Let's get started. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining Bank of America's 33rd Annual Financial Services Conference. This is Craig Siegenthaler, North America Head of Diversified Financials at Bank of America, and I'm pleased to introduce a number of senior executives joining us from Cboe. We have CEO Fred Tomczyk, we have President Dave Howson, we have COO Chris Isaacson, and also CFO Jill Griebenow. Fred became CEO in 2023 after serving on Cboe's board for four years. Before that, he was President and CEO of TD Ameritrade for eight years. Dave has been President since 2022 and is responsible for overseeing all of Cboe's business lines globally. Before that, he ran Cboe's Europe and Asia-Pacific business, and he joined Cboe as part of the Bats acquisition in 2017. Chris has been in the COO role since 2019 and was recently promoted to Cboe's Chief Information Officer.
Before that, he was a founding member of Bats and also joined Cboe after the acquisition. Jill has been at Cboe since 2011 and was elevated to the CFO role in 2023, prior to which she was Chief Accounting Officer and also CFO of Cboe Europe. We also have Treasurer and Head of IR Ken Hill joining us, and oh, right there in the back. Okay, so we had a full team. I actually had to read this intro out because we have so many members on stage, but the first question is, is anyone back in Chicago manning the ship?
Somebody's keeping the lights on, and if you want to question, you can do a song if you like.
All right. Well, only kidding with that one, guys. But for anyone new to Cboe, it's a global options exchange that offers trading, clearing, and investment solutions. I thought we could start with a question on the macro front. Can you help us make sense of trader positioning over the last few months? It feels like maybe index options missed the boat on the post-election retail trading bonanza, but then in January, there was some solid growth in the complex. So what really clicked there?
Yeah, certainly. I'll take that one, Craig. If you look at Q4, Q4 2024 had tough comparisons to Q4 2023, but certainly the volatility toolkit, the complex really, really worked exceptionally well for customers. That risk -on rally after the election, people used SPX calls to catch up to that. With the Fed reset later on in December, the VIX complex came into its own. And that left 2024 with record volumes for SPX options, VIX options, and XSP options, that smaller S&P 500 index options. Coming to 2025, you've got Fed expectations resetting, you've got fiscal policy concerns, you've got inflation risks abound. And then you look at actually what happened. You had executive orders coming out at a fairly steady stream. You had DeepSeek news over the weekend. And so customers turned to our volatility toolkit, the complex again.
We saw an increased demand for SPX hedges, for hedges through the SPX options complex. We saw volumes in January that exceeded the 2024 ADV record in January for SPX. Those overnight news or those over the weekend news items resulted in the Global Trading Hours hitting a record ADV in January also for the SPX complex. Then you look to the other key tool in the toolkit, VIX options. The need for tail risk hedging was really paramount coming through January and well used by our customers through accessing VIX call options. And the ADV in the VIX options complex was 12% higher than the ADV record in 2024. So what does that leave us for the setup for the year?
Those cyclical factors coming together to combine with the long-term secular trends we've been talking about across the franchise that we are right in the center of sets us up really nicely for 2025 as we think about that volatility toolkit, offering different exposures, hedging in a variety of strategies from systematic trading to income generation.
Great, Dave, thank you for that. Next question, long-term growth opportunities. I'm really curious to see what you all think Cboe looks like in five to 10 years and what do you really view as the biggest growth opportunities at the firm?
I mean, the whole strategy that we've got is all built on leaning into our core strengths, but leading it into what we see as global secular trends impacting our business in the capital markets. So everything we lined up here is the growth of the retail investor, and we've seen that happen in the U.S. That's happening elsewhere in the world. So that's important to recognize. The increased adoption and use of options in investing and trading strategies, and that's been, some people would say, a 50-year trend, and we're all just waking up to it now. But it has been going on a long time, and we see that to continue into the future as people become more sophisticated, they have more online tools and things like that.
That kind of goes hand in hand with retail, but it goes in other ways as well because you're starting to see more RIAs and other types of investment managers look at these types of products and use them. Then lastly, I continue to see no matter where I have traveled in the world, and Dave's been with me on a lot of these, you talk to clients. Yes, they would love us to do some of the things that we do in the U.S. in their market, like options and disruptive strategies into whether it's a big incumbent, like the incumbent is a little lazy, but they also want access back to the U.S.
