Virtu Financial, Inc. (VIRT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great. Well, welcome, everyone, to our next presentation or our next session of the day, I should say. Next, I would like to welcome Doug Cifu, CEO of Virtu Financial. Over the last year, Virtu has remained busy, integrating acquisition of ITG, which so far has resulted in new -- several new revenue initiatives and new opportunities, meaningful cost cuts and obviously ability to free up capital. At the same time, the operating backdrop for electronic market makers has been pretty robust, to say the least in 2020, with record volumes and significant retail participation. So as CEO, one of the largest global market makers and agency execution firms, Doug's perspective on these trends is always very much appreciated. And so welcome, looking forward to chatting with you.

Not always appreciated by everybody, Alex, but I appreciate the intro, and it's lovely to see you as always.

Well, good to see you as well.

All right. So why don't we start with 2020? Look, obviously an unbelievable year from a volumes perspective. And what I wanted to zone in on is helping us sort of dissect some of the macro benefits that Virtu naturally had this year, which nobody's complaining about those. But clearly, underneath the surface, there are also a bunch of organic initiatives that seem to have worked. That's a little bit harder to dissect. So why don't we start there? And can you help us better understand sort of some of these organic benefits to the business in 2020?

Sure, sure. We look -- and thanks very much for having me. And I agree with you. It's always been a challenge to try to separate out like what's kind of legacy Virtu, what do we get from Knight and kind of how we -- and ITG and how are we amalgamating all of those? And what are we focused on to grow the business? So starting a couple of quarters ago, we said, "Let's do our best to sort of break out things that didn't really exist in 2018 as a starting point," kind of when we bought Knight, right, that we either found on the shelf at Knight but not being fully utilized or was something that we kind of wanted to get into in the DNA of Knight or ITG kind of helped us out, like new style initiatives. And the 3 or 4 that we've highlighted are block ETF market making globally, being an options market maker globally, right? Looking at some of the KCG quant style market-making strategies that were very successful in U.S. equities but we didn't think had been fully utilized outside of the United States in global equities and in other asset classes. And then within our Execution Services business, starting a capital markets business. So those are kind of the 4 buckets. And through the third quarter, we generated like somewhere around $135 million, $137 million of adjusted net trading income from those 4 buckets. The maturation of each of those obviously is different based on when we initiated them and the difficulty of initiating them. So the most mature and the largest of that overall bucket is our block ETF business. Knight had a -- had, had been in that business. It had, had some success, it had its travails. We had a decision, do we shut it down or do we de-platform it, kind of virtualize it? And we obviously chose the latter. I'm very happy we did. And one of the great tailwinds and one of the systemic changes, I think, behind that business is really what you've seen in fixed income, where fixed income ETFs as a sub-asset class, if you will, has grown exponentially, both investment-grade and high yield. And so we're now on the radar. We're a player in that in the United States, right, the meaningful part of that $137 million. And that's a difficult business to be in. It's relationship-driven, right? You got to know the RIAs are sending their flow to a desk, to an aggregator and that's going to come to the market maker. So you have to have those relationships. We had those, right? And there's obviously risk involved and connectivity to MarketAxess and to Tradeweb and all the things that we're good at, that we've built over the last 2 years. We're now taking that to Europe as well, right? We've migrated some of our key personnel to Europe and we're doing the same thing in Asia. So look at that as a continuing growing business. Maybe we're in the second and third inning. Options by contrast, we really didn't have a lot under the covers, right? Getco and Knight had done a little bit with some great people that were here, but we didn't have the architecture of an options business, right? We grew up -- the etymology of Virtu was always as a cash equities firm and a futures firm, and that's very different from an options firm. And so we had to build, with great Virtu technologists, the infrastructure to be competitive as an options market maker. We've done that in the United States. I would say we're still in the dog act, putting our cleats on, right, to continue the sports analogy. And we're profitable. We've got a great team. We've added to the team. We've invested in that technology. And there's a long runway to run, both here in the United States and in Asia, an index options; and in Europe an index options; and then here obviously the 800-pound gorilla of retail options and how that marketplace, which obviously we're in the delta hedge for all of these businesses, right? So we're a big cash equities firm. We have all Chicago products, right? So managing the delta is within our scope. And so it's just a lot of blocking and tackling, a lot of hard work, right? The competitive firms have been built in the same way that we were built over the last 10, 20 years, right? And so we're not going to become meaningful #2 or #3 or #4 without a lot of hard work, but we'll get there. We'll get there. I'm very confident we will. And the KCG style-quant strategy, we talk about those a lot. Again, basic blocking and tackling, getting the data, doing the reconciliations, going to Europe, going to Asia. The key of each of these, though, is these are businesses that we understood, that we have the infrastructure for, right? We had to build a little bit, but the great thing about Virtu was the scale of what we had built, right? So combining these firms, we had that scale. So now we can approach these new marketplaces and these new products with a great deal of efficiency and we think add value.

