All right. Hi, everybody. Good afternoon. Welcome to our next session. I'm Ben Budish, Barclays analyst covering the brokers, asset managers, and exchanges sector. With us for this session is John McKenzie, CMO, CEO, pardon me, of the TMX Group. John, thanks so much for being with us.
Thank you. I'm happy to be the chief marketing officer as well today.
Apologies there.
No problem.
Maybe just starting off with, you know, the current IPO environment. Now, IPOs have generally been weaker over the last 12 months as equity markets have cooled. On your earnings call the other week, you commented that you're seeing signs that markets are poised for a rebound. Can you speak to that in a little bit more detail? You know, what does the pipeline look like across, you know, TSX Venture, and you know, what are the sort of macro conditions that we need to see to change? What are the kind of the unlocks that we should be looking for?
Yeah
... that'll lead to a, you know, resurgence of activity?
There's two ways to think about pipeline. The long-term pipeline, those are the relationships that we're curating over multiple years. It continues to be a really robust, healthy pipeline. 1,500-1,600 companies in it, kinda, you know, most of them are tech. 60% tech, kinda half outside of Canada. We're continuing to nurture all those relationships. What we were really talking about on the call also was the near-term pipeline, the pipeline of actually companies coming to market or actually also raising capital. Not just the IPOs, but companies that are already there that are gonna do secondaries and other capital raises.
We, like also the banking community around us, are in active dialogue with a number of issuers that could go to market, that have deals ready to go, or they have financing needs, and they're kind of in wait mode. They're looking for more certainty around, you know, valuation, volatility, the ability to get a good transaction done and get follow-on support for it. In any cycle before this, what has normally preceded kinda that, what we'll call that boom that follows the bust, is a handful of really good transactions that get done, that get great fills, that get oversubscribed, and that gives the confidence for other people to get their deals done. That's really what we're looking for, is that market confidence, some leaders to go forward, and the industry will follow.
The nice thing we've got in the meantime is, because as you mentioned, we've got this unique model of venture and senior, we're actually still bringing companies to market through alternative means. Even though I think IPO-wise we've only had a handful, we've still brought in another 11 Capital Pool Companies on the TSX Venture Exchange. We've done Qualifying Transactions to move companies into them. We've had new graduates come in, and we've brought companies over from other marketplaces as well. All that continues to happen at the same time, and that's why even with the light IPO activity, we're actually net up in total listings in 2023 again. This will be the eighth year if it persists for the year.
That's great. Just thinking tactically about what happened in the first quarter, you know, January, February, obviously we all understand March was a real funky month.
Mm-hmm.
If we hadn't seen that sort of banking crisis in March, do you feel like the trajectory would look a lot different throughout the rest of the year, or is the unlock more around rates, the path of the Fed? You know, are we entering a global recession?
Yeah, I think you really hit it on the head. That created a new layer of unconfidence and uncertainty. I think we would've seen more things get done. We saw some interesting deals get done in the first part of the year in terms of the Lithium Royalty Fund. That was a $150 million lithium company, U.S. CPCs that we got listed, so there was some confidence there, the U.S. banking piece created a new level of uncertainty. What hasn't changed, though, this is gonna drive tailwinds going forward, is rates are still high, potentially going higher.
Balance sheets have not really been refinanced yet, so we haven't been in this rate regime long enough that companies have either exhausted their cash or have had to refinance those debt loads. When that happens, you compare refinancing long term in the debt market versus actually raising equity, that's gonna be kind of another driver for people to test and tap the equity market, and we'll see deals get done that way. We saw the same thing in kinda 2011, 2012, 2008, 2009, and I think we'll see it again. It's just a question of timeframe.
sticking with the topic of the exchange, you know.
Mm-hmm
... top global exchanges in terms of international listings. What is it about the platform that attracts these international issuers? Kind of on the, on the topic of the mix, you know, can you talk a bit about the evolution over the past years towards more, you know, innovation-?
Mm-hmm
... versus kinda more energy and resources-based issuers?
