating and a meaningful retracement within the same year.

The re-rating is rational in one respect: StoneX today is structurally larger, more diversified and more capitalized than it was five years ago. The risk is that the market capitalizes peak-ish earnings as though every part of the improvement were structural. A trailing multiple around 16 times does not look expensive until $0.76 of EPS is identified as directly sensitive to a 200-basis-point parallel rate move and unusually strong trading economics are normalized.

Business model, moat, industry and horizontal analysis

StoneX's operating machine is best viewed as four client franchises sharing clearing licenses, capital, risk systems, product specialists and treasury.

On a trailing-twelve-month basis through June 2026, Commercial and Institutional have become the engines. The company's presentation reports the following segment economics:

Segment income is before group corporate overhead, financing and other shared items, so it should not be summed and treated as consolidated pre-tax profit.

Commercial is the historical core: agricultural, energy and other commercial clients buy risk-management advice, OTC structures, listed derivatives and physical-market services. RJO deepens this franchise because introducing brokers and commodity hedgers are natural users of StoneX's broader OTC and physical product suite. Commercial's value is relationship intensity; a producer managing grain, livestock, energy or currency exposure usually cares more about credit, execution, expertise and operational reliability than shaving a few basis points from a single trade.

Institutional has become almost equally important. Its revenue comes from securities execution, fixed income, prime brokerage, clearing, financing, lending, derivatives and capital-markets activities. StoneX says banks' retreat from balance-sheet-intensive services has created room to win mid-sized institutional clients that want more attention than a global bank provides but more products and balance-sheet capacity than a niche broker can offer.

The Global Prime Services franchise illustrates that strategy. By June 2026 it served more than 700 clients with more than $16 billion of client balances and more than $137 million of trailing net operating revenue; StoneX says net operating revenue in that unit has grown at more than a 60% annualized rate since 2019. The niche is emerging and mid-sized managers, including hedge funds, ETFs, family offices and some digital-asset participants, rather than the largest global funds served primarily by bulge-bracket banks.

Payments is small but economically attractive. It moves funds through a proprietary cross-border network that reaches more than 180 countries and 140 currencies. Segment margin was about 61% on a trailing basis. Payment volume is growing faster than revenue because rate per million has been under pressure: Q3 payment ADV rose 20% while RPM fell 7%. That is a real pricing signal.

The pending acquisition of Banco Travelex in Brazil extends this franchise. Announced August 12, 2026, after the Q3 reporting period, StoneX said the combined operation would handle about $6 billion of annual volume across approximately 20,000 clients. It broadens regulated banking and FX capabilities in Brazil but also adds another integration project before the RJO integration year has fully closed.

Self-Directed/Retail is the weak spot. The GAIN/FOREX.com franchise provides access to retail FX, CFDs and related products, but current trading activity has softened: Q3 FX/CFD ADV declined 12% and RPM declined 8%, while trailing segment net operating revenue fell 20%. This is the part of StoneX where technology, acquisition cost and price competition from highly automated retail brokers are most direct.

The cost structure has useful operating leverage. Clearing charges, introducing-broker commissions, interest expense and much of trader/consultant compensation move with revenue. StoneX's own KPI presentation says 58.2% of non-interest expense is variable, above a long-term target of more than 50%. That makes the business more resilient than a broker whose compensation and technology cost base is predominantly fixed.

Q3 offers a practical demonstration. Fixed compensation and other expenses were $56.7 million higher year on year, but $48.5 million of that increase came from acquired businesses. In other words, the legacy fixed-cost increase was modest relative to acquisition-adjusted revenue growth.

Technology is still a meaningful fixed cost. Clearing, custody, risk, payments and electronic execution cannot tolerate prolonged outages, and the company continues to invest in internal platforms such as Nyle, StoneX Hedge and StoneX Plus. But StoneX is not a software company masquerading as a broker. Its competitive advantage comes from integrating technology with capital, licenses, product expertise and humans who can handle complex clients.

I identify four genuine moats.

The strongest moat is regulatory infrastructure plus capital. FCM membership, broker-dealer permissions, swap-dealer registration, FCA/MAS-regulated entities, clearing relationships, client-asset systems and sufficient liquid capital are expensive to replicate and slow to build. RJO added scale in exactly that scarce infrastructure.

Second is network breadth. A commercial client can move from advice to OTC hedge, exchange execution, clearing, physical transaction, FX conversion and payment without assembling half a dozen specialist vendors. An institutional client can combine execution, repo, lending, custody and derivatives. The network does not create a classic consumer network effect, but it lowers the marginal cost of cross-selling and makes relationships harder to displace.

