Schwab’s Commission Sales Rise in July

Charles Schwab Corp. said Thursday the number of trades on which it earned commissions rose 19% during July--its first monthly increase since April--but customer assets fell 1%.

San Francisco-based Schwab, the biggest Internet brokerage, said customers made an average of 147,700 commission trades daily in July, up from 124,000 in June and down from 207,700 in April, the comparable month of the second quarter. A year ago, the average was 102,600.

Customer assets dropped to $587.3 billion from $591.7 billion the month before. July was a weak month for the market, as the blue-chip Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 3.2%.

Net new assets brought in by new and existing customers during the month totaled $8.9 billion, up from $8.4 billion in June.

“There’s clearly a seasonal pattern to trading,” said Henry McVey, an analyst with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. “Assets rather than trades will separate the winners from the losers,” and Schwab’s net new assets are “a healthy number from any standpoint.”

Still, commission trades in July slumped more than some analysts expected, compared with April.

“They’re down 28% from April, and that’s a little bit worse than I thought,” said Bill Burnham, a Credit Suisse First Boston analyst. “This increases the probability that there will be a sequential quarterly decline in trading volumes industrywide, barring a great September.”