And if you look at the returns of the U.S. market in U.S. dollars relative to any other country or market in the world, you can see why, because the returns are phenomenal compared to everybody else. And it's not by a little bit, it's by a lot. So you're seeing this. So I think you'll see us be much more trying to get in the way and put our product portfolio into different parts of the world that we find attractive to get into bringing those flows back into the U.S., leveraging our index options, but also leveraging retail and our education arm. So those things you'll see us continue to do. So I think if you look out five to 10 years, pretty much that, over that time frame, you might see us move into something new.
But we haven't figured out what exactly that is because we kick off a lot of free cash flow and we have lots of options to do different things. And as we talk to the management team, it's always nice when you're running a financial institution, particularly one that's got trading or risk oriented, that you keep your balance sheet strong. But when those events happen in the world, probably driven by macro events, not company specific events, that you're in a position to take advantage of them. But they'll always be focused on those long-term secular trends.
And I would add that if you think about what Cboe's known for, our strengths, we'll be building on that scaled infrastructure that we've built around the globe. For 50 years, we've been innovating on products and new exposures for investors in the U.S. and around the world. So we'd expect more and more different exposures and hedging capabilities around that core S&P 500 complex. Think about the variance futures we launched last year, VIX options on futures. So product innovation around the core, but actually also innovating liquidity ecosystems around new asset classes. Just look what we're doing with the Bitcoin ETF Index and those index options there. We're calculating the index. We've got a product based off the back of that index, which is actually using the index options to maintain that product. The Calamos product launched recently with more issuers to come.
So innovating liquidity ecosystems around new and emerging asset classes is something that in a five-to-ten-year view, you'd expect to see us doing more of. And as Fred said, think about the European derivatives offering. That's a longer game push for us. And then separately, in the other strategic priority we've talked about in Data Vantage there, we're doing a lot of innovation around the infrastructure, the data, putting data closer to customers. And then think about the juxtaposition of new technologies and new capabilities around that 27 venues worth of data that we've got in the Cboe franchise, in the Cboe complex. Think about the new insights we can put together and push those forward.
And the final thing I'll mention is that the secular trend of the need for capital efficiency is real and things like our securities, financing, transactions, clearing service really lean into that need for more efficient access to capital.
Thanks for that. Fred, when I come back to your comments, the secular drivers, retail, overall option adoptions, I'm curious, is index options really the primary driver or growth engine over the next couple of years still?
I think it is, but you know . But we just had made a new hire to help with our multilist, single stock options, Meaghan Dugan, who we brought in, because we just see opportunities there to get better at what we do. We've seen where our market shares come down. Some of that's for various reasons involved with market structure. But I think there's more to it than that. And so we've got to get back to making sure we have a robust business around that in terms of multilist options. But I think index still remains very important. It's a big part of who we are, it's what we're known for, and we're very good at it.
And I think we've done a very good job as an organization sort of developing these cash-settled European-style index options that there is a lot of appeal for, for a variety of reasons. And as more people adopt the use of options and they get more sophisticated at the retail brokers, they will go into multi-leg trades and that product is perfect for if you're going to put a multi-leg trade on.
Stick with that last point on single stock options. That market continues to intensify in terms of competition. How do you fight back? It seems like there's kind of two models. Let's play some defense and maximize profits or let's go for market share. What's your strategy there?
I'll let Dave talk a little bit more, but it's a constant battle. It's a street fight. But I think the education arm can play a big role in that. But I'll let Dave because Meaghan's got hired in his area, so.
Yeah. So when you think about multilist options, just like in many ways the multilist cash equities business, we look to optimize revenues through balancing market share and capture. There's value in the data as well. So the market share is also an important component to that as we think about the value in the data that we generate. The competitive legs in that environment are, of course, the pricing that I just mentioned, the pricing dials. We've got four options medallions. The second part there, which spreads across those four options medallions, is the functionality and differentiating order types and capabilities, alongside that pricing is fundamentally key. And an area that we've been leaning into thirdly very much so recently is data and analytics.
