MarketAxess Holdings Inc. (MKTX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
March 1, 2021
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystAll right. Good morning. We will go ahead and get started. For those of you who do not know me, I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy. I'm a capital markets analyst here at Raymond James. Thank you for joining us for our virtual conferences here. Up next I have MarketAxess. And on their behalf, I have CEO, Rick McVey. We're just going to do a fireside chat here. Feel free to submit your questions via the online functionality, and where appropriate, I'll work to incorporate them into our conversation. And with that, I just want to say good morning to Rick.
Richard McVey
executiveGood morning, Patrick. Thanks for having us and excited to join Raymond James for the conference again this year. But I'm sure most people would agree, we'd all prefer to be in Orlando.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystYes, yes. Hopefully, next year, fingers crossed.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystSo I'm going to start our discussion with a conversation about the competitive landscape. Obviously, Tradeweb continues to post increases in its reported U.S. corporate bond market share, particularly in high grade. Trumid seems to have found some traction with the recently issued bonds, and they have completed multiple recent financing rounds. Broadridge is launching LTX. So as you sit here today, how confident are you that MarketAxess has a durable competitive advantage relative to other venues, particularly in your core client base of institutional buy-side traders?
Richard McVey
executiveSure. Sure. I'll start fast right out of the gates, Patrick. But no, thanks for the question, and yes, we feel really good about the results from 2020, both on a relative and an absolute basis with the growth that we saw in volumes and revenue and earnings. And let me just take a step back, first of all, and say, this is a very large global fixed-income market opportunity. So you've been covering us for a long time and questions about competition come up every year. Some of the names change along the way, but there are always questions about competition because it's expected that, given the size of the opportunity, companies are going to continue to invest in global fixed income electronic trading. So we welcome that. We've been dealing with it for 21 years. Lots of competition in this space. And the reality is that every year, we have found new ways to grow. And the facts that the investors care about are really revenue and earnings, and we announced in our full year earnings call recently that both 5- and 10-year compound growth rates in revenue are 18%, and 5- and 10-year compound growth rates in earnings are 25%. We're highly confident when it comes down to those facts that investors care about. We are the leader in growth in the industry and we have been for a long time. So we have been fending off various forms of competition. You are right, there are pockets of activity going on away from us right now. One is portfolio trading. It's growing and still relatively small as a percentage of TRACE, somewhere around 3%. But it's an area we are investing in. But let's be clear, it's not wide-open, Open Trading marketplace-style trading. It's generally one-to-one, where one client is going to one dealer. And it's a processing efficiency tool. We were on with one of the large banks the other day, and they were encouraging us to keep investing because it's not fully electronic today. There are spreadsheets being used back and forth, and they'd like to see portfolio trading become more electronic. So we are investing there, and it's a pocket that we are optimistic we can compete in and close. And the newly issued trading. That's been a niche for a Trumid, you're right. Relatively early stages. And it sure looks like the [ dealer-attributed ] trading is driving most of that growth. Again, not Open Trading, it's client-to-dealer or new issue trading. So it's very different than what we do. So when -- I think when you try to look at this, you have to look at, okay, can we get to the facts on revenue and earnings? Because that's really what we need to know. The volume reports are very difficult to decipher because the practices are so different across the industry. And then you have to look under the hood and say, where are they generating their revenue. And in my opinion, there's only one global, all-to-all, open marketplace for electronic fixed income trading, and that's ours at MarketAxess through Open Trading.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot it. I had a question that came in here as a follow-up to that. Question is, what gives you confidence of sustained market share gains, especially given the competitive environment.
Richard McVey
executiveAgain, it's just the track record of success. If you look at the consistency of our share gains over the years, it's been very clear. And it's because we invest all the time, right? We're constantly growing the network, growing protocols, getting more clients involved, moving internationally. So the track record is there. The things that are going on competitively don't impact our market share through Open Trading in our all-to-all marketplace at all. So we're pretty confident that we're moving in the right direction and our long-term track record speaks for itself. And we think we're making the investments to continue to grow market share.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot it. So you touched on portfolio trading. From the client perspective, what are the pros and the cons of portfolio trading as compared to single-bond trading? And how does that impact how interested MarketAxess is in developing a portfolio trading solution?