Right. One of the new initiatives that I really want to zone in on, and I'm going to jump around a little bit, but it's really the options business. And look, maybe because the volumes in the listed options space have totally exploded this year. And some of that is scale, obviously but maybe perhaps there's a little bit more of an institutional angle to that as well, just given so much activities happening on with some of the growth stocks. Can you help us better frame the addressable market there because it is a big space, right?

Yes.

In terms of the revenue pool that you're going after as a market maker and options. What do you think is achievable, kind of like what are you shooting for, for 3 years out?

Yes. Look, I mean, unfortunately, none of the competitors, if you will, are public companies today, right? So there's no -- like traders you can look at as a great competitor and they're public in Europe. So you kind of look at what they do in block ETFs as a little bit of a proxy for the total addressable market. What I would say is, you can obviously look at overall option volumes, and there are little hints out there, little breadcrumbs in the market that you can kind of look at and say, "Well, if you look at the payment for order flow, aggregate amounts for cash equities as compared to options, there's more paid for options, certainly in 2020 than risk for cash equities." That would lead one to conclude that the bid offer in aggregate, if you will, of retail is likely higher than cash equities. I don't know that factually but that's probably a likely supposition, given the data points that are out there in the marketplace. And you can look at index volumes in Tokyo and in Sydney and then look at the costly volumes and whatnot, and say to yourself, "Okay, if I assume that the basis point bid offer spread in all of these marketplaces is X, that's the total addressable marketplace for these markets." So it's billions of dollars, right? It obviously was significantly higher in 2020 than it was in 2019. And there will be ebbs and flows to that. Obviously, the bid offer and volatility expands dramatically when there's a volatility year like there is like 2020. So never -- may never see it like this again. But again, getting back to the theme of Virtu. We're the low-cost provider. We're the scale provider, right? So whether it's a 2019 year or 2020 year, we can have a really nice scaled global options business that is highly profitable. So clearly, it's -- my goal for this is to be a meaningful 9-figure business to the firm, right? So be a meaningful contributor to our overall P&L.

Right. That's helpful. Maybe shifting gears a little bit and talk about retail broadly. Obviously an incredibly busy year, an incredibly active year for retail investors. I feel like I read a headline about how active retail is like every other day. And look, who knows whether or not that's going to continue into next year? I mean, with people coming back to work, maybe some of that is going to slow down. But I think most would argue that a lot of that change is structural, right? Going to zero on commissions and just people getting used to trading more, that's all good things for your retail business. Help me understand a little bit better the competitive dynamics and how that has shifted at all? Give us the fact that we've seen the surge in retail bonds. On both players, you're obviously one of them. Pricing, market share, how do you see that evolving, given retail's become so much bigger?