The interesting thing is the international piece is actually a microcosm that way of the whole market of the whole exchange. As we talked earlier, that unique model of venture for small cap companies and TSX for senior companies, unique in the world. Nobody has that structure the way we do with the graduation program in it. That allows us to really target small cap companies around the world where they wouldn't have the same public company ecosystem in their home market. The majority of our international listings actually come from that small cap environment. We've got over 250 listed. Around half of them come from actually the U.S., the other big regions we would have are South America, Australia, Israel, and some others. Even some out of the U.K. market here.
Sector-wise, the two biggest sectors, the one traditional sector is this has always been a strong market for mining and resources. Over that kinda 250 base, about 111 are resource companies. We basically are listing half the resource companies in the world doing half the global capital raising in mining. It really is a sector strength. Companies come from all around the world to raise capital in Canada, do that because of the whole ecosystem. Emerging now is that technology companies is as big or becoming as big a sector as resources. You know, 111 in resources, like 87 in tech, in that kinda 250 international.
You see a similar piece on the overall market where 13%-14% of the market capitalization's coming from resources or from mining, and tech at one point was 14 as well. Pulled back a bit when valuations pulled back, but it's that same kinda size. Those are the two sectors that are driving it the most. Even with that, it's a broad-based market. You've got industrials, commercials, financials as well rounding all that out.
Got it. In terms of the growth of the business, I think your growth objective for capital markets, excluding the trust business, is strong growth, which you define as 5% plus.
Mm-hmm.
What are the key drivers here between market cap growth, new issuers, any pricing conditions you may have? How do we kind of think through the various pieces?
It's really the combination of those three. You've got the underlying growth in market valuations, and over long term, those continue to grow. Most of our pricing is actually market cap based, both in terms of the sustaining fees and the actual financing fees, so they grow over time. As I mentioned earlier, that continued net growth in new issuers, so that's a contributor to that long-term growth as well, that we're gonna keep adding more issuers to the platform. Not just adding them on, growing them and graduating them. We've had 755 companies that started as junior Venture companies that graduated the senior market. When they do that's a capital raise, it's a higher sustaining fee, index eligible, so there's all kinds of lift that goes with that.
Those pieces together, as well as the continued growth in the financing of a bigger book of companies as we go, and that's why we've got confidence that over the long term you'll have that sustained 5%+ growth there. You know it's gonna be lumpy, because it does depend on what the financing activity levels are from period to period.
Got it. Maybe thinking about the trust business now.
Mm-hmm.
You know, can you talk a little bit about the revenue components here? Obviously, interest income has been an important key driver recently. What are the other components? What kind of builds up the whole?
Yeah. I mean, over the long term, the trust business would be about kind of 60% recurring revenue, 40% transactional, because you've got relationships with the issuers around transfer agency, trust mandates, even things supporting their annual meetings or plan management, those types of things, and they're all generally subscription activities. That piece of the business has been stable and growing. The transactional component, outside of interest is actually soft this year because very much like capital raising, if you're not seeing a lot of transactions, that transactional piece of working on corporate actions isn't there. Very much the lift that we got in the first quarter was driven by growth and interest rates. With that interest rate growth, you know, we're handling cash on behalf of corporate action activities, trust mandates, things like that.
With rates having gone up from what, you know, near zero when we got into this business, to 4% or 5%, that drove, you know, over 40% growth in the business in the first quarter. The business is apples to apples 'cause the acquisitions that we did were before that. That's kind of the mixture. You know, going forward, we're expect to see continued strength in the interest rate component, but also more growth in the underlying in terms of client acquisition, new products and services. As our trust piece grows, we'll actually take on larger bank balances for companies as well. That growth is mostly rates this year because it's actually cash positions were roughly similar to the year before.
Got it. You mentioned acquisitions. It's been a little, I think, over a year and a half since you closed on AST. Can you kind of remind us what are the synergy opportunities look like from here on? Where are you in that process?
I mean, we're largely complete in our integration program, and I think last year we did a little less than CAD 4 million in terms of the G&A savings that came through that. We are on track to deliver on the, I think, overall CAD 10 million of total synergies coming from that program. The really important piece though in terms of what we put this together for was to support the long-term growth, and that's, you know, where we are right now. We got a combined business, fully integrated teams, we've got a much larger client base, and it's allowing us to sell into bigger clients than before. That's what gives us the confidence in the long-term projection that this is a business we're gonna grow in that high single, low double-digit growth rate going forward.