Richard McVey
executiveYes. So again, portfolio trading, the community of investors and dealers that trade portfolios today is pretty small, but there are large credit market participants. So it's a small universe of large clients and dealers, and it's a new way to transfer risk. And I believe it's all part of the transformation of the credit trading model that's moved away from heavy dealer balance sheet trading to new ways of transferring risk through the system, and it's growing along with ETFs. What I love about it, Patrick, is that I think it's another tool in the shed that's actually helping overall credit market trading velocity. When you look last year at all these new tools, you can make a case that we have successfully transformed the market because the dealers had record FIC revenue last year at a time where they're not using balance sheet. So portfolio trading is another tool where investors are finding situationally that they can move baskets of bonds through 1 or 2 dealers at a time typically that allow them to transfer risk that they would not be able to otherwise. And as I mentioned, it's probably around 3% of TRACE now. We expect it to grow, and it's an investment that we're making, and we think we will compete in the portfolio trading space. I will say we see the secondary benefit of portfolio trading already because these large baskets of bonds lead to a lot of tail risk that needs to be managed, and that comes right to MarketAxess. So part of our growth, oddly enough, last year was because of portfolio trading and the fact that individual bonds had to be traded afterwards to manage that tail risk.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot it. Got it. And then as we're thinking about single-bond trading, your Open Trading all-to-all solution continues to gain traction, and you've kind of repeatedly mentioned it as one of the big competitive advantages of your platform. How challenging is it for a competitor to replicate the liquidity that you have with Open Trading?
Richard McVey
executiveWell, it's -- we think it's a significant challenge, which is why we've been able to not only maintain but grow our lead in Credit Trading. It was a great year for growth at MarketAxess that we don't see elsewhere when you get to the real facts during the course of the last 12 months or so. And it's a series of things. One, you need the order content first. And we are highly confident that we're way out in front in institutional-quality order count and volume that comes through our platform every day with around $17 billion or $18 billion of Credit Trading opportunity coming into Open Trading every day. So you need the content. And of course, we've been at this for 21 years to get 1,800 active institutional firms on our platform delivering that content. But then we've been, as you know, building out the liquidity side with alternative market makers, with getting investors more comfortable, being the price provider when they have a matching opportunity in the system and, of course, connecting even more dealers around the world to that order flow, which ultimately results in huge transaction cost savings for our clients. And that too was a wild record last year, where our estimated transaction cost savings in 2020 delivered back to our clients from Open Trading price improvement was $1.1 billion. So that was greater than company revenues, and the savings are calculated after transaction fees. So we feel really good about what we're delivering back to our clients. You also have to have all the counterparty agreements set up to compete in the space, and then you have to invest in the settlement infrastructure. That's something we've been doing now for 6 or 7 years very actively.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystYes. You certainly seem to have a pretty big lead in that space. What's MarketAxess' strategy in the recently issued bond space? So I assume that Live Markets is part of that. Can you speak to Live Markets, how that's going and just your overall strategy in recently issued?
Richard McVey
executiveYes. Especially important last year because we had such a big new issue year that newly issued bonds made up a bigger part of the market. Live Markets is moving ahead. I think it's an example of how MarketAxess plays the long game because it's a big behavioral change for both the market makers and clients to participate in a truly live order book environment. But we are seeing growth in terms of the market makers that are working with us now to integrate and be automated to populate the screens. We obviously made the early announcement that Goldman Sachs embraced it very early on. You get at least 200, 2-way markets available on the screens each day. Trades are coming in, more clients are starting to pay attention. So I think in the long term, an order book has a place in global credit around newly issued bonds, highly liquid bonds. We're in very early stages right now. So we have not really changed our percentage of newly issued bond trading yet and the patterns are still the same with the way that, that tends to go back to the underwriters in those very early days of trading.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot it. Beyond the notion that competition could eat into MarketAxess' long-term market share opportunity, I think there's also the concern that ultimately, it's going to introduce pricing pressure into this space. Where do you think pricing on MarketAxess heads over time, both in terms of the variable transaction fees as well as your fixed dealer fees?
