Cboe Global Markets, Inc. (CBOE) September 2026 Conference Transcript

Oh, there we go. Great. All right, everyone. Thanks for bearing with us. If any of you don't know me, I'm Ben Budish. I cover the U.S. Brokers, Asset Managers, and Exchanges here at Barclays. For one of our last firesides of the day, really delighted to have from CBOE, we've got Craig Donahue, CEO, Rob Hocking, Head of Derivatives, Jill Griebenel, CFO, and Prashant Bhatia, EVP, Head of Enterprise Strategy. So, everyone, thanks so much for being here. All right, let's jump into it. So, Craig, you know, you're almost 18 months into the seat as CEO. You know, CBO's strategy has shifted a bit over the past few years, coming out of a period of heavy acquisitions to a more, you know, recent sharper focus on things like index options and data. So for you with some time in the seat now, can you talk a bit about your assessment of CBO? How do you think about the growth strategy? Where do you see the biggest opportunities?

Okay, yeah, thank you. It's great to be here, and thank you for having us. You know, I'm really pleased with how things have gone. You know, I decided to come back to the industry and come to SIBO because I thought that, you know, to some degree it was, you know, a transformational type opportunity, which I really love. And that has proven itself to be the case not only internally within SIBO, which is what I'll talk about, but then also just the external environment and the way that it's evolved very rapidly over the last 12 to 18 months. there's a lot going on. So I'm loving being here. We spent, you know, quite a bit of time early on in my tenure, really sorting through the whole portfolio of businesses at SIBO. SIBO had been, as you mentioned, very acquisitive, had been trying to do a lot of things, you know, and they had a certain strategy, and the strategy was really built around expanding, you know, their equities capabilities globally. And then, you know, the idea was that they would layer on to that, you know, data and, you know, information analytics and then derivative products. But I think a lot of the entry points and a lot of things they tried to do were just too small scale to really contribute to growth and lots of obstacles to the achievement of that strategy. So we basically, you know, got a strategic realignment done. We exited a lot of the cash equities businesses that were quite marginal. We, you know, rationalized a bunch of other things and that really allowed us to focus on the core. And I think, you know, doing that to me was obvious because we have great growth opportunities in the core. We've been achieving tremendous growth, but the organization was very fractured in its attention and its allocation of resources, trying to do a lot of other things versus really paying attention to the core business and making sure that we're doing as well as we can in terms of both growth and profitability. So that went really, really well. You know, we're well through that process. The other thing is that in the five years before I got there, SIBO had also grown dramatically in terms of the size of the organization, both through acquisition and through hiring. We'd added like 900 people to the organization. So in tandem with the strategic realignment, we also went through an organizational rationalization, and that's been very, you know, positive for us as an organization because it really has caused us to be very focused on the core and then identifying new growth opportunities. So we're actually very excited about the shift in focus, you know, back to derivatives. I mean, obviously, we've got a great FX business, we've got a great data business, we've got a growing and very successful European equities business, stable but not growing U.S. equities business, but there's a lot more we can do in derivatives and including outside of equity derivatives per se, and that's within Rob's remit. But for the moment, you know, what we're really focused on are event and prediction markets that are oriented toward financial instruments, economic indicators, commodity prices, and then, you know, much more so in our wheelhouse where we're starting is in securities-based event contracts. And Rob can talk about that, but we're, you know, bringing to market. We've already brought to market a binary yes-no contract based on the S&P 500. and now we'll be bringing to market soon after regulatory approval, you know, KPI contracts. And that's a huge market opportunity for us, we think, in terms of the total addressable market. And then in tandem with that, you know, as we're thinking about product innovation, especially in the derivatives markets, is expanding our clearing capabilities. We have a clearinghouse in Europe, a clearinghouse in the U.S. And that's a great way for us to be able to control our ability to innovate and our ability to bring products to market, and also the ability to provide value to clients in terms of cross-margining benefits and reducing capital and margin requirements in new products that we develop. So I'm very excited about that.