You know, despite what interest rates are doing over the long term, that's what we think the whole core business is gonna do.
Great. Maybe moving over to the equity and fixed income trading business. You talked on the last earnings call about some market share gains in the dark trading business or the dark pool business. Can you maybe talk about the drivers there, and can you perhaps remind us, you know, why are the dynamics around dark trading or dark pool trading different in Canada versus in the U.S.?
I think the dynamics are different just 'cause the market is smaller. When you've got such a large market in the U.S., you can do a whole lot more activity in dark that can interact with each other. When you've got a market that's the size of ours, where the large institutional players and the large traders that do them is more limited, that's gonna limit the size of that activity. However, what we've been trying to do with our product is make it a product that really meets the needs of those clients. It's based on client feedback, the type of transaction types in there, and we make it interact with the lit market. If you're not getting liquidity in the dark, you can get it in the lit market, and vice versa.
That's a really powerful product proposition, and that's why you're seeing us get the growth there. Then to continue that growth, we've launched, you know, two new markets that have gone out for consultation, both based on our Alpha platform. One is Alpha DRK, one is Alpha-X. Alpha DRK, again, would be an expanded dark facility to do more of that institutional trading. The X is more about execution quality. Again, you know, what do institutional traders need? They need to get institutional trade done with low market impact, so we're bringing new trading features and order types to help with that execution quality in a market that is slowed down, so it's not friendly to high-frequency traders, and that's intentional, so that they're not seeing the institutions getting picked off.
Those are both out for public commentary, and in client commentary as well. As typical, when you're bringing new reform, we've got a lot of folks that have come out and said, "This is a fantastic idea. It meets our needs," and some folks that say, "Why do we need two more marketplaces?" For us, we can run it all on our platform, and we can run it at scale. We're not creating new instances. We run it all in a single trading capability.
In terms of the market share gains, just thinking about new entrants in Canada over the last few years, can you maybe talk about where those are coming from? Is it traditional players, new entrants? anything you can point to there?
I mean, most of the market share gains we've brought lately have been around things like dark, and we've taken it from other dark players. Like, the other dark player is Match Now, which is Cboe Canada now. Beyond that, market share itself has actually been pretty stable. Despite the number of players that are in the Canadian market or the fact that some of them are actually big global players now, like Nasdaq's been there since 2015, Cboe had Match Now, they've got NEO as well now. We've had 2/3 of the market share of our names the entire time and have seen no degradation in it because we keep giving the clients the features that they're looking for.
The expectation I do remember this 2015 Nasdaq came to Canada and there was a panic like, what, you know, what's TMX gonna do? This is Nasdaq in Canada. They haven't launched any other services in those last eight years. They actually, I think their market share is down since when they first came in. They run it efficiently on their tech, but that's as far as it goes because we've got some really good competitive moats around our business. It's very hard for them to move into things like listings or derivatives or clearing, because we've got such strong footholds there, and I don't think that's any different from Cboe. We keep serving the clients with the products that they need. There's no need for them to go to somebody else.
Got it. Maybe in terms of pricing, I think you talked about a 1% pricing change across, you know, TSX Venture and Alpha. Can you talk about the process a little bit from a regulatory perspective, and how should investors-
Mm-hmm
... think about this as a longer-term driver, any kind of annual expectation, understanding you have to go through the regulators, but how should we kinda conceptually think about what reality might look like?
I think the regulator is the end of the process. Pricing is about where do you stack up competitively, what's the value proposition, the services, and then what can we adjust. What we're doing as a business, as part of our business planning, is to look at that across every business, not just trading. We're looking at every single business and looking at what are the opportunities and the competitive dynamics. In trading, you've got, again, 13, 14 marketplaces in Canada and 80 next door in the United States, so highly competitive from a pricing standpoint. We're really looking at, you know, where do we have opportunities to make changes. When all that work is done, the regulatory process is actually quite straightforward because we've already made the commercial case in terms of impact on clients, impact on the market, competitive dynamics.
Similarly on other parts of the franchise, we did more material changes around our market data business, it was all grounded in where do we have opportunity globally, what are our benchmarks, how do the comparatives work, you know, where do we overlap certain products or product comparatives. When you get to that stage of the ask for the regulators, you've got a well thought out of business proposition there, as opposed to just taking pricing for the sake of pricing. What we have not done is done across the board price increases. Everything has been strategic and tactical.