Richard McVey
executiveYes. I think it's going to be a range, but there, again, I encourage investors to look at the track record, right? I think we've got 10 years of supporting and defending our fee structure without any meaningful change. In our biggest year of volume last year, average fees per million actually went up. So it's -- I think we've got a great track record. And the way that we do that is focusing intently on delivering more value back to our clients. And I think fee capture is directly connected to value delivered. And that $1.1 billion in estimated transaction cost savings defends our fee structure. And so you're going to see a range, and we talked about it when we launched Live Markets. Newly issued bonds with very tight bid offer will come at lower fee capture. It's additive revenue we would like to have it, but it will come in lower fee capture. Portfolio trading over time, if it's purely a one-to-one or one-to-two trading efficiency tool, which it is today, the fees on that over time will become quite low. Do we want that activity on our platform? Of course, we do. But I think the fee captured is really tied to value delivered. And in Open Trading, in credit, the amount of transaction cost savings that we're delivering back to our clients is doing nothing but growing, which allows us to defend our fee practices that we have today.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot you. And maybe a follow-up to that point. So your billing nature, how you guys do your billing to the clients? Is it different in Open Trading than in RFQ. In RFQ, the fee is embedded within the quote that they're getting back from the dealer. In Open Trading, it's a little bit different. Do you think kind of more transparency into your pricing for the buy side is going to lead to more pricing sensitivity in Open Trading over time?
Richard McVey
executiveWell, first of all, our pricing is 100% transparent. It's disclosed to clients on our website. We've got our MTF schedules posted. It shows up in TRACE on every trade. So it couldn't be more transparent. So just to be clear, investors know what the pricing is. They also -- let's be also clear, institutional investors know a good price when they see one. They have more data at their disposal than ever before to determine whether a price on our system is a good price or not, and they're doing more trading on our platform as a result. So it really isn't different with Open Trading. The only thing that's different about Open Trading is that, that markup is embedded to our B-D, not to a traditional disclosed dealer counterparty. So it works the same way that there's a difference in price between the buy and the sell, and that's the amount of the transaction fee but 100% transparent. And I tell you what, with the savings that are coming through Open Trading, clients would love to do even more of that because that's clearly when they're seeing a price improvement because of the network effect that we are delivering to them.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot it. Appreciate that. And I'll be more careful with my adjectives. So you kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, but in addition to market share gains, another growth driver for MarketAxess has been and likely will continue to be growth in industry-wide trading volumes. So you're stacking market share gains on top of growing market volumes. Those volumes have grown for much of the past decade despite a reduction in transaction velocity, but in 2020, we actually saw velocity positively inflect. Do you think that we're in the early days of sustainable growth in that transaction velocity component?
Richard McVey
executiveYes. And thanks for following that story, Patrick. I think it's not written about enough in the analyst community. And like other areas, you're paying more attention to it and into the details more than some of your peers. And I think it's a really important story because this is why we've been reporting so extensively on the growth in trading automation that we're seeing with both investors and dealers because they're investing in technology so that they can take advantage of more trading opportunities that are coming through the growing electronic markets. And then you have new tools like portfolio trading, you're seeing the D2D business embrace Open Trading and other electronic networks. And Open Trading is also bringing an influx of new and significant market participants into global fixed income trading. So I think there's -- the recipe is here for continued growth in trading velocity. And if you look at the Fed statistics on primary dealer balance sheet, the balance sheets are as low as ever. So this is the transformation of global fixed income that's taking place with more automation, more electronic trading, more portfolio trading, more ETF trading. And it's all coming together to give people more trading opportunities and to be able to transact in bonds more easily and readily than they have in the past. I think it is the beginning stages, and we will see continued growth in trading velocity.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot you. I want to touch on emerging markets. It's your third-largest product representing, I think, around 12% of your revenue in 2020. How would you compare the outlook for EM bonds as compared to U.S. corporate bonds?
Richard McVey
executiveYes. The nice thing about the space that we're in is there's no end of growth in debt outstanding anywhere you look, whether it's fiscal stimulus driving deficits up that are leading to government bond issuance or corporations that are -- continue to raise more debt for a host of reasons. There's -- the markets are growing, and I don't see any end in sight there. EM, it's a combination of sovereign debt and corporate debt. And our long-term success is -- we've been investing very actively in EM local markets. So we still have a slight majority of our trading coming through hard currency markets in dollars, euros and yen primarily. But what we're excited about long term is really conquering more of the local markets. And we have 26 of those live on our marketplace. And if we really start to have a larger impact in those markets, which we're optimistic we can, then that global EM opportunity can compete for revenue and earnings that we see currently mostly in the U.S. high-grade and high-yield businesses. We're also -- we're really starting to get excited about Asia. The last year or so, it's the first time that we've really seen the market starting to embrace electronic trading in the region and, of course, some of the EM local markets in Asia are the fastest-growing and largest opportunities in that space. So we're excited about what we see there.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystTo follow-up on what you just were commenting about, what's the opportunity for MarketAxess with Chinese bonds? It's a different market. How you access that market has, I think, certain rules to it. Where do you guys stand on that front?