Third is the accumulated client and introducing-broker network. RJO brought approximately 75,000 clients and 300 introducing brokers; StoneX's ability to offer those channels more products gives a distribution advantage that a new FCM cannot cheaply recreate. The risk is that introducing brokers themselves own much of the end-client relationship, so retention and economics remain partly shared.

Fourth is specialist knowledge. Physical commodity hedging, OTC structuring, emerging-market payments and mid-market prime brokerage involve operational problems that pure electronic brokers often do not want to solve. That expertise has survived several market cycles and acquisitions, making it more credible than a marketing claim.

The weaker moat is consumer technology. Interactive Brokers has spent decades optimizing automated global market access and low-cost electronic execution. StoneX's retail decline suggests its broad ecosystem does not automatically translate into a superior retail proposition. Its technology advantage is stronger in workflow integration for complex customers than in mass-market self-directed trading.

Management's capital-allocation record is ambitious rather than conservative. The company has repeatedly bought capabilities instead of waiting to build them organically. The operating-revenue CAGR and expansion of equity show that this has created scale, while RJO's purchase multiple suggests management did not pay a technology-style valuation for the largest transaction. The downside is integration complexity, goodwill/intangibles and a higher permanent debt coupon.

Governance has one important wrinkle. StoneX's proxy structure links executive annual cash bonuses heavily to ROE. That aligns compensation with shareholder profitability, but ROE at a financial intermediary can also be raised with more balance-sheet leverage. Regulatory-capital and risk controls therefore matter as much as the incentive metric itself.

There is no dual-class structure in the 10-K; the listed security is ordinary common stock. Leadership has also been transitioning: Philip Smith became chief executive in December 2024, Bill Dunaway is CFO, and Sean O'Connor moved into an executive vice-chair role, with John Radziwill elected board chairman in 2026. Smith was therefore already chief executive when RJO was agreed and closed, so the integration is being run by the team that chose the deal.

Accounting controls need monitoring. KPMG gave an unqualified opinion on StoneX's FY2025 financial statements but concluded that the company had not maintained effective internal control over financial reporting at September 30, 2025 because of a material weakness in the control over how securities purchased under agreements to resell and sold under agreements to repurchase were presented. The major 2025 acquisitions, including RJO and Benchmark, were excluded from management's acquired-business ICFR assessment for that year. That does not mean the financial statements were misstated; it means the control environment entering the largest integration year was not yet clean.

Industry structure explains why this company can earn attractive returns while still trading below exchange operators and elite electronic brokers. StoneX sits between exchanges, global banks and end users. Exchanges such as CME own scarce market infrastructure and collect transaction and market-data fees with very high margins. Banks own massive balance sheets and relationships but increasingly ration service to smaller clients. Electronic brokers such as Interactive Brokers use automation to serve huge numbers of accounts at very low marginal cost. StoneX occupies the middle: it combines human-intensive risk advice, clearing, market-making, financing and cross-border service for customers too complex for a simple brokerage account but often too small to receive priority treatment from a global bank.

The cycle exposure is therefore multi-dimensional. Rates affect client-cash economics. Market volatility and volume affect commission, clearing and market-making revenue. Commodity cycles affect commercial hedging. Securities-market activity affects institutional execution and financing. Credit conditions affect the value of StoneX's balance sheet and the chance of client deficits. These cycles do not always move together, which is a real diversification benefit, but FY2026 has had several favorable drivers simultaneously.

As of the research cutoff, the federal-funds target remained 3.50%–3.75%, with the September FOMC meeting underway. That is already below the 4%–plus levels that prevailed earlier in the rate cycle, yet RJO's larger float has allowed StoneX to grow net client-balance income anyway. This shows why the acquisition creates some protection against moderate cuts: balance growth can offset yield decline. It cannot eliminate rate exposure, as management's own sensitivity table makes clear.

The closest listed operating analogue is Marex Group (MRX.US). Both firms combine commodities, futures clearing, market-making and institutional services, and both have grown by filling space between specialist brokers and global banks. Marex is a cleaner commodity/intermediary comparison; StoneX is broader in payments, physical trading and retail.

Interactive Brokers (IBKR.US) is a different animal. Its core advantage is automation and electronic brokerage economics; its margins and valuation reflect a software-like cost structure StoneX cannot match. IBKR traded at roughly 35 times current market-data earnings at the September 15 close versus StoneX's company-derived 16 times. That premium is a market statement about automation, secular account growth and cleaner earnings quality.