Great. A lot to dig in there. But maybe just one other sort of high-level question, maybe with one specific one in there. Just thinking about the macro environment, you know, give us a bit of your assessment of how customers are behaving, thinking about retail, institutional, how they're using, you know, the SIBO product suite. I'm particularly curious on the retail side, you know, given the lifting of the pattern day trading restrictions a few months ago, it looks like there's some early signs that we're seeing a pickup in activity. So, you know, curious if you could weave that in as well in terms of what you're seeing on the ground.

So I think, you know, SIBO exists kind of on what I would call the higher end of retail. And I like to sort of describe it that way because, you know, I think there's a lot that's happening in retail right now. And then there's sort of the gaming platforms and there's the sports betting and all that kind of stuff. You know, I think where we are is, and I just want to take a second to step back and remind everybody that, you know, We've been, you know, capitalizing on this trend toward retail for six or seven years, wholly unrelated to event and prediction markets and all the things that we see happening today with offshore perpetuals and all that kind of stuff. And that was really, you know, with the advent of zero DTE trading. And so when we look at, and this is another distinction that I just want to, you know, highlight, is we have lots of people taking ownership of their own financial future. We have lots of people who are increasingly sophisticated and actually do understand options, including a lot of the retail broker dealers have done a great job, not only with education, as do we, but in the development of tools that make it much more intuitive and easy for them to learn how to trade options. having shorter duration, one-day expiring contracts, I think also was very additive to that. So we see really strong long-term secular growth trends that we're capitalizing on, the increasing importance of the U.S. equity market and the S&P 500, the shift from mutual funds to defined outcome ETFs, which has been extraordinary, and embedded, and all those are options that come into our market, so a secondary effect there. And then just this overall trend toward increased sophistication. It's still at a very nascent level, we think, in terms of where it can go over time, and Rob can talk a bit about that. But the pattern day trader rule has had a positive effect as well. had a fairly arbitrary limitation on the amount of trading that you could do in options depending on your net account value. That's been lifted, and as Rob can describe, there's been a step function increase in volume that we're seeing coming out of the larger retail broker-dealers that have already implemented that. But overall, I would say incredibly positive, and I think the last thing that I'll just say so I don't keep talking, is that when we look at the use cases, you know, we see people doing fairly sophisticated trading activity in our products. So, and I just want to highlight that because I think people worry about the sustainability of it, especially when they're thinking about, you know, sports betting and gaming and, you know, event and prediction contracts that are oriented toward other things. That may not be sustainable. In our case, when we're looking at what they're doing, A lot of what they're doing is what larger institutional users in our markets are doing.

You got to answer my next question. Sorry, I didn't mean to. It's all good along those lines. There's definitely a perception that retail is more at the lower end. I'm curious if there are any specific KPIs or stats you have, the percentage of trades that are single-leg call, single-leg put, versus more sophisticated strategies. Any way to sort of measure that?

I think the great thing is, overall, I would actually take a step back, it's the balance we're seeing overall across the platform. If you look at zero DTE, you know, it ranges around, call it 60, just low 60s as a percentage of SPX trading. When you look at the breakdown between retail and institutional, once again, it hovers between, call it 55% to 60% retail, the balance institutional. Obviously, that led to, in the Q2 record, you know, SPX volumes around 5 million contracts, 3.1 of that was zero DTE. But what I think it's also important to then show is options expiries in the 30- to 60-day bucket were up, call it, 14%, 15%. If you were to look at options in expiries of 90-plus days, those were up 28%. If you look at electronic access, up 163%. If you look at open outcry access, up over 20%. So you look at short-term, long-term, both up, retail, institutional, both up, electronic, open outcry, both up. It just speaks to the stability of the platform, and it speaks to the diversity of how all the market participants are coming in and using the product. And it's leading to just a massive liquidity pool that then builds on that. Now we have, you know, international demand wanting to come in, people in regions like Korea, Thailand, all wanting access to that liquidity. And I think as that comes in, you all have heard the statement, you know, liquidity begets liquidity. We just can continue to grow. And then we use that as a foundation to now lean into things like we've already talked about, KPI contracts, things that now are kind of offshoots of that liquidity, valuation components of single-name companies that lead to stock price valuation, stock price leads to the sectors, option-based ETFs. Those lead to the indices, and you kind of wrap it all together into a very, you know, long-term sustainable business.