Yes. Look, I mean it is a very, very competitive business and it has been for the last 20 years, right? Knight was the -- and this is why we were candidly very attracted to Knight. Knight effectively created this business. This business was created by really smart people that preceded me that essentially went to the retail brokers and said, "Why do you want to send your orders to an exchange? They're more expensive and you need to expose them." If we internalize them and we become the market center and you trust us, we'll give you good service. We'll give you guaranteed execution. And most importantly, which gets lost in the dynamic of all of these headlines, we will give you meaningful price improvement from the best bid or best offer in the marketplace. And that's how we are judged every day, every hour, every week, every month and every quarter. Now people will talk about payment for order flow. I'm happy to engage it. We have 200-odd retail broker wealth management relationships around the world. It's not just the United States, it's Canada, it's Europe, it's Asia. They're sending order flow to us that they want to guarantee fill on. That's their most important bet. About a dozen of them take a rebate. The rest of them were judged on price improvement alone. Even the ones that take a rate rebate, they're sending orders to either us and to the great firms we compete with, Citadel, Susquehanna, Two Sigma, UBS, based on price improvement. Everybody has got a different metric. Some do it daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever it is, we obviously know all of that. And the ebbs and flows of the market share will be based on how much price improvement, execution quality are we prepared to give, that benefit -- that's better than the best national best bid or best offer. We disclosed on our third quarter that we paid nearly $950 million, right, back to our partners that then provide it to their retail clients, right? That's huge. If we're doing that, Citadel is doing probably twice as much, right? So think about the billions of dollars that have flowed back to all of these -- to the retail ecosystem, it's pretty incredible. So I'm very proud of that ecosystem and that business and the value that it creates. It's competitive. It's obviously more profitable some days and it's not when DoorDash and things like -- companies like that go public, we're just going to be busier, right? So our market share is all public. We've kind of hovered around that kind of 30% of marketable orders, which is kind of like the sweet spot, right? And -- but it's a very competitive business, its brokers are very demanding in terms of the execution quality and then they should be. That's their job, right? So they want us to provide enough that we can be profitable because we have to invest a lot because we are giving that guarantee of execution. We are the market center, right? That's the important difference. That's something that a third-party exchange just can't provide.

Yes, yes. That makes sense. And what about the rest of the market making business, right? And I know those are kind of difficult to dissect, right? Like what's really retail versus what's kind of the legacy Virtu institutional? But there's probably a way to segregate that. And curious how you've seen that business evolve for yourself this year and more importantly again, from a competitor perspective, how are things looking and what's [indiscernible]?

Yes, look, I mean, it's been our best year by any measure for all of -- for those businesses, right? Everybody loves to talk about our 605 retail business. I love it. It's great. I'm blessed to try to lead it every day. And -- but what we created at legacy Virtu is special, right? Some of your competitors -- your competitors, some of the other analysts talk about melting ice cube, and I want to take the ice cube and I don't want to tell you what I want to do with it because they're just [indiscernible] right? This is the best year by far that legacy Virtu would have had on a stand-alone basis, right? And that is in FX, it's in commodities. It's in U.S. and global equities that have nothing to do with the client, right? We have continued to grow and evolve. Give a lot of credit to the Knight business, right? We learned a lot. It was an amazing company that we bought. The smarts that they have, the quantitative smarts that they had, we didn't have any of that in legacy Virtu. We were a blocking and tackling market-making company but really good around the bid offer. When you put those 2 things together, right, it really helps the legacy business. And I don't want to forget the legacy Getco business because those guys were rock stars as well, right? So putting all those together, if you ignore anything that's with a customer order, right, I mean, it will be near $1 billion this year, right, of adjusted net trading income, right, which is just a lot of money, right? And frankly, I'm very proud of what we've done. Is it competitive? Yes. Have we invested tens of millions of dollars in technology? That'd when we continue to do that? Yes. Do we need to hire smart men and women from great universities to continue to grow that business? Yes. But it is here for the long haul, and it feeds everything else we're doing. We couldn't be in the options business if we weren't a world-class market maker in individual U.S. equities, right? Nothing to do with retail, right? There's guys right now sitting in Virtu that are providing the best midpoint pricing that any options market maker could ever want. That's the strength of the combined holistic firm. You got me fired up today, Alex. Let's go. What else we got? Come on.