Richard McVey
executiveWell, needless to say, we're working very hard with CFETS to gain approval for China Bond Connect. It's going to be an important marketplace for all global investors, the third-largest government bond market in the world. So it sits somewhere in between a large EM market and an -- actually a developed government bond market, and some of the index providers, as you know, are treating it as such. So we see it as a perfect fit for our business and the investment that we've made in our EM network, in EM trading, in general. And we're working very hard to gain those approvals. And I think you will see that it's in their best interest to have more networks like ours involved in the mix, and we're optimistic that we will get there, and that will be another addition to what we're doing currently in our Asia business.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot it. Another credit product that you guys are generally pretty excited about is municipal bonds. I think it's kind of Chris Concannon's big thing these days.
Richard McVey
executiveYes.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystWhere is this product in terms of electronic penetration? And why are you guys so excited about the opportunity?
Richard McVey
executiveWell, we're excited because of the value we know we can deliver back to our clients. It's, by far, the most fragmented bond market in the world with all kinds of small municipal issues that -- it's interesting that it was one of the first areas of focus for retail electronic trading even back when we started in 2000. So you see the retail platforms have added value in munis. It's very early days in the institutional market. So that's what we're excited about is the network that we have in the institutional space is now seeing more value in what we're able to deliver in munis. And look, it's a hard market to even find the other side of the trade, let alone get competitive pricing and feel good about where you're able to transact. That is a recipe for Open Trading. And that's what we're -- the reason we're excited is over the last 18 months, we can see as those volumes grow, the cost savings that we're delivering back to our clients are also growing. That tells us we're on the right track. I think the market will be more electronic. And I think it's essential that, that market has all-to-all Open Trading to really deliver secondary liquidity that works for investors.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystI think another component of the debt market that is historically very illiquid and very much traded over the phone, if it's traded at all, is leveraged loans. I think that's an initiative you guys have been working on for a number of years as well. Can you give us an update on where that progress stands?
Richard McVey
executiveYes. It's slow and steady wins the race in some cases. And we're progressing in leveraged loans, not a big part of our revenue and earnings story from last year. But when you're here and you're grinding it out every day and every week and executing the way that we always do, you see some green shoots to tell you that we're on the right track. And we do have clients that really care about leveraged loan trading, another area where it represents a behavioral change. But we think we're on the right track. It fits very nicely alongside our high-yield business, which had an enormous growth year last year, as you know. So we think it will be an important part of what we're doing, but another product that I would say is in the long-term option portfolio. It's not a huge driver today, but I love the fact that we're creating this portfolio of long-term growth options, which I see as my job is how do I stay -- keep the company focused on long-term sustainable growth. And products like munis and leveraged loans and rates are all part of that portfolio for long-term growth.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot it. And you did just mention high yield. I probably should have asked earlier. What do you think were the factors that led to the dramatic increase in your market share in high yield in 2020? You had a good year in high grade, but you had a phenomenal year in high yield. Was that a function of growing ETF usage? Was it a function of the certain market dynamics? What were you seeing there in 2020?
Richard McVey
executiveWell, all of the above. We obviously had a very volatile year for high yield with the big spread blowout in the spring and then the massive rally in the third and fourth quarter. So you've had a very good year for credit spread volatility in high yield, which you know, Patrick, is a good thing for our business model. But beyond that, I would say it's a virtuous cycle of our Open Trading network just continually getting larger in high yield, where we have more alternative market makers in the mix, we have growing ETF participation with growing assets in high-yield ETFs. And it's benefiting from the new market-making and trading model that's emerging in institutional credit. So all of that -- the combination of the market environment plus the network benefits of Open Trading, I think, really led to one of the fastest years of market share growth that we've ever seen in any product.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystSo -- and then beyond credit, you guys are a little bit more than a year into your ownership of LiquidityEdge, rebranded now as MarketAxess Rates, a dealer-oriented U.S. Treasury's trading platform. How would you assess the success of that acquisition at this point?