BGC Group (BGC.US) is more heavily exposed to institutional brokerage, interdealer markets and electronic Fenics businesses. It competes for institutional flow but has a different balance-sheet and clearing mix. Its current market-data P/E around 30 times is not a clean benchmark because accounting and business composition differ.

CME Group (CME.US) is best used as an upstream quality reference, not a direct competitor. CME owns the exchange and clearing infrastructure on which intermediaries such as StoneX execute significant activity. At roughly 23 times market-data earnings, CME receives a premium because it captures industry activity without taking StoneX's client-credit, introducing-broker and market-making risk. Its 2025 revenue reached a record $6.5 billion.

A current market-price cross-section illustrates that distinction:

† SNEX P/E is recalculated from company-reported $4.19 TTM EPS; peer P/Es are market-data figures and are used only as a valuation cross-check rather than filing-derived fundamental metrics.

The valuation discount to IBKR and CME is justified. StoneX earns more volatile revenue, needs more regulatory and working capital, carries more client-credit risk and has more acquisition complexity. The interesting question is whether a 16-times multiple is still a discount once StoneX's earnings are normalized. That answer is much less obvious.

The ecological niche is attractive precisely because it is awkward. StoneX is the regulated, capital-bearing connective tissue between commercial hedgers, mid-sized financial institutions, introducing brokers and global markets. Technological substitution is unlikely to eliminate the need for capital, clearing and risk management, but automation can compress simple execution pricing. StoneX becomes stronger as banks abandon sub-scale relationships and weaker if its services collapse toward commoditized execution.

Current fundamentals and valuation analysis

As of September 16, the latest reported period is fiscal Q3 2026, the quarter ended June 30 and released August 5. The fiscal year ending September 30 is nearly complete but has not been reported. Presenting nine months as a full year would overstate both certainty and the durability of an unusually strong period.

The final split-adjusted quarterly sequence is:

Source: StoneX's Q3 FY2026 presentation, which retroactively presents the share series on the current basis.

Q2 was the peak quarter so far. Q3 net operating revenue fell 13% sequentially and net income fell 27%, yet both were far above the prior year. This is an early reminder that StoneX does not have SaaS-like sequential revenue progression. Market conditions can move earnings substantially quarter to quarter.

Q3's year-on-year growth remained broad. Listed-derivative operating revenue rose 125%, OTC derivatives 73%, physical contracts 106%, securities 24%, payments 13%, while FX/CFDs declined 19%. Interest and fees earned on client balances rose 64%.

The RJO contribution was material but not the whole explanation. Q3 RJO net operating revenue was $78.8 million after a $9.8 million mark-to-market loss on its investment portfolio and exchange stock; Benchmark contributed another $29.5 million. Subtracting those from consolidated $719.7 million leaves about $611.4 million for the legacy/acquisition-adjusted proxy, around 25% above prior-year consolidated net operating revenue. This proxy is imperfect because smaller acquisitions and internal reallocations remain in the group, but it shows that current momentum is not simply purchased revenue.

The next subtraction is cyclical. Ex-RJO listed-derivatives volume was roughly 16% higher than the prior year and revenue per contract was 23% higher. Securities ADV rose 33%. Those are favorable market conditions layered on top of acquisition growth. Payments gives the opposite example: volume rose 20% but pricing fell 7%.

RJO cost synergies are now measurable enough to underwrite. The $37–38 million Q3 exit run rate represents 74–76% of the original $50 million cost target, and management expects to reach roughly $45–46 million at FY2026 year-end and $50 million in FY2027 Q1. The remaining incremental saving from the Q3 run rate is therefore only around $12–13 million pre-tax. Most of the obvious cost-synergy upside is already entering results.

The larger future opportunity is revenue cross-selling: giving former RJO customers access to OTC hedges, physical commodities, fixed income, FX and the rest of StoneX. Management has deliberately not promised a timetable. I treat revenue synergy as upside rather than a base-case entitlement.

The market is trading three things simultaneously: RJO integration, structurally larger client balances and continued strong market activity. The 59% one-year stock-price advance is far greater than what a simple $50 million cost program would justify; investors are capitalizing the possibility that StoneX's entire earnings base has shifted upward.

The stock's decline from $94.64 to $66.86 also matters. That 29% retracement has taken much of the most aggressive re-rating out of the price without any comparable collapse in operating performance. Q3 still generated 18.4% ROE and 102% year-on-year net-income growth. The stock is no longer priced like an uninterrupted momentum story.

The bull/bear disagreement can now be stated precisely.