I think following up there, because you mentioned, I think, some of the international interest. And I know on earnings calls for some time, you've called out APAC, and I think more recently, Europe is being mentioned. Maybe if you can give us an update on what you're seeing there, you know, what sort of inning are we in terms of, you know, adoption of the suite, you know, retail engagements? And to what degree is demand overseas coming from retail brokers versus institutions?

I think we've had a heavy focus in the APAC region on the retail side, on the retail broker side. I still think, you know, demand continues to grow for the liquidity pools, like I mentioned. Some of the barriers to entry are just from a regulatory standpoint, and some of those regions, some of the cultures, options are still viewed as a risky tool. So we're kind of working through that. So I think early days, I would say, of penetration and options usage there. When I think more on the institutional side, I think more of, call it, the Middle East region. You look at a lot of the sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East, the Adias, the Atticas, they all have 30, 35 percent exposure to the S&P 500 in their portfolios, but yet are very underpenetrated in the options market. And we see that as a huge kind of growth area on the institutional side. Once again, as we build off of those, we just kind of continue to expand where we see that demand.

Great. You mentioned also a little bit the short data SPX complex, so maybe a question there. I think most recently it's around 63 percent of total SPX trading volume, and it's, I think, up pretty meaningfully over the last several years. So I guess for these shorter data contracts, maybe how would you describe the use cases? And sort of given zero DTE's importance in driving growth of the last, you know, four to five years, you know, how high do you think this can go, and what does this sort of mean for, like, the longer-term growth outgo?

Yeah, great question. You know, once again, I'll come back to the balance. So what I like to see in the zero DTE case is the balance of risk. 95% roughly of the contracts traded are defined risk. So either buying an outright option, call or put, buying a spread, selling a spread, everything where you know your risk going in, which is great for us to see. It means that that sustainability is there because you're never going to have that blow-up moment where somebody just has unexposed risk. So I think you'll continue to see the percentages fluctuate over time based on the environment. Retail tends to be much more active in calm environments, as you would expect. Volatility upticks, you get more market uncertainty. That's when the institutions start to trade a little bit more, and you see that percentage of maybe retail dip, institutions increase. But once again, it's still very balanced. Where you're seeing a lot of the strategies come in, once again, I think yield generation has been a very common one, whether you're overwriting calls on a long-only portfolio or you're using call spread, put spread overlays and writing those on the sell side to capture that option premium. I think those have been very, very common and continue to grow. And then also, to be honest with you, and this is kind of a side shoot to the answer, we've seen options grow from more a professional institutional side that are now using them to embed into ETFs that are offering option-based ETFs to the retail side. So if you're a retail client that don't trust yourself in trading the options directly, but want the performance of options in your portfolio, these ETF products have been great. We've gone from probably about 2019, around $5 billion AUM tied to these option-based ETFs, to about $300 billion currently. And I know BlackRock just came out with a research report saying they anticipate that to be around $650 billion as early as 2030. So you see options usage continue to grow on multiple, I would say, avenues, which is just super encouraging.

Well, maybe we'll dig into one of your other newer areas of potential growth, the prediction markets event contract. So you're live, I think, on Interactive Brokers and Charles Schwab with your kind of binary yes-no S&P contract. So maybe just starting there, talk a bit about the strategy, what type of traders are these contracts meant to appeal to, and what does the initial uptake look like?