Richard McVey
executiveWell, in the D2D treasury space, it wasn't a great year last year. We had very low rates and low vol. It wasn't a great market environment for that particular business. What people haven't seen yet is how much we've invested in our rates platform to move into the client space. And that is just happening now. So we have more clients connecting to what is an aggregated streaming marketplace, something different than RFQ. For U.S. treasuries with lots of installed market makers at the other end of our platform, we've been able to close the gap on things like both treasury hedging and net hedging off of our corporate bond business. That's starting to really take off and make a difference with dealers and investors. So I think watch this space over the next year or 2 because we think we have a very interesting entry into the rates space when government bond debt is exploding around the world, and we're doing things differently. We're not another me-too RFQ platform. It's a different protocol. It's a different network. And we feel good about where it's going. And there, again, it's a very large space, and there's room for a new competitor.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot it. And so the decision to buy LiquidityEdge was your last big use of capital. As you guys are thinking about capital allocation decisions, what is your general philosophy? You do have a lot of cash on your balance sheet. You're generating a lot of free cash flow. Your stock is presumably an attractive currency if you wanted to use that. So how are you thinking about your overall philosophy here?
Richard McVey
executiveYes. More of the same, basically. I think the investors that have owned our stock for a long time have benefited from our focus on organic growth and the consistent track record of execution there, which also makes us a different company than many in the fintech space as we build things and we deliver them to clients and we grow organically. So I think everyone should expect that we will be very selective on acquisitions, and we'll be opportunistic if we see capabilities that are additive. Rates is clearly an example of that. Or when we can acquire additional client order flow or in the case of reg reporting, add lots of new regulatory reporting to our European franchise, which also creates even more valuable data plan for European fixed income. So we will be selective. We have the capital, clearly, to do acquisitions with excess capital on the balance sheet, no debt. But I think it will be more of the same where the primary focus is organic growth, and we will be selective.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot it. The answer I probably would have expected to hear. So turning to margins, MarketAxess generated more than 500 basis points of operating margin expansion in 2020 on the back of over 30% revenue growth. In 2021, it looks like consensus appears to be currently modeling slight margin contraction. How do you think you're balancing investor appetite for consistent margin expansion over time versus making sure that the company is in a position to capture the long-term revenue opportunity that you see?
Richard McVey
executiveYes. Well, I will take issue with the way that you presented the question, Patrick, because I think you're talking about analyst expectations on margin, not investor expectations. Investors want us to invest to win. Full stop. This is a huge 5- to 10-year opportunity for us in front of us at least. So what we hear from investors is that they love the fact that we're investing more than anyone else in the global credit trading opportunity in the space. And they don't get too bothered by 2- or 3-point short-term swings in operating margin. And I think they ask us hard questions about whether we're investing enough. I think a lot of the analysts are very short-term oriented and are looking at, geez, what's the expense growth rate this year, what's your margin going to be, is it going to be up or down 1%? Quite honestly, who cares, is are we investing to win big over the long term. So I think a lot more about what's the right investment rate, are we investing to stay out front to capture some of these large opportunities for our investors long term? And quite frankly, the short-term swings in operating margin are largely to do with market conditions and whether expenses -- or whether revenues went up or down above or below average during a given year. So we're in investment mode, and it's worked really well for our shareholders for many years. And the game plan A is to continue that organic investment and make sure we're doing everything that we can to win long term.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystOkay. So to maybe reframe the question from the standpoint of your shareholders, are you investing enough? What is the limiting factor in how aggressive you can be with your investment spending?
Richard McVey
executiveWell, that is a great question. That is the right one. And our management teams spend -- that -- when we're thinking about our budget in the fourth quarter, that's the question that we're asking ourselves, not, oh, my god, are we going to have an expense number that's too high for the analysts? But we talk actively about that in terms of what markets are really right now for electronification. So we think a lot about the product areas in the regions around the world that are showing all those signs of higher adoption rates, and then we drill into those areas, and we say, are we investing enough to win? And so that's the process that we go through with our management team. And when you look at it, we have been investing more. Certainly, the absolute amount of investment has been growing very actively over the last 3 or 4 years. And we feel good about where we are, where we've got a nice balance, where we're investing a lot, but we're still growing earnings and then maintaining really attractive margins.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystAnd with those investments, is it sales capability? Is it technology development? Kind of what are some of the big areas?