Bulls believe 20%-type ROE has become sustainable because client balances, FCM scale and cross-product penetration are permanently larger. Rates can decline modestly without undoing the balance growth. RJO cost savings are mostly de-risked, and StoneX's widening capital base should support more institutional prime, clearing and financing revenue.

Bears believe trailing EPS of $4.19 sits materially above mid-cycle earnings. StoneX itself says 200 basis points of lower rates cost $0.76 of EPS. Transaction activity is also above normal: listed volumes, revenue per contract and securities activity are all elevated. A simultaneous normalization could push earnings into the low $3s before secular growth rebuilds them.

The current valuation must therefore start with normalized earnings and book value.

At $66.86, trailing P/E is 15.96 times and P/B is 2.82 times June book value of $23.70. A third-party market feed reports a lower P/E near 14.7 times because it uses EPS of $4.55; I reject that denominator because StoneX's latest own presentation reports $4.19 trailing diluted EPS through the latest reported quarter. This is exactly the sort of post-split vendor inconsistency that two splits in a single fiscal year create.

Tangible book is lower because RJO created more than $400 million of identifiable intangibles plus goodwill. Depending on amortization and subsequent purchase-accounting adjustments, the shares trade around the mid-to-high three-times range on estimated tangible book. That premium can be justified only if tangible ROE remains comfortably above the cost of equity; StoneX reported trailing return on tangible equity of 28.7% through June.

A sum-of-the-parts valuation looks appealing but is misleading. Commercial, Institutional and Payments have very different margins, yet shared treasury, regulatory capital, clearing infrastructure, overhead and interest income tie them together. Applying a payments multiple to the Payments segment and a brokerage multiple to Institutional while ignoring the capital they jointly consume would create false precision. I therefore use normalized P/E with P/B and tangible-ROE cross-checks.

The cash-flow passthrough test produces the same conclusion. Statutory operating cash flow is unsuitable because client-money and financing movements dominate it. A conservative owner-earnings floor of roughly $3.75 per share produces a multiple around 17.8 times versus a headline 16.0 times. The gap is modest; the main valuation adjustment must be for rates, volumes and credit risk rather than reported cash flow.

StoneX's company-provided rate sensitivity gives an unusually useful normalization anchor:

The calculation is based on $14.1 billion of interest-sensitive investable balances, net of $2.6 billion of fixed-duration instruments and incremental variable-rate debt expense, with a 27.5% tax rate.

A 200-basis-point rate cut by itself reduces $4.19 of trailing EPS to about $3.43. That stress does not assume client balances leave StoneX, and it does not include possible volume effects. Conversely, it also excludes future organic growth and incremental cross-selling.

My three-scenario valuation therefore uses normalized earnings rather than trailing earnings:

This is valuation-scenario analysis within a research framework, not investment advice. The ranges are my assumptions derived from company disclosures rather than management price targets.

The base case deliberately refuses to capitalize the Q2 record quarter. A normalized $4.00 of earnings at about 16 times produces roughly $64, while retained earnings and book growth justify a modest range around that point. The optimistic case needs something more durable: roughly $5 of EPS with 20%-plus ROE surviving both integration and some normalization. The conservative case assumes the rate sensitivity actually arrives and market activity loses some of its current pricing strength.

Historical-percentile precision is unavailable because long-run P/E and P/B data are unusually vulnerable to StoneX's repeated splits and to the cyclicality of its denominator. I therefore do not quote a fabricated "83rd percentile." The observable conclusion is narrower: current P/B of 2.82 times is above the approximately 2.3-times relationship implied by the stock and book value around a year earlier, while current P/E looks modest because trailing earnings have risen much faster than book.

Peer valuation reinforces rather than resolves the issue. StoneX is cheaper than IBKR and CME, but both deserve structurally higher multiples: IBKR has greater automation and CME owns the toll road rather than driving trucks across it. StoneX does not become undervalued simply because higher-quality peers trade at higher multiples.

The expectation gap for the next results is concentrated in four measures: whether Q4 ROE stays above the company's 15% long-term target; whether client balances remain around the enlarged $15–16 billion level; whether RJO cost synergies reach the promised mid-$40 million exit rate; and whether Commercial/Institutional growth remains strong as extraordinary Q2 conditions fade.

Sell-side estimate history is less useful than usual here. The two fiscal-2026 splits mean consensus data captured before July can use inconsistent denominators. A post-result source reported Q3 EPS of $1.00 against a $0.76 estimate, but I do not build valuation from a multi-provider consensus series that cannot be independently audited for split adjustment.