Yeah, I think who we're trying to appeal to are non-option traders today. We launched binary contracts back in 2008, and they weren't successful. We ended up delisting them mainly because we were offering a binary product to an existing options trader. Once you're trading a pure option, the binary yes-no, zero-to-one element isn't really what you're looking for. You're looking for a more sophisticated trading tool. So now with the advent of the prediction market and all of the, I would say, attention on the event contract space and that binary contract, we relaunched contracts on the S&P 500. They're a yes-no format, so it's, you know, where will the S&P close today? Will it be above 7,500 yes or no, that style? Like you said, we launched them. They're live now on IBKR and Schwab. Schwab just recently went live about a week and a half ago. The difference in those platforms now, though, is like that was kind of a gateway product to us getting out KPI contracts, which will be structured very similarly in that yes-no format. With the IBKRs and the Schwab platform currently, they're not being offered in the graphical user interface version of the yes-no kind of gamification platform view that you see something like on Kalshi or Polymarket. That is something they're still developing and will roll out later this year. So early uptake of this contract, I would say, is there, but it's slow because you're still kind of, in my opinion, working with that same user base that knows options today. What we're really excited about is the rollout of the KPI contract, mainly because now you're going to use this yes-no vehicle to give a valuation component that doesn't exist today. We do broad-based very well with SPX. I've talked about the defined outcome in the ETF space that's kind of that sector level or slightly smaller than broad-based. We do single stocks well with our multi-list contracts. Now we're going to take that a step lower, and we're going to start to get into the individual metrics that drive the valuation of those stocks themselves, which is super exciting, because I think it'll entice retail to start. And I think you'll see the rollout work very similar to zero DTE, where kind of that 80, 85% of retail to start. But then I think you'll see institutions come in when the data sets become available when they can go to their risk managers and get approval to introduce some of these new products to their portfolios. But you're going to be able to trade these individual metrics that impact individual stock performance. And I'll close with, I've been using this example a lot, but I think it's a great example. Home Depot last quarter, they beat on every KPI metric, and yet on future guidance, their stock price was down immediately after. So if you were trying to have a trade-on that was to represent the beat on all these individual performance metrics and you own the stock thinking that was going to show up in that performance, you would have been dead wrong and it actually would have worked against you. Now having these components, you can have backward-looking metrics where I can look at Tesla car deliveries, I can look at NVIDIA data revenue sales, and I can actually have components in the valuation chain able to trade that. And And then I can also look at future guidance and maybe use the stock price or something along those lines to make those trades, which I think is a super interesting kind of forward-looking way to evolve this industry.

Maybe just on the regulatory side, so you have an application with the SEC. Maybe talk a bit about that process, what the conversations have been like. I think there was a bit of confusion because the SEC extended the potential deadline to maybe help us understand what all that means. Yeah, I can take that.

I mean, I think, first of all, you know, we think the SEC has been great to deal with all this stuff. They're very interested in these products, and we've had, I think, a really good back and forth with them. So right now, while they've extended the time frame, you know, we have two things that are predicates for us to go to market. One is the approval of the contracts themselves, and the second is the approval of our application to be a temporarily registered securities clearing agency. That one had a slightly longer time frame anyway, so the extension of the comment period doesn't really affect us in that way because we need them both. But our expectation based on our interactions with the commission and the commission staff is that we would hope to see regulatory approval well within that extended timeline. But it's been very, very positive. The commission's been moving very quickly on both in terms of our interactions, raising questions. We've been able to answer them. And so we're very positive on that.

Great. Maybe just one last question on the single stock KPIs. So any call on the early reads with buy-side firms and market makers? You mentioned, I think, that you expect a lot of, like, retail uptake. But, you know, from our conversations, there seems to be a lot of interest, especially if, like, the liquidity is there and, you know, you can get good execution. So, you know, what's the appetite from those types of customers for products structured this way? And maybe as you think about, like, early liquidity, how do you ensure market maker participation and get liquidity off the ground?