Market quality information, analytics, quality data insights that come off the investment in technology allow customers to further enhance their engagement with the platforms and therefore improving market share. And then it's the talent, it's the ability to bring all that together. And that's where Meaghan Dugan, who's joined us as Head of all U.S. options for us, is a key part of that. And we did a press release last week announcing a number of other hires in the derivatives business focusing on market intelligence, sales, and marketing around the globe as well as in the U.S.
Let's move on to succession. Fred, when you took over, you listed succession or succession planning as one of your top priorities. That was over a year ago. I believe there's some new commentary in the earnings call last week. But how should we think about where you are in this process and how do you think about internal versus external candidates?
Well, let's step back. I mean, so when I came in, I had three or four priorities. And so I've knocked down all those except the last one. So we've stabilized our margins, our balance sheets in a good shape, and stabilized the situation because we went through quite a tumultuous time. So we got all that done. So now is the right time to bring in succession. Obviously, this is a board decision. It's not my decision. It's not anybody up here's decision.
The board felt that we wanted to run a robust process and a fulsome process focused entirely on getting the best person for the job, recognizing who we are, what we do, and also the free cash we kick off and has a good long-term perspective on how to allocate capital, but also to maximize this thing that we've got today and build off of our strengths into these secular trends. They're just, they know our internal people. We've got a great internal team, but they also want to consider outside candidates as well.
Great. Thanks for that. I know that's not an easy one to talk about. Let's move on to Titanium. So you recently decided to rebrand Cboe's technology platform as Titanium. What should investors know about Cboe Titanium as it relates to how it differentiates Cboe and impacts your financial outlook?
Yeah, so Cboe Titanium is the time.
Sorry, Chris.
Yeah. So Cboe Titanium is the Cboe exchange platform that runs all of our equity options and futures markets around the world. And as we mentioned on the earnings call on Friday, we are coming to the end of what has been 10 years of migrations of building out the scaled infrastructure across the world so that all of those markets operate on Cboe Titanium. So that's at the core of the competitive advantage we have is that we can build something once and deploy it many places around the world. There's some recent examples of dedicated cores, enhanced access, or rolling out timestamping services. The list goes on. We have functionality such as periodic auctions that started in Europe and has come to the U.S. And we have things that have started in the U.S. and then have gone to APAC.
That's the power of a scaled infrastructure that's a unified platform that's globally consistent, but then locally optimized to the market that allows us to compete and be agile. The other thing is we spread it across the world and it's quite large scaled infrastructure, but we're upgrading it every single week, which allows us to be agile and meet the customer needs where they're at. I'd also say it opens up opportunities for greater access and data. So part of our real growth initiatives, as Fred and Dave have mentioned, is that we see a great need for data around the world. And those markets produce a tremendous amount of data, and we want to get that data closer to our customers. So having a unified platform gives us the ability for customers to connect wherever they are, and we're going to get it closer to them.
Quick question, a follow-up on that one. Who are your biggest competitors in that segment?
We don't sell our technology. Cboe Titanium is something that we use internally to operate all of our equity options and futures markets. We technically don't compete from a selling of software, but our competitors are the different exchanges within the different markets in which we operate all around the world. We don't have any plans to commercialize the sale of the technology at this point, but we felt like this is a point in time that's so important. As we went through the strategic review, we talked about our core strengths in derivatives and product innovation and technology. This was the time to accentuate that. Also coming to the end of all these migrations, now we have all these resources freed up to really focus on organic growth and executing our refined strategy.
And I would add just every market we've put Cboe Titanium in, our market share has started to go up. So that tells us something. People value that technology, what we do and how we do it.
Thanks for that, Chris and Fred. It almost seems like something you might be able to sell with the rebrand. That's kind of what I was thinking. Let's talk about profit growth. So I was wondering if you walk us through the EPS algorithm. Of course, you have unit sales growth, pricing, maybe inorganic growth. We've been seeing friendlier trends on the operating margin side too. And you're in a stronger capital position than some of the