The margin-of-safety check is harsher than the ordinary valuation.

Current price is well above the conservative fair-value range of $49–54, so there is zero discount to the conservative case.

The most fragile base-case assumption is that the enlarged float remains highly profitable while client balances stay in place. If the earnings contribution embedded in that assumption is cut to 70%, a rough base-case EPS falls toward the low-$3 range and the blended P/E/book valuation falls toward roughly $53–55. That is below today's price.

If earnings are flat for three years and the terminal P/E is unchanged, a non-dividend-paying shareholder earns approximately 0% annualized from multiple and earnings growth. The U.S. 10-year Treasury yield was around 5% at the research cutoff. Measured against that risk-free alternative, there is no margin of safety at this buy price.

StoneX can still compound book value while EPS is flat if it retains capital, but that does not create an adequate prospective equity return unless the market continues paying the same or a higher multiple for the larger book.

Margin-of-safety sufficiency verdict: none.

Risks, catalysts and tracking dashboard

Client credit is the risk most likely to be underestimated by an investor who views StoneX as an asset-light brokerage. A clearing broker can be liable when a customer's losses move faster than margin can be collected. StoneX requires large clients to meet intraday calls during volatile periods, but extreme gaps can still create deficits. The probability of a truly group-threatening event is low, but impact is high because loss severity can jump discontinuously.

The current numbers provide a small-scale example. Bad-debt expense for the first nine months of FY2026 was approximately $12.6 million versus $2.3 million in the prior period, including about $8.0 million associated with a Global Metals client and smaller deficits across other activities. Those amounts are manageable relative to $441 million of nine-month net income, but they demonstrate that client-credit losses are not theoretical. The observable warning indicator is bad debt approaching 1% of operating revenue, which management itself uses as a long-term risk threshold.

Rate normalization has medium-to-high probability and medium-to-high earnings impact. StoneX has already quantified the transmission path: a 200bp parallel decline lowers after-tax earnings by roughly $94 million and EPS by $0.76. The observable indicator is the policy-rate path combined with StoneX's investable client balances, because higher balances can offset lower yield.

Trading normalization has medium probability and medium impact. Q3 listed contracts rose 73%, revenue per contract 23% and securities ADV 33%. A decline in volatility can simultaneously reduce contracts, market-making spreads and demand for hedging. Variable costs offer protection, so earnings should decline less than gross activity, but the market's narrative would change quickly if Commercial and Institutional net operating revenue both fell sequentially for several quarters.

RJO integration and internal controls carry medium probability and medium-to-high impact. Cost savings are on track, but StoneX is integrating its largest acquisition while KPMG's FY2025 ICFR opinion identified a material weakness and acquired entities were initially outside management's control assessment. An operational failure in client migration, margin processing, reconciliation or regulatory reporting could damage both earnings and the franchise. The warning indicators are integration charges that persist beyond FY2027 Q1, cost synergies stalling below $50 million, or failure to remediate the reported control weakness.

Regulatory and litigation risk is lower probability but potentially high impact. The BTIG trade-secret dispute moved through FINRA arbitration and was resolved in 2026 with approximately $1.9 million plus an additional immaterial payment. StoneX also disclosed that the SEC had concluded its related investigation without recommending enforcement, while a Justice Department subpoena remained outstanding at June 30. The known amounts are not financially material; an unexpected expansion of the DOJ matter would be.

Liquidity and capital risk is low probability under ordinary conditions but very high impact. StoneX had roughly $754 million of regulatory capital above reported minimums and $3.47 billion of cash plus undrawn facilities, but FCMs must meet exchange margin calls daily and sometimes intraday before receiving funds from customers. A large simultaneous market shock and client default can consume liquidity more rapidly than an industrial debt ratio suggests.

Valuation is a separate permanent-loss channel. A price near 2.8 times book requires durable high ROE. If normalized ROE falls from roughly 20% toward 12–14%, the stock can be hit twice: earnings fall and the justified P/B multiple contracts. This double compression, rather than ordinary day-to-day volatility, is the principal equity risk.

Positive catalysts over the next year are the completion of U.S. RJO integration, realization of the full $50 million cost run rate, evidence that introducing brokers are retaining assets, growth in cross-sold OTC/fixed-income/physical products, sustained client balances despite rate changes, and accretive expansion in payments including Banco Travelex.

The newly authorized repurchase program can become supportive if valuation falls. In August 2026 the board authorized repurchases of up to 5.0 million shares during FY2027, replacing the expiring FY2026 authorization. At today's price, buying stock is most attractive only if management's own view of normalized book and earnings justifies paying materially above book.