Great. Let's talk a little bit about the ongoing modernization project across Canadian exchanges. You know, what are like the longer term benefits to the broader market of moving to a shorter settlement time? Obviously, you know, customers gain efficiencies by having, you know, funds tied up for shorter periods of time. What's the impact on TMX? Is it more turnover, more volumes?
Mm-hmm
... more engagement? How do you think about that?
This is more the modernization on the clearing houses.
Yes.
Does affect all the marketplaces as well. We've got a program, we've been putting in TCS BaNCS to run the clearing and settlement systems for the country. Candidly, we would have been ready to go live with the industry at the end of this year. Substantial 5+ year investment that we've been doing. With the change that you mentioned, when the SEC announced that they're gonna go to T+1 settlement in May of next year, Canada has to move at the same time. There's no question we can't divorce the two markets. They're so highly integrated that we wanna do that seamless for the entire industry. As we engage with the clients, our clients are very clear that they can't do both these programs at once.
It's the same people, it's a lot of risk for them. what we've agreed to do is continue our modernization program into the summer, and then essentially suspend it and move our execution date from the end of this year to next year. that the industry can focus on executing T+1 with excellence, because While the benefit that people are talking about in terms of shorter settlement means, you know, potentially less collateral in the system, going from two days to one is substantially harder on the industry in terms of confirming trades, making sure there isn't any fails, doing allocations and distributions.
Particularly in the fund side, the custody side, there's a lot of work, and when we went from three to two, a lot of people made that happen by just jury-rigging their processes. They didn't make technology investments. This is an actual challenge for the industry. It's gonna be a challenge in the U.S., it's gonna be a challenge in Europe as well. That's why we put our tech program aside so that the industry can focus on it. What I'm finding coming out of it is that we're already identifying working with the industry, things that we can build in terms of new enhancements that are actually gonna make it easier from the due T+1. Different types of confirmations, helping with allocations and other things to reduce the amount of trade failures that would happen otherwise.
There's actually potentially a business opportunity, that comes out of this, where there's gonna be a service need from the clients to help them with settlement. At the same time, the work we need to do for the clearinghouse that we run to go to T+1 is, it's fairly light, and we're T+1 ready already, and the new product that we're working on is already T+1 ready. We'll get this done, we'll get it launched in May, and then we'll immediately restart our program and expect by the end of 2024, we'll have replaced all the technology for the Canadian market. It'll all be modern current stack.
Great. Maybe, last question on kind of the trading business. Can you talk a little bit about the mix in Canada, retail versus institutional? Obviously, in the U.S., with the advent of a lot of new trading platforms.
Mm-hmm
... more dated options and the like, we've seen a real explosion in retail trading, not to mention the, you know, the stay-at-home impact of COVID. How is the retail trading environment in Canada? How does it compare to, you know, other markets like the U.S. and the U.K.?
Yeah, I mean, during the COVID period, we saw that similar spike as well, with both the stay-at-home trading, easier tools, more adoption. It has pulled back since then, so probably about 37-ish% of the market that's driven by retail trading. Certainly higher than it was pre-COVID, but not at the heights of it. The difference in our market is between the senior and the junior market. The junior market is really heavily retail. So more than half the trading there, even before COVID and continuing afterwards, is retail-oriented. That is a market that's then also more impacted by market volatility. When we're in a very highly volatile place right now, that market pulls back more. When it's much higher engaged, that one will take off even more.
That's where you'll see a lot of retail engagement, because it's all small cap companies that tend not to have big institutional followings. It's really the retail base that supports them.
Got it. All right, maybe we'll move on to the, your derivatives business.
Sure.
There was some talk on the last call about sort of the transition from, you know, the rate benchmarks from CDOR to CORRA. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what impact that transition could have on the business? How are you expecting things to kind of transition from here?
What we're expecting is no impact. That's actually what we're working on. The this is such an important transition because the CDOR rate, which has been the prime benchmark rate for the Canadian short term, has been the rate for decades, and when that's gonna change to the new CORRA rate, the Canadian Overnight, I can't remember the rest of the acronym. You can look it up. That new rate, not only are you changing the rate, but you wanna make sure that the products that the customers use continue to be there and continue to be liquid. We, on average in the historical BAX product, so the BAX product is what actually is based on CDOR. It would trade 100,000 contracts a day. It's a very liquid and really important benchmark product.