It's all DoorDash obviously.

Yes. As you know, I ordered. Don't tell anybody. It's on my desk. I got to support.

There you go. Look, so I want to shift gears a little bit to talk about the Execution Services business. You talked about some organic revenue initiatives there. The one actually you didn't mention yet but I wanted to zone in on is expanding into other asset classes. And that's something that Virtu, legacy Virtu started doing with FX. How is that going? Is that still a priority for the firm? How are you thinking about [indiscernible]?

Absolutely. I mean we've sent out a bunch of press releases because I think it's important when you run a customer business. Let me just take a step back. I think what people don't give us credit for, and I don't want to sound defensive, right, is 2019 was like the perfect storm, right? You had [indiscernible] volumes, you had volatility. We bought this wonderful company that we wanted to fix up called ITG in the middle of all that, right? And then all of a sudden, we had like thousands of customers that were scratching their heads saying, "Hey what's this Virtu I heard about? HFT? And they're now buying my institutional-only agency-only firm." And somebody maybe dialed us back a little bit, some guys like shut us off, we went through reviews. That's a tough process, right? I did countless meeting where I was explaining the firm. We had to be really transparent. We had to do all these -- that was tough. That was tough. We're in the midst of that. We're replatforming and effectively getting rid of all the ITG Algo product and replacing with Virtu. In the midst of that, we're replatforming Triton, and we're making our analytics business, as you point out, multi-asset class. So we now have clients that are executing FX through Triton. We now have a fixed income and FX analytics products that, I think, are world-class that people are buying, right? So a lot of effort went into that. You will see that continued -- I love hockey so I'll just use a hockey stick analogy, right? You'll continue to see that growth, right, in 2020. We reported, I think, 3 nice quarters already, and that will continue in 2021 because we have the scale. We have the world-class clients. We have the best algo product suite out that we have, the multitude of other products that all kind of sell off of each other, right? And so we're very -- and we've built the efficiency now, right, because we've kind of consolidated that firm into this large global firm. And so again, the theme is we've got -- we're the low-cost provider of the widget continually to the buy side and their seeing the sell side, and they now see the value, right? Holding up the Virtu Algo, right, compare it to others and say, "You know what, these guys actually -- the execution quality here is pretty good." There's empirical evidence about that. You can go read some of the trade [ recs ] that kind of report the ranking, then we're always on the first page. It's pretty exciting to see.

Got you. Well, look, not to get too narrow-minded and too micro, but given the fact that we're talking about trading, any observations around Q4 so far? Obviously the macro proxies in November got a lot better. So any update you guys can give us around how the fourth quarter is going?

Yes. No, I know you guys love these monthly updates. I don't love them as much because people over -- I like the good ones, I don't love the bad ones though. Look, I mean, November was a little bit of a mixed bag. You're right, like the volumes were better. The volatility was a little more muted. It was maybe down -- realized volatility is maybe down like 15%, so like the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. But I've always said, we've been much more of a volume-driven firm, right, certainly on the nonretail side for sure. So I like volumes and that's great. They've been elevated. And so the November environment was better than the October environment. It's now December. What day is it, ninth, right? We got a couple more days. The excitement around these IPOs -- I'm pointing at the television, is good for business and is good for volume. So I think if that trajectory continues, we'll have a nice fourth quarter that people will be happy about.

That's all right.

Not bad. I did it right, yes. That's fair.

That works. Look, let's talk a little bit about expenses. I appreciate you guys being always very upfront and transparent around the expense policy, and I know investors obviously appreciate you for that as well. So on the last call, you were talking about 2021 operating expense guidance, $605 million to kind of $645 million target. Now we know always Virtu has been very conscious of managing expenses, which is all there. But help us frame the organic expense growth in the business from here, right? Because there's clearly the revenue initiative and the growth opportunities you just talked about. You have to fund in somehow. So what's [indiscernible] base that you talked about for '21, what's sort of the reasonable investment [ base ] from there?