Yeah, it's a great question. Market makers right now are very interested from, I would say, all the usual suspects that you know that represent liquidity in SPX are all signing up. They're testing. Susquehanna has probably been the most vocal as of late. They've committed to being there day one to offer liquidity in these products. And, you know, I think it's shaping up well for the reason that I talked about, which is these are a different valuation component, and they're directly tied to portfolios and books of work that they have today, As opposed to things like sports, mentioned markets, pop culture, those things don't really naturally fit into the portfolio that they have. Maybe they're building other portfolios to trade those things, but this is directly involved. If you have stock positions today, having access to these types of components, you know, will be valuable to managing that risk. And I think also even on the regulatory front, and to kind of back up my comments, you know, you've seen Citadel come out, and they just wrote a comment letter recently about how these contracts belong on the SEC side that belong with the same customer protections that we're seeing individual stocks trade and how this whole market has formed. MFA just came out recently supporting the Citadel paper on how, you know, these needs to trade on the SEC side. They need to trade with the same customer protections. And so as you see this market form, the portfolios that exist today, trading these single names, trading these exposures, this is just a natural extension of that.

Got it. Or maybe switching gears a little bit, thinking about the competitive environment. So I think last year we were talking about a competitor applying to a list, you know, more expiries of a bunch of MAG7 and some other single stocks. This year it's shifted to new products, prediction markets, which we talked about, PERPs, which we've all been, you know, debating at nauseam. And maybe just your overall thoughts on product-level competition. How do you see the defensibility of SIBO's core product suite? Just leave it there, high level.

Yeah, I think, well, one, SIBO has an amazing platform to compete with. We have the CFE. We can launch futures products. We can launch security option products. We have multi-list. We have our prop universe. So really that's where the strength of the platform comes from, and that's where I always enjoy competition. I think it pushes us to introduce new products. I think it pushes us to get better and think of things in different ways. And so I would argue as competition increases, it's only going to fuel us to design new products and be able to compete in these different sandboxes. Where we're seeing the threats, like you said, perps, whether it's some of the event contracts, I think ultimately it's not the competition piece that worries me. It's the level playing ground that worries me. And so when I look at some of these other platforms that are using, you know, the innovation badge to say, you know, we need to move products into different regulatory regimes, that's because we already have these sandboxes to play in. It's like, come on in, let's play in these sandboxes. Let's design KPIs that are securities based or let's design perpetual futures that are futures based. But let's make sure we're doing it where those rules are well-established and where we can compete as we've competed for the last 50-plus years.

I think, Rob, you should comment on the perps versus options issue. I think that's helpful.

I think the history of perps, and I don't want to go into too long of an explanation, but the history of perps were a crypto-based innovation, and it was very useful. You didn't have the ability to short any sort of crypto future. You had a rolling cost. You didn't have that Delta One constant maturity underlying. Perps kind of filled that void. And for crypto, it was very necessary because you needed a vehicle that you could short pricing to keep pricing in line. That's a very useful and needed vehicle, and you couldn't do that. The only way you could sell a cryptocurrency in the early days was if you owned it, which caused pricing anomalies. Now fast forward, and perps are now this vehicle that people are looking at like this new invention. One, it's not new. We tried to launch a PERP about 18 months ago, and the CFTC actually shut us down in a different regulatory regime. We then came out with continuous digital futures that had like a long-term expiry date to kind of satisfy that need. But I keep coming back to what are PERPs doing today? They're offering leverage. You're actually hearing people trade PERPs in short-dated windows where they get in and out in the same day. Well, if you get in and out on the same day, you don't need a perpetual future. A regular future trades the same exact way. So it really comes down to isolating what people want. They want leverage. If you're trading offshore 10, 50, 100x leverage products, one, we have to determine onshore if we want to actually offer that much leverage. But if we do, let's make sure that we understand the leverage. And if you're trading leverage 100x to the upside, you're getting 100x to the downside too, whereas options can offer very similar leverage to the upside, but you get capped risk downside with the way convexity works. Your gains accelerate, your losses decelerate until you get to the options purchase price of where you traded. Those things, I think, it's great to have the debate because I think it's really important and it's drawing visibility into the differences in these products. But when one is looked at as a substitute for the other, I think that's where the whole argument really breaks down.