We've already actually created a new CORRA benchmark product. It actually trades alongside the BAX. We've built a liquidity and a market-making program in it already. We've also partnered with CanDeal. CanDeal is, you know, similar in, to the U.S. of like an organization like Tradeweb in terms of a fixed income operation. We're partnering with them to actually administer the new CORRA rate, build the benchmark, and then we put the futures on top of it. We actually have the product in market now, over the next year we'll help the industry transition out of that BAX product into the CORRA product. The upside is they're actually gonna be able to launch more different 10-year products around it.
We're gonna be, you know, when we sunset BAX, we'll be able to do both a 30-day, a 90-day, and other CORRA products around this rate regime, and actually then give more tools to the investor community around it. You know, very similar to over the last years where we launched a two-year and a five-year and a 30-year. This allows for more, more, more flexibility around what you can do in the short end of the curve, and more importantly, ensures that Canada is transitioning to the new rate standard that the rest of the globe is going to on a time that's commensurate.
Got it. Maybe just a high level question on the derivatives business. The last quarter was, you know, results were pretty solid. Where are you seeing the most traction generally? What do you think are the largest opportunities, this year?
I mean, the largest opportunities this year, some stabilization in bank rates will certainly help in these short-term products. They were very strong in the first quarter, have pulled back again as things got more volatile again. Some stabilization there. We'll see a lot of strength in those short-term products and a lot of strength in the growth of the new products we've added. We've seen double-digit growth in that two-year, that five-year, that 30-year product. The rate regime is gonna be something that's gonna be interesting watching that help drive double-digit growth. The other place where we're seeing really outstanding growth is in options on ETFs.
The more ETFs that we bring to market and add launch options on it, if you've got a deep liquid ETF, that's a really good vehicle, particularly for either institutional or retail traders, to get option exposure on a sector or a subset or things like that. Those, again, have been double-digit growth products, and those two areas have contributed to what has been double-digit growth in the franchise, and that's what we expect going forward.
Speak, you know, the options on ETFs, I think, are a really popular product for retail traders. We talked a little bit about retail in general in Canada.
Mm-hmm
... about derivatives, you know, how does adoption look in terms of those products specifically?
I was about to make a baseball reference, and I'm not in a baseball country right now. I'll do it anyway.
Any adaptable
If it's a cricket, if it's a five-day cricket match, we're in the first part of day one in the comparative. The penetration and the usage of options in Canada for the Canadian retailer is pretty light. It's actually not generally sold by the dealers side by side the way a dealer would in the U.S.. The licensing regime is different. You can be licensed for equities and not options, as opposed to a Series 7 in the U.S. where you're getting both. There is some barriers to adoption that are a little different. As that, we're not as well penetrated today, but the flip side of that, we've got substantially more room for growth.
As more of the broker-dealers make the products available to their clients and they market them to the clients, we have the opportunity to see more uptick in the options program, the options on both the single stock names and also on the ETFs.
Does that require any sort of product enhancements, you know, making options smaller and more palatable for retail, or?
No, it really is marketing, awareness, comfort, and execution.
Got it. Great. All right, well, let's start, now move over to, you know, GSIA.
Mm-hmm.
Starting with maybe some of your recent M&A, can you kind of give us a brief overview of VettaFi? You know, what do the partnership opportunities look like? Is there a path to kind of outright ownership there?
Yeah, I mean, when we got into VettaFi, we actually got into those discussions from the partnership angle. That's actually where we started getting going with them. The opportunity is really around working together to build custom new benchmarks, using TMX data, TMX relationships that we could provide to ETF manufacturers, fund manufacturers, et cetera. When you're trying to do, like on the index side, we've got a partnership with S&P for the big indices-
Mm-hmm
... our S&P/TSX Composite, our 60. That's not the vehicle if we wanted to do a, you know, a custom, lithium index for an ETF manufacturer that wanted to create some new products around it. That's the tool set that we found that we wanted to work with VettaFi for. As we got more engaged with them, we, so we built a partnership agreement to bring new products to market that are co-branded with us. Even then the opportunity came to make the investment as well. VettaFi is a fast-growing business. It's, looking to make expansions as well, so we put $175 million into the company, which allowed it to do a couple things.