Negative catalysts are a sharp rate-cut cycle, simultaneous normalization of futures and securities activity, a large client deficit, evidence of RJO account/IB attrition, delayed integration savings, remediation problems in internal controls, or an adverse development in the DOJ matter.

The tracking dashboard is:

† StoneX had not announced the FY2026 Q4/full-year release date as of the research cutoff. A third-party calendar estimates November 20–23; the company released FY2025 Q4 results on November 24, 2025, which supports a late-November window but not an exact date.

ROE should be read with regulatory capital rather than alone. A 20% ROE generated while capital cushions grow is much better evidence of franchise quality than a 20% ROE achieved by allowing buffers to shrink. Client balances and client-balance income should also be tracked together: falling rates are manageable if RJO and organic account growth keep enlarging the base.

The most important integration indicator is no longer whether StoneX will find $50 million of expenses. It is whether client balances, introducing brokers and transaction volumes survive the systems migration and begin buying products outside their original RJO relationship. Management has supplied a cost-synergy scoreboard but not a comparable revenue-retention scoreboard. That missing KPI deserves attention.

Cross-synthesis summary, research conclusion, uncertainties and sources

Looking vertically across StoneX's history, the capability it has genuinely proven is the ability to take specialist financial businesses and connect them to a broader regulated distribution and balance-sheet platform. The present business did not emerge from one breakthrough technology. It was assembled over decades: commodity-risk expertise, wholesale execution, securities, OTC derivatives, retail FX, payments, prime services and now RJO clearing. The 25% operating-revenue CAGR from FY2021 through FY2025 and continued acquisition-adjusted growth in FY2026 show that this is more than financial engineering.

Management's contribution has been capital allocation and integration rather than invention. The company has repeatedly found niches where clients need greater breadth than a specialist can provide and more attention than a large bank is willing to give. RJO fits that pattern unusually well. Its introducing-broker network brings distribution; its nearly $6 billion of incremental float brings rate-sensitive economics; and its clients can potentially buy StoneX products that RJO historically lacked.

Past success also benefited from its era. Higher rates transformed client cash from a modest ancillary source into a material profit pool. Volatile commodity and securities markets increased client activity. Current trailing client-balance net revenue of roughly $447 million is 45% above the prior trailing period, and listed derivatives plus securities activity are running far above prior-year levels. These tailwinds are measurable rather than theoretical.

The most important structural improvement is that the rate-sensitive base itself is now larger. StoneX can lose yield and still earn more absolute interest income than it did with half the client balances. That is why a simple "rates down means earnings collapse" bear case is too crude. The correct sensitivity is the company's own: roughly $0.38 of annual EPS for every 100 basis points, based on the current balance mix.

The corresponding mistake on the bullish side is to call all current earnings structural. A 200bp rate decline subtracts $0.76 from trailing EPS before any volume normalization. Current listed-derivative pricing is strong, securities ADV is elevated and Q2 generated a 26.5% ROE that should not be treated as a permanent quarterly state.

Horizontally, StoneX's advantage is not the best technology, lowest cost or strongest consumer brand. Its advantage is breadth under one regulated roof. Marex is the closest operational competitor; IBKR has stronger automation; CME owns structurally superior exchange economics; global banks have more capital. StoneX's niche is the combination of enough capital, enough product breadth and enough specialist service to solve awkward mid-market problems. That niche has grown as banks focus resources on larger customers.

That advantage should survive lower rates. It should also survive gradual automation, because regulatory capital, credit judgment, collateral and complex commercial hedging do not disappear when execution gets cheaper. The weak spot is any activity where execution itself becomes the product. Current Self-Directed/Retail contraction is evidence that StoneX does not automatically win there.

Financial soundness is better than the headline $54 billion balance sheet suggests. Most assets are associated with clients, securities financing and liquid trading activities, and regulated subsidiaries show meaningful capital cushions. Yet the balance sheet cannot be dismissed as pass-through bookkeeping. StoneX must meet margin calls before it necessarily receives client funds; a large client failure can convert a hedged transaction into a real claim on StoneX capital. That is why liquidity and credit culture are part of the moat itself.

The market's likely misjudgment is more subtle than "StoneX is expensive" or "StoneX is cheap." At 16 times trailing earnings, the shares look inexpensive compared with IBKR or CME. At 2.8 times book and closer to 18 times a conservative owner-earnings floor, they do not look cheap for a leveraged intermediary entering a potentially lower-rate environment. The stock is pricing a meaningful amount of RJO's structural improvement while still leaving room for upside if cross-selling makes $5-plus EPS sustainable.