Great. Thanks for all that. Maybe switching gears a little bit, maybe spend a moment on data advantage. The growth there has been quite healthy. You're trending well ahead of your medium-term guide. You know, what are the key drivers of the recent acceleration? You know, how's the back half of the year shaking up? And what does that mean, you know, as we think about 27?

We continue to experience strong growth in data vantage. So let's just go through some of the components. About two-thirds of data vantage is connectivity and access to our core exchanges. So you're seeing the growth in that area as you're seeing the growth. Rob talked about on the SPX side, you're seeing the growth in our multi-list business. You're seeing share growth there. So there's more demand for connectivity and access along with that volume growth. There's also more demand for connectivity and access as more players come into the market and want access to the products that we offer. So you can see that in more trading desks at some of the core trading firms come in as well. And we're seeing connectivity and access and demand for data come from overseas as well when you look at access to our products and markets. So that's the connectivity piece of it. We have nice, stable growth there. When you look at the market data component to it, the real driver of growth there, and I'll split market data into a couple of pieces, the driver of growth for our market data, our proprietary exchange-driven market data, is coming not only from the U.S., but we're driving about half of our new sales there overseas as well. So that's overseas clients wanting access through their institutional broker-dealers or otherwise onto our markets. So that's driving a fair bit of growth on the data vantage side, and it's more international-oriented there as well, where we've seen the growth accelerate. We think there's a lot of opportunity there. We're underpenetrated from our perspective overseas around data sales. So we'll continue to drive on that growth there. When you look at the other component of market data, we also create data packets and data sales that we drive off of our proprietary data, but we put those through our analytics engines to create data sets that are valuable to institutional clients, and we sell those data sets as well. So some of the acceleration that you've seen in growth over the first couple of quarters was driven by launching new data sets that were so interesting from a client perspective, we get the sales going forward and the subscriptions going forward, but they like the data set so much they want all the historical data that went with it. that's what drove some of the one-time sales and the acceleration of growth off of trend that you saw in the first couple of quarters so that's a driver of growth and then the final piece i'll highlight the the index part of the business where we generate and create indices that utilizing our data and analytics that we then use on our offering up trading products to clients the mag 10 would be an example of that where it's based off an index that we've created It's a tradable derivatives product on our exchanges. It's a proprietary product. And now you're seeing some underlying interest where we're launching an ETF. Clients are launching ETFs off of the MAC-10. So that's a little bit of what's driven the growth in DataVantage.

Great. Thank you. All right, maybe a couple of questions on M&A and capital allocation. So at the beginning, you sort of talked about the deconsolidation strategy that you've been undergoing. When you were the CEO of CME, you oversaw a period of pretty significant consolidation. So maybe talk a bit about how that experience informs how you think about M&A opportunities at SIBO. And, you know, on top of this, Jill, I love to pepper you with this one all the time. You know, SIBO's cash balance has been growing pretty meaningfully over the years. So, you know, how are you thinking about best use of this capital?