Retire some expensive debt, like other, you know, growth companies that had some expensive debt, and also fund its latest acquisition, which was the RoboGlobal acquisition, which allowed it acquire new indices for, you know, AI and machine learning companies, which now seem quite topical. You know, the timing is really good for that, and it actually expanded the assets under management on their products from kinda $14 billion to $17 billion today. Again, that business is a strong double-digit growth business. It's got economics that look a lot like Trayport when we got into it. And it's certainly, to your point, an area where we'd like to see the ownership level expand, and bring it into more of the TMX family when that's right for the other owners and sellers at the time.
We did a very small transaction actually in the last couple weeks that took our ownership stake up. We had an investment in a company called ETFLogic, which is ETF Analytics. Very complimentary activities go on in VettaFi. They've got a fantastic ETF network and investor tools. We actually saw that that was a better home for it than with us, so we acquired the rest of the interests that we didn't hold, we rolled it into VettaFi to take our stake up in VettaFi.
Great. Maybe just some color on some of the other recent transactions.
Mm-hmm.
Wall Street Horizon, anything else. You know, how do those kinda fit into the business, enhance the growth profile, enhance cross-selling opportunities and the like?
Yeah, think about what we have in our data business. We have all the proprietary data from our marketplaces and very deep reach around the world in terms of subscriber base. What a Wall Street Horizon gave us was corporate action data sets that we didn't have. You know, they've got a product that helps pull together the data sets for 9,000 global public companies in a way that actually competes with, you know, what you'd find in a Refinitiv or an IDC or other these platforms. They do a really good job of it. By acquiring that, we expanded our data sets, we got better product tools that we could put our own data sets into, but we can also be the engine to drive sales and distribution. They had less than 200 global clients. We have 11,000+.
This is a business that, while small in terms of the size of the deal that we did, we saw one where we could integrate it immediately, scale it up multiple times. That's when we're looking for, if we're gonna do any small acquisitions, tuck-ins, we wanna see that kind of ability to integrate it in and scale it up immediately, and that's what we're doing with Wall Street Horizon, and you'll see us do more deals like that as well as we build this out.
Got it. Well, let's spend some time on Trayport now.
Mm-hmm.
You know, when you acquired this asset six years ago, it was a mid-single digit grower. What's changed in that time such that it's now one of your fastest, you know, growth drivers? What are sort of the current opportunities in terms of product expansion, geographic-.
Mm-hmm.
expansion, you know, price, et cetera?
Well, Peter's in the room today, he runs the Trayport business for us, like I say, we appointed Peter, that helped drive the growth too. Actually, one of the best things that we got when we got into it, as you said, Trayport was growing about 6%-7% a year when we acquired it, we've been growing it 10+ every single year since. The immediate piece that we found, Peter would reiterate this, is we had a team that had tremendous ideas on continuous innovation for the clients, what they needed was investment and support. We've actually expanded the franchise by over 50% in terms of incremental people, particularly around developers, salespeople, product people to really expand the mandate.
We focused on growth that was driven by what the clients were looking for. Additional products on the platform, selling to more clients, adding more tool sets like our algorithmic trading and charting, data analytics, all based on what those client needs were. That's continued to fuel the expansion of the business. When we look forward in terms of where we continue to go, we've got such a good platform that it's about what you can add to it and where you can take it. From an additive to it on kind of both ends of the energy spectrum, at some ends we're adding voluntary carbon, clean emission, clean power, and then on the other end we're working on, you know, how do we bring oil onto the platform?
Oil is a massive global market. It's underserved by the current tools in the market. Trayport would be the perfect tool to aggregate and put on a single screen the disaggregated oil markets around the world. We are working on both those spectrums of adding new product for the trading community that'll drive more demand for the traders. As I said, you know, where do you take it? We're working on where in the world we can actually solve the problems with the Trayport screen. The U.S. market is where we're investing the most right now in terms of both sales and development resources. We've got clients on from exchange standpoint, from hedge fund, from trader standpoint, and we'll continue to build that beachhead out.