Richard McVey
executiveAt the margin, the investment now is mostly technology because we have most of the large global investors and dealers already on MarketAxess, fully integrated. There are counterparties of our broker-dealer that participate in Open Trading. It's not to say we can't expand more, especially in areas like EM local markets that I talked about earlier. But the bigger investment is going into technology because our clients are demanding more automation. Clearly, new protocols are working. We've got Live Markets and Mid-X both out there that we're investing in. And we're tackling a lot of new product areas like munis and rates. So it's more on the technology side so that we can really satisfy or exceed the expectations of our dealer-investor clients in terms of automating more of what they do.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot it. Turning to the market data part of your business, you've historically, I think, focused on using data to kind of instigate trading activity. And so you monetize your data through transaction fees. But we've seen with other companies that fixed income data can be quite valuable in its own right. And given your U.S. credit market share and your European reporting business, presumably, you've got best-in-class raw material to work with. So how do you think about monetizing market data going forward?
Richard McVey
executiveYes. Another one of those that I would put in our attractive portfolio of long-term growth options. And I think we've done the right thing to deliver the data back to our clients to make it easier and more valuable for them to trade on our platform. But as you see the ETF space grow or indexing, in general, growing, portfolio trading, there are ways to insert our data into those growing pools in a way that will create better long-term revenue growth from our data products. And what we've done with CP+, I think, is phenomenal in terms of taking all these aggregated transaction prices that we now have access to and created a blended mid-market real-time price for hundreds of thousands of credit securities around the world. Axess All, which is really the closest thing to the TRACE tape in Europe off the back of our reg reporting business. These are really valuable data products. And I do think that there's ways for us to participate more actively around indexation, ETFs, bond valuations. And I think it will be an even more important source of our revenue in the years ahead.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot it. Time left for a couple of questions. So if anybody listening has anything else, definitely feel free to send it in. In the meantime, let me ask you a current events question. Obviously, I think the big kind of macro story the last couple of weeks has been rising interest rates, and the 10-year yield has moved up a lot. As we've been in the early stages of past rate increase cycles, what's the impact on MarketAxess' business typically?
Richard McVey
executiveWell, I think the consistency in our track record would say that we've been able to really execute across a whole variety of different market environments. We're happy to see some volatility in the treasury market. I was laughing because I'm embarrassed to say, but I was down on the CME floor beginning in 1984 and people are calling a 40 basis point move in the 10-year a big move. Well, there were some days where the 10-year moved 40 basis points in a day back then. So I still laugh about going from 1% to 1.4% in 10-year yields being considered a large move. But at least there is some volatility there. And look, there is a lot of government bond debt around the world coming to market. And the big question is can the market digest that at these yield levels. And there were some questions about that in the U.S. market over the last week or 2. So we think it's healthy to see volatility. It was more on the rate side than it was in the last couple of weeks on credit spreads, but volatility in any form is a good thing for us.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot it. And then maybe one more question here. Obviously, a new administration in Washington, D.C., new Head of the SEC, presumably with Gary Gensler. What is kind of -- what are you currently looking at right now in terms of the regulatory environment, headwinds, tailwinds? Or do you kind of see it as a continuing, almost nonevent for MarketAxess?
Richard McVey
executiveWell -- and we had a very good track record of working with Chair Gensler at the CFTC and our expectation that he will be confirmed at the SEC as well. So we have a track record there through the CFTC's regulations and the work that was done post Dodd Frank. So it won't be a new relationship for MarketAxess. There's a lot to focus on, right, between the events in the retail e-trading markets, the massive growth of SPACs. There's quite a few topics of interest that I'm sure the SEC will be focused on. We certainly hope that Chair Gensler wanted to continue to work with FIMSAC. There were about 20 or 22 of us from the industry that were able to work very closely with the SEC over the last 3 years or so to really provide our thoughts on areas that should require regulatory focus within fixed income in the U.S. markets. And I think it was a very productive exercise with lots of high-quality recommendations, and I applaud Chair Clayton for setting that up. And certainly, we are recommending that the SEC continue with that work. And a shout out for Horace Carter, your own fixed income head at Raymond James. He's been one of the active contributors to FIMSAC. And I certainly enjoyed working with him there. But we'd love for them to see the SEC really embrace the industry as the presumptive Chair Gensler arrives. And I think that would be a great way to start off a great working relationship with his term and the fixed income industry.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystGot it. On that note, I think we can wrap it up here. I apologize I've gotten increasingly backlit as this call has gone on. And I think you're talking to a shadow at this point. But Rick, certainly, we appreciate you joining us and next year, let's do it down in Orlando.
Richard McVey
executiveAll right. Thanks again, Patrick. I enjoyed it. We'll talk to you soon.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
analystAll right. Thanks.
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