Yeah, just on the first part, I would say that, you know, that was a unique time and a unique place. And I think the synergies that we had at CME with the Board of Trade and with NYMEX and COMEX were kind of extraordinary in the sense that, you know, we were, you know, the exact same types of businesses, same regulatory frameworks. We had, at that point in time, I think, superior capabilities, both in terms of global electronic trading, you know, capabilities as well as clearing capabilities. And so, you know, we knew we had massive cost synergies and cost takeout opportunities. And then we also had really interesting revenue and growth opportunities because of the intersection of short-term interest rates at CME, long-term treasury notes and bonds at the Board of Trade, and I could go on and on. So it was, you know, they were kind of no-brainers in a way. They were hard to do in many other respects, but in terms of the logic of it, the strategic rationale and the financial rationale. I think that part was pretty easy. When I look at the landscape today, you know, I think it's a much more mature environment. I think there are fewer consolidation opportunities. And so, you know, that raises the bar for, you know, doing things that would actually make sense both strategically and in terms of the, you know, financial attributes for shareholders in terms of being compelling. So it's a pretty high bar. I think the way I approach it is I think we've got great growth opportunities in our core business. We've got great growth opportunities around our core and some of the things that we're talking about. And so I don't feel like there's a need to necessarily focus too much on inorganic growth. So we'll be opportunistic about it. We obviously, you know, generate a tremendous amount of free cash flow. But I want to make sure that, you know, we continue to focus on the organic side of things. We will always evaluate opportunities to do things inorganically. And if we come up with something that makes sense, we'll do it. I like to say that I think the bar is a little bit higher in the sense that I think the investor community is, you know, has gone through this cycle with CBO where we've done a lot of small-scale acquisitions, many of which we've now sort of backed out of and exited. So that informs how I think about it.

And just to Craig's point, we do generate a healthy amount of free cash flow, which is a wonderful thing. I actually quite like the balance sheet flexibility we have. I think it's just consistent with prior messaging in that we look to deploy capital in multiple ways. First is via quarterly dividend. So we do have a history of increasing that quarterly dividend. We just did so this past August, took it up 19%. We also are opportunistic as it relates to share repurchases. And then you heard a lot today about, especially from Rob, these growth areas that we're leaning into. It's great to have that flexibility for organic investments that we're making.

Got it. And maybe just one further question. Your margins are, I think, already among the highest of most publicly traded companies. So, you know, how do you think about margin expansion, margin maintenance? What are the sort of targets that you think about internally versus sort of your key, like, kind of OPEX investment priorities?

Yeah, good question. So I would say if you look at our 2Q financial results, our adjusted operating EBITDA margin was about 72%. So that was up, I think, six percentage points from second quarter of 2025. What I'll say, though, is we are not targeting a specific adjusted operating EBITDA margin. What you're seeing on, I think, that as a result of is very disciplined expense management coupled with really solid revenue trends. So the way I would frame it is expect periods where we are leaning in from an investment perspective because we truly want to generate long-term growth. So planting those seeds today, and then you'll see other periods where we're harvesting those investments.

Great. With a little bit of time we have left, maybe one last very high-level topic to touch on. but sort of some of the technological and other market structure changes in the cash equities business. So the industry has got a large focus on crypto and tokenization, so I'm curious if you have a view on, you know, how those fit into CBO's business. Maybe talk about the degree to which you're participating in any pilot programs. And then alongside that, you know, there's talk about a move to always-on markets. I think you had previously filed this year to operate near 24-5 equities trading. And so, you know, what does that sort of mean for your equities volumes, your index options suite?

I know there's a lot in there, but I'll just hit a couple of highlights because we won't have time. But, you know, I think of, first of all, we're all moving toward, you know, always on, and we're all iterating toward expanding trading hours, both in cash equities and in equity options. um tokenization is something that we will definitely participate in um i don't think that tokenization of cash equities or tokenization of equity options for example i don't i don't think that those are inherently interesting in and unto themselves i think if it expands the universe of participants um because people want to transact that way um they want to use alternative forms of collateral or they want to work around the limitations of traditional market infrastructure, whether that's at the exchange or the clearinghouse level. I think there's some peripheral additional business that we can probably achieve through that, but I don't think a tokenized version of an equity security or an option is actually more interesting than the deeply liquid, ubiquitous products that we already offer.

All right. I think we're out of time, so we'll need to leave it there. but everyone thank you so much for being here thank you thank you thank you appreciate it