That's the area that you'll see the biggest build, I would think, geographically is the North American market.
Is there a further international expansion opportunity, or is the focus right now North America?
There is both. I mean, the focus is North America, and that's where we're prioritizing, but we continue to watch around the world in terms of the markets that have opportunities as they deregulate. As Japan moves or potentially moves to deregulation, we've already tested in that market, we're ready to go. Should South America look to deregulate, we could move to there. It's really about the conditions on the ground that create the opportunity for multiple trading venues for then a Trayport will provide value of integrating them and aggregating them on a single platform. That's how we think about it in terms of where we can go to next.
Great. maybe lastly on Datalinx. You know, you reported Q1 growth pretty well in excess of your long-term financial objectives. What were the key drivers there? How sustainable do you think these sort of recent trends are?
Are you going to give me a three-quarter pass now because we beat the mark in Q1?
You bet.
Certainly, like, I mean, our long-term growth objective is the mid-single plus for Datalinx. The first quarter was fantastic, a lot of things all working all at the same time that helped us deliver that. That 16% we did in Q1, you know, we did get a little bit of tailwind from currency 'cause a big piece of the Datalinx business is U.S. dollar. We got a lift from that. There's about 3%-4% of the overall lift that actually came from pricing activity. Pricing is something that, as we talked earlier, we're gonna be doing on a regular basis, so that is part of the long-term outlook for the business.
You know, it might not always be that, and it's gonna be targeted on where we see opportunities, but we are gonna continue to do that. A big chunk came from product expansion, sales, and expansion of the things that we'd acquired, so the Wall Street Horizon that we can grow faster than when it was bought. That's the real push. When we think about five plus, it's the ability to continue to expand product, bundle product, global sales, and if pricing can enhance that, great. We're not counting on currency to do it. We're actually counting on business fundamentals. That, that gives us the confidence of the five plus, and then we'll continue to reassess.
Got it. Maybe one last question, thinking about kind of all your segments, and this is something that's true across most of the exchanges is that they have kind of evolved from traditional exchanges to, you know, data service providers. They do a lot of things. How do you think about sort of like the flywheel effect across all the businesses? How does data feed into equity trading to, you know, the capital markets piece, just at a, at a high level?
That is such a good question 'cause it's the piece that can't get lost. I sometimes think that there's so much focus on where the exchange companies are moving into. If you lose sight of the core, you actually lose the core bread and butter of what we do. If you think about why we talk about making sure we have such a healthy listing franchise, our two-tier ecosystem to feed more companies in the pipeline, that feeds trading. Both those things feed deeper and richer data sets. That creates the complement to actually build benchmarks and products and indices. Those are the cores of what then you can then trade options and futures on.
When we look at our strategies and where we're focused on growth, we look at that whole ecosystem effect in terms of where we can do things that are gonna have impact all across the franchise. When you talked about VettaFi earlier on, that's exactly why we wanted to be deeper into the index space. When we get deeper into the index space, we can help our clients create products, we can bring new ETFs to market, we can add new options on new products. We are able to get that ecosystem effect all the way through. Everything in our strategy is interconnected that way.
Okay. Maybe now talking about moving to M&A for a minute. You know, on the call, you kind of mentioned that the acquisition pipeline looks similar to what you've done in the past few years. You know, as you sort of think about what it might look like moving forward, you know, as you look backward, where do you think you've kind of had the most success with your recent acquisitions, and what are you most excited about in terms of what may be out there? Where do you see the greatest opportunities? Then how do, you know, valuations kind of look? Is there?
Mm-hmm.
Is there still a struggle for, you know, buyers and sellers to kind of meet in the middle? 'Cause obviously you've been getting, you know, some deals done, but how does it look, you know, across the board?
Let me start where you finished there. I think that valuation is still a challenge. I think particularly in technology-based business, that there's still an overhang there from valuation expectations and that companies, if they still have enough capital, or if they still have enough backing, they're unwilling to mark to market in some cases where they were a year ago. That'll change, and that'll continue to change as, you know, as debt comes due, as cash is needed, and people are forced to make a change around expectations. Where, you know, where we have gotten things done is I've been really pleased with the team's ability to execute.