For the next 12 months, RJO integration, policy rates, client balances and market activity dominate. The company is already three-quarters of the way toward the cost-synergy goal, so a mere announcement that $50 million has been reached should not create enormous incremental value. Evidence of account retention and revenue synergies would matter more.

For three years, the central variable is normalized ROE. If StoneX can sustain 17–20% ROE through a less favorable rate and volatility environment while regulatory capital remains comfortably above minimums, the RJO acquisition will have genuinely raised franchise quality. In that case, a valuation in the mid-2-times book range can be defended, and book-value compounding becomes the principal source of long-run return.

If ROE settles closer to 12–14%, the current price becomes much harder to justify. A financial intermediary earning only modestly above its cost of equity should not trade around three times book. The multiple would contract at the same time earnings disappoint.

For five years, the question is whether StoneX evolves from a serial acquirer into a genuinely integrated global capital-markets platform. Global Prime Services is one promising example: more than $16 billion of balances, 700-plus clients and more than $137 million of trailing net operating revenue provide evidence that newer franchises can become material. Banco Travelex provides a similar test in payments.

The acquisition record can become self-defeating if management keeps adding businesses faster than controls, systems and regulatory capital can be standardized. The FY2025 material weakness makes that concern concrete. The next annual ICFR opinion matters more than investors usually treat an auditor-control paragraph.

Bull reasons:

• RJO has roughly doubled the scale of futures client balances, and StoneX's client-balance economics now operate on a materially larger permanent asset base.
• Even after subtracting Q3 RJO and Benchmark net operating revenue, the legacy/acquisition-adjusted proxy grew about 25% year on year, showing that current growth is not purely acquired.
• RJO cost synergies were already running at roughly $37–38 million annualized by Q3, leaving relatively little execution risk around the $50 million target.
• Regulatory capital exceeded principal subsidiary minimums by approximately $754 million, providing a meaningful buffer while the business grows.
• StoneX's mid-market combination of clearing, financing, OTC hedging, securities, payments and physical expertise occupies a gap left by large banks and simple electronic brokers.

Bear reasons:

• StoneX's own sensitivity says a 200bp decline in rates costs approximately $0.76 of annual EPS, enough to turn a 16-times trailing P/E into roughly 19–20 times rate-stressed earnings before any volume normalization.
• Q3 listed-derivative volume rose 73%, rate per contract 23% and securities ADV 33%, so current transactional earnings contain a cyclical component that should not receive a full structural multiple.
• The stock still trades at 2.82 times book value after a 29% drawdown from its high, leaving little protection if sustainable ROE moves toward the low teens.
• FY2025 ended with a material weakness in internal control just as StoneX began integrating the largest acquisition in its history.
• Client-credit risk is real: nine-month FY2026 bad debt rose to $12.6 million, including one roughly $8 million Global Metals exposure, and a larger gap event could consume capital much faster.

The first pre-mortem script is a rate-and-volume normalization. By fiscal 2028, policy rates fall roughly 200bp from the current sensitivity base, directly removing about $0.76 of EPS. Futures and securities activity normalizes enough to remove another $0.30–0.50, while RJO cross-selling proves slower than expected. EPS settles near $3.0–3.3 rather than $5. If the market then assigns 13–14 times normalized earnings, the stock trades around $39–46. That represents a decline of roughly one-third to two-fifths from today's price even without a solvency problem.

The second pre-mortem is a clearing shock layered onto integration complexity. During a sharp commodity move in 2027, a large client or introducing-broker relationship develops a deficit measured in the hundreds of millions rather than the current single-digit-million examples. Regulatory capital remains above minimum but falls sharply, management suspends buybacks and retains all earnings, and investors cut the stock from nearly three times book toward 1.5–1.7 times a damaged book value. A share-price decline approaching 50% becomes plausible even if StoneX survives comfortably as a going concern. The historical mechanism is exactly why FCMs demand intraday margin and why StoneX holds large capital and liquidity buffers.

The research conclusion is that StoneX has become a materially better and larger franchise. RJO appears strategically rational, the cost synergy is mostly de-risked, acquisition-adjusted growth remains strong, and the company has built a defensible niche connecting commercial and institutional customers with markets that require capital, licenses and expertise. Those are durable improvements.