Yes. Look, I mean talk about investing, so I feel like I start to use those words and like I get it. But I think we have a little bit of a different philosophy. We don't go off in like an R&D lab for 2 years and say, "Okay, let's start -- figure out how we trade options." It's just not my style. Like I'm a cash in, cash out kind of guy, a simple kind of businessman from that perspective. And so like if you take like our options business, we have like a small little one that we inherited from the Knight transaction with some really talented people. And sure, we reallocated internal people unless we would have been paying for. We've gone out and acquired and attracted a couple of really, really talented folks. But it's not like Alex, we're not going to go buy a 30-person desk from some place, put them in a corner and say, "Go work for 2 years and give me an options business." It's just not how we roll here. So we use internal Virtu people that know our systems, right, and understand all that and can leverage everything that we have that we're already expensing in the P&L. And maybe we add some outside people. The perfect example is our Virtu Capital Markets business, okay, which I didn't mention before. Three great guys that came to me from a competitor and said, "You know what, we want to come to Virtu." I said this, and I'm not trying to be funny. They sent me an email about the ATM business, and I swear to you, I said, "Why do I want to be in the cash machine business? I mean, I like cash but I don't need an ATM." I swear to you, I didn't know what the hell it was. And then they explained it to me and they say, "Hey, we want to be there because you've got Algos. You've got the market maker. You've got retail flow. You've got market share." We're the #1 market maker in all these names. And I was like, "Wow, that's genius. Thank you, guys." So these great guys came here. Three wonderful guys, assimilated really well. That's the investment we made. They're really talented, they're going to get paid. I love paying our people really well, but I didn't have to go build an entire whatever to make it work. It's just not -- I'm not going to go hire 20 guys then build a -- convert-to-capital markets business and whatnot, that's not how we roll.

Yes. Yes, that makes sense. Look, let's shift gears a little bit. I want to spend some time on capital and you guys made tremendous improvement on the balance sheet this year. The leverage ratio is now down to [ 1.2 ] or something like that. And obviously remains very comfortable. Can you talk about sustaining the dividend and the quarters we have, a lot of excess returns like you've had earlier this year, you'll redeploy some of that into buyback. So let's take it one step at a time. One, how do you think about the dividend level? Is that the sustainability that you would like to see? How do you think about the tradeoff between special dividends versus the buybacks versus sort of a steady flow of dividend?

Yes. I mean, first of all, I've always said this, I love the dividend. I would sell every piece of furniture in this office right now before I would cut the dividend. So I'm never going to say never but it's sacrosanct, right? That's how we start the firm. We believe cash in, we want to reward our investors. I'm a big shareholder. I bought more stock this year. I love the yield. In a 0-yield environment, getting paid $0.96 by Virtu is a good thing. I love it because it's here for the foreseeable -- forever as far as I'm concerned. In terms of excess capital, we've always said when we buy companies, we lever, we delever. We did it twice. We did it with Knight, we did what we said. We've done it with ITG. Are we going to that a little bit more? Yes, there's -- the credit agreement has an excess cash flow sweep and we'll probably let that operate, maybe [indiscernible] a little bit. I think Joe Molluso, our President, did a great job. If you're looking at the presentation, Joe was like, "Hey, we're in the equity. Let's tell him what it's going to be." He was right. So we announced the $100 million buyback. If we hadn't paid back $300 million, $288 million of debt this year, we would add a $400 million buyback this year. I think that's the right way to approach it. I love rewarding my investors. That's who I work for, number one; number two, I think it's more tax efficient to do that. So I'm not a special dividend guy but you will continue to see these buybacks because I think it's a [indiscernible]. The next question you're going to ask me is what about M&A? Well, the bar is high now, right because we have this ability to buy back what I think is stock that's undervalued. And we have built this large company, right, that's pretty scaled. We don't really necessarily need other products or services. And I think right now, sellers have inflated value expectations. Everybody takes the first half of 2020, multiplies it by 2 and says my EBITDA was X. Pay me 10x that. And I say, "Okay, let's go through this." My EBITDA in the first half was X multiplied by 2, we should be valued higher than DoorDash. We're not. So unfortunately, I can't pay you like that. That's just how it works. So until people have more realistic expectations around price, I'm not a buyer. I'm not a buyer. We're a very disciplined buyer of companies, right? We've made 2 very successful accretive strategic acquisitions. I'm a steward of the money of this firm, and I'm going to use it the best way possible. And the default is always reward your investors. Unless I can create more value for them, I'm rewarding my investors.