Execute a good deal, get it integrated into TMX, and the pieces that have the most success are the ones where we can make it bigger than what it was by itself. Where you can take advantage of our network, our distribution, our scale, to make something bigger than it ever could be on its own. We've brought multiple pieces of small products into TradePort, but we integrated them into the dual screen, and that gives the ability to distribute to multiple clients. Same thing with Wall Street Horizon. We're bringing a small product, and we can sell it across our distribution network globally. Those are the keys to making these successful is where we can take something and really scale it up.
That being said, we'd also be happy to do another large-scale, more transformative transaction. Our balance sheet's in excellent shape to do that. Our debt level's low. We've got good equity. We got a shelf prospectus all ready to go. If there was an opportunity that comes that has that kind of scale to it, we're ready to execute that as well, you know, provided the fundamentals work for the investors.
Got it. you know, maybe revisiting something we talked about earlier, as I kind of realized we didn't really talk about it, but just thoughts on the fixed income trading environment in Canada, just with yields sort of, obviously, you know, higher than they've been in.
Mm-hmm.
-quite a long time. bonds are cool again, so it seems. What sort of activity are you seeing there? Can you remind us, like, how big, how important is fixed income trading for you versus equities, derivatives, everything else?
Fixed income trading, the core cash fixed income trading is, and it's a smaller business for us. It'd be less than CAD 30 million. It's still going to be largely an institutional business. You're not gonna see that kind of trading activity that you really see in the retail market and the equity market. Where it is much more meaningful is to us is the futures. The pieces that trade on the Montréal Exchange, you know, roughly, you know, half the volume comes from those fixed income futures products. They are still in the growth stage in terms of the other terms that we've added in there. Let's not forget that with all the COVID and post-COVID spending, governments have substantial debt they still need to term out.
The underlying block of debt product that's going to be available is actually growing, not shrinking. You add the complexity of, you know, different rate regimes, higher bank rates, different yield curves. There's a lot of things in there to trade. I think the long-term tailwinds for fixed income are really strong.
other ETF opportunities, you know, think about what we talked about earlier with VettaFi.
Mm-hmm
... and the way you kind of create benchmarks. How do you guys think about that? Is that perhaps less of an opportunity in Canada?
No, I mean, Canada was the first market to actually list an ETF on fixed income. We shouldn't be surprised we were the first market to actually do an ETF at all. Yeah, you will absolutely see more fixed income ETF products, and VettaFi is a natural partner to actually create those underlying benchmarks to create ETF product on fixed income. No question.
Great. Maybe a last question on the Montréal Exchange. You mentioned that, and we didn't spend too much time digging into it earlier. Just maybe at a high level, how do you think about, you know, competition across the various, you know, options exchanges in Canada, and the U.S. as well? You know.
Mm-hmm
... control BOX, we track it quite closely. Obviously, you consolidate it within your earnings. How do we think about the competition there?
Yeah. It's a good chance to level set the difference between Canada and the U.S. BOX in the U.S. is doing a kind of 5%-6% of the market share regularly. I think we peaked as high as 10. It's a really good platform, really well-liked by the clients. It's feature rich. It's a standalone entity from us, we have folks on the board that help guide it, but it is a separate operation. It's not integrated or an affiliate. That's how we get our exposure to it. Patrick and the team there are doing a fantastic job, and we want them to keep pushing ahead.
The Canadian option market is a little different. We actually do not have any domestic competitors in the options or future market because we operate that market much more like the CME operates the futures market in the U.S. It's a vertical trading and clearing. We control the clearing house. The products are not fungible in other marketplaces. The barriers to entry for someone else to create competing option market is pretty high. We haven't seen anyone else do that. We've certainly had rumblings of folks trying to engage and talk to the client community about the interest level in creating a competing market. They generally hear from the clients, "No, thank you." When you wanna build something like that, you have to build clearing. You gotta build regulatory capacity.
You gotta get people to fund the clearing house balance sheets and the risk pools. You better have a really good value proposition to do that, and we already have one. That barrier to entry is really high, and we're gonna continue to enjoy the strong growth in that business.
Got it. Well, unfortunately, John, we're just about out of time here. thanks so much for being here. What a pleasure to have you.
My pleasure. Thank you very much.