The current price does not provide enough compensation for simultaneously underwriting rate normalization, transaction normalization and RJO integration. At $66.86, StoneX sits near my base estimate of present fair value and well above a price that protects against the conservative case. The stock can compound from here if management preserves high-teens ROE, but the expected return is increasingly dependent on continued execution rather than simple multiple recovery.

I regard StoneX as a good financial franchise at an acceptable holding price, but not yet at a price with a genuine margin of safety.

【Company-profile scores】

• Fundamental quality: high
• Growth: high
• Moat: strong
• Financial soundness: strong
• Management credibility: high
• Valuation attractiveness: medium
• Risk level: medium
• Suitable investor type: cyclical

【Investment rating】

• Rating: Hold
• One-line thesis: RJO has lifted structural scale, but $66.86 already capitalizes much of the benefit while rates and extraordinary transaction activity remain earnings-sensitive.
• Current-price classification: acceptable hold
• Whether to wait for a better price: yes. A new purchase becomes substantially more attractive around $39–42 provided regulatory capital remains strong, RJO client balances are retained and normalized ROE still appears at least 15%. The opportunity cost is that successful cross-selling could keep EPS near $5 and prevent that entry price from appearing.
• Target holding horizon: 3–5 years
• Expected annualized return: conservative approximately -8% to -10% over three years if normalized value settles around the high-$40s/low-$50s; base approximately 6%–8% if EPS compounds toward roughly $5 and a 16-times terminal multiple holds; optimistic approximately 18%–20% if $6-plus earnings become credible and a high-teens multiple persists.
• Max-loss risk: roughly 40–50% in a combined large client-credit loss, ROE collapse and P/B compression toward 1.5–1.7 times.
• Reassessment triggers: TTM ROE below 15%; regulatory-capital cushion below roughly $400 million; client equity and sweeps below $13 billion; RJO cost synergy below $40 million by FY2026 year-end; or bad debt rising above 1% of operating revenue.

【Ideal Buy Price】39–42 USD

Basis: approximately 20% or more below the $49–54 conservative fair-value scenario, equivalent to roughly 1.6–1.8 times current book and about 12–13 times conservative normalized EPS. This is the one buy-range basis used throughout the report.

Acceptable hold price: 58–76 USD. This brackets the $64–70 base fair-value estimate while allowing normal market noise around a cyclical financial intermediary.

Clearly overvalued price: 95–105 USD. The lower bound is more than 10% above the $86 upper end of the optimistic present-value scenario and would require the market to pre-spend a large share of future RJO cross-selling success.

【Valuation Range】

• current: 66.86 (close as of 2026-09-15)
• bear (conservative · ideal buy zone): [39, 42]
• base (fair · acceptable hold zone): [58, 76]
• bull (optimistic · above the clearly-overvalued line): [95, 105]

Research uncertainties are concentrated in five areas. First, the retrieved primary materials do not provide a clean FY2021–FY2022 cash-flow extraction, so the report refuses to splice secondary figures into a five-year cash-conversion ratio. Second, StoneX does not publish a current retention percentage for the acquired RJO clients and introducing brokers. Third, realization of the original at-least-$50-million capital-synergy target is less transparently disclosed than cost savings. Fourth, the true maintenance/growth capex split is not reported and the $50–60 million maintenance figure is a research assumption. Fifth, long-run valuation percentiles are unreliable without manually rebuilding every historical price, EPS and book-value series through multiple stock splits; I therefore use normalized absolute valuation rather than false percentile precision.

Principal sources are StoneX's FY2025 Form 10-K and annual report, which provide the historical financial statements, RJO accounting, business descriptions, debt and ICFR opinion. StoneX's fiscal Q3 2026 10-Q supplies the latest balance sheet, regulatory-capital, RJO contribution, credit-loss and legal data. The August 2026 Q3 earnings materials supply current split-adjusted EPS, segment economics, client balances and company-calculated rate sensitivity. The RJO announcement and completion releases provide original transaction objectives and network statistics. Market price and share-count cross-checks use the September 15 close and the latest filing cover rather than an unadjusted historical vendor series. Macro assumptions use Federal Reserve primary disclosures current through the last completed FOMC decision.

Other tickers mentioned

• MRX.US: closest listed operating analogue in commodities, futures clearing and financial intermediation.
• IBKR.US: automation-led brokerage benchmark and a higher-quality reference for electronic execution economics.
• BGC.US: institutional brokerage comparison for transaction-driven capital-markets revenue.
• CME.US: upstream exchange and clearing benchmark illustrating the premium awarded to infrastructure economics.

This report is based on public information and does not constitute investment advice. Markets carry risk; invest with caution.