Got it. And so naturally, I was going to ask you about M&A. You sort of answered it already, that the bar is just much higher. Is that partially just a reflection that given the collection of businesses you have, there's enough also organic growth initiatives, like -- we didn't talk about options 2 years ago. Is that the reason?

Yes. Yes, I think there's something to that. I think there's -- yes, yes, absolutely that's something to that. I have a great deal of confidence in our ability to like grow organically. I've always had a great deal of confidence about everything. But when you [indiscernible] and they work, right? You got great people here that say, "Hey, we can do this." It's funny. When you make an acquisition, it was like, "Oh, you know, well, we're going to get 62% synergies or whatever we got from 59% synergies," and you wave a magic wand, that's hard. It's hard to do that, right? And going through that, it's difficult work and it also distracts you like in 2019, right? We're integrating ITG, a distraction from other things that you could do. So in terms of those priorities, do I want my Chief Technology Officer, who's a super genius like work [indiscernible] I want him worrying about the next widget that he can help build? Probably the latter, right? So I'm not saying never, right? We're experienced at that, we're good at it. But I think sellers need to be more realistic and it has to be value creating for my firm.

Yes. That makes sense. Super clear. Staying on the topic of capital for a second. I want to talk about trading capital. And look, earlier this year, when the markets were super volatile obviously Virtu had arranged for basically a line of credit with [ Vinnie ] as a sort of contingency. Well, look, this is not -- that was not the norm. Clearly, those were not normal markets. But I guess, how are you thinking about sort of the basic operational capital arm is that you need to run the day-to-day and the experience like that? Does that tell you, you naturally just seem to have a much bigger buffer than you currently do?

It's not the buffer. I mean, the Vinnie capital was really opportunity, right? We -- in March, we -- I don't know if we separately reported this, you guys could probably figure it out, we made $780-ish million of adjusted net trading income. And a lot more than half of it, right, happened in March. If we had a revolver from like our friends at Goldman and a bunch of other people for a couple $300 million, I don't know. We could have made another $10 million a day in March, something like that. It was really more opportunity, Alex, than anything else. I don't like being in a position where I'm saying, "Okay, yes, we got to like limit our positions in a particular area, right, because I'm worried about margin or capital in a particular area." When I see opportunity, I want to go for it. Now juxtapose that against, I think it's silly to have just hundreds of millions of dollars sitting on the balance sheet, right? So we paid back dividend, we paid debt, right? And we've -- between dividends and paying back debt, we've paid $500 million, $600 million, $700 million, $800 million this year. It's obviously -- the capital has been there and will continue to be there. So really, our challenge is to find enough dry powder, extraneous to the world, if you look for those opportunities because right now, our base capital base is more than adequate for everything we need to do and everything we want to organically go into. It's those opportunities, right? In March, you saw almost like an unprecedented, excuse me, dislocation in the fixed income market, the timing of going to Mr. Viola, my pal, was not a surprise, right, because the Fed then jumped in and intervened, and the market kind of collapsed and we never needed to unfortunately draw that money from the Viola family. God bless them for doing it. They did it as quickly as any humans could. We had to go through a process. And unfortunately, we missed a significant trading opportunity. If I could do my life over again, I would have gone to Vin on March 1 and say, "Hey, Vinnie, I think there's going to be this great opportunity." It was literally a 10-minute phone call to him. He said, "How much do you need? Let's go for it." Because he knows his business. He built it with me, right? There aren't a lot of lenders like that.

Right, right. That sense. Why don't we shift gears a little bit? I want to ask you a couple of things around just the market structure. And there's been, look, plenty of things in development. Obviously MEMX is now up and running. You guys are obviously a core investor and you kind of helped on that business. What sort of the changes have you seen in the marketplace already? They're obviously very aggressive on the pricing front. We've seen CBOE adjust their pricing, kind of in the last couple of months. Are you starting to see some of these benefits play out? How do you think it's [indiscernible] in the next year?

Look, I mean, one of the reasons we wanted to get involved in MEMX was frankly for competition, right, to keep the -- there was some of the regulatory element of it. We should probably talk as the SEC put out their rules today. We could talk about that briefly. I'll come back to that. But really it was just for competition. So when CBOE's getting aggressive on pricing, that's great. Ed Tilly is a friend of mine, he runs a great business and he wants our flow. That's great. MEMX helps generate that, so MEMX is now a competitor in that. And they're going to be on a level playing field with all these other guys, and we wish them well and I'm going to be really supportive of them, right? But it's just really by creating that transparency and that competition, that's really what we want, right? You don't want -- when monopolies run things, it's not a good thing. That was my big beef with the SIP. And today, the SEC, knocked on wood, agreed and sai -- God bless them, said, "We'll allow competitive SIPs," right? That's a great [indiscernible] completely overreacted to it. These exchanges are unbelievable businesses, like selling off 3% on that news to me was a complete overreaction. I don't give advice, but like the competitive SIPs aren't going to put NASDAQ out of business anytime soon, right? I don't think Adena Friedman is really worried about that. But it's just, to me, was like, "Hey, it's an opportunity now for Virtu to get into that business. I'm going to try to have a SIP product today, right? If I can compete with them and provide a product to a bunch of folks on the buy side and even on the sell side, right, at an affordable price and we can make some money off of it, that's America, right? That's what I love.

Right, right. Well, speaking of regulatory backdrop obviously the SEC had a very robust agenda, with respect to U.S. cash equity market structure. A couple of years ago, they've been implementing, putting various proposals together. We're having a change in administration, Biden's leading. So as you think about some of these initiatives potentially sticking around and kind of morphing into maybe something else or kind of proceeding as they are into the new administration, how do you think that's going to play out? Do you think it's going to remain as intensive focus as it's been over the last couple of years?

Still hard to say. I mean, Chairman Clayton and Brett Redfern, in my view, have done a fantastic job. And obviously they have given everything that we desired and some of the comment letters they've ignored, right, so you don't -- it's been a [ half flow ] from some questions. But they've been very data-driven. They've been -- they didn't respond to the hysteria right? They're not doing regulation by innuendo and tweets, right, and that kind of stuff. That's all we ask. That's all we ask. We got an amazing market structure here. The fact that a retail investor can go [indiscernible] from one of these little things, right? And for 0 money, go buy 1,000 shares of Tesla that better than any of the institutional investors that are walking this can, remarkable, right? Why would you change that, right? Because some schmuck rotor book that he didn't know what he was talking about, that schmuck being Michael Lewis, right? Now I got myself in trouble, right? It makes no sense. It makes no sense. What the hell are we talking about? So we've got this great market. Just think and understand the data before you react. That's all we ask. That's all we ask. And those guys did that. So the successor -- whoever is going to -- whoever is going to replace Chairman Clayton, I'm sure will be a very thoughtful person. We will try to share our experiences and data with them. And hopefully, we won't tinker too much with something that really is not broken. It's just not. I mean, this whole -- if 2020 didn't prove that the U.S. capital markets are the greatest in the world, and we should be proud of them and we shouldn't muck around too much with them, I don't know what TV you've been watching.

Great. Well, that's a perfect note to leave it on,

Thank you.

And we're almost out of time so we're going to wrap it up there. Thank you very much, Doug. Always...

Always a pleasure.

Always love talking to you. Thank you for supporting the conference over the years, and looking forward to seeing you, hopefully in person soon.

Great. Great to see you. Thank you, everybody.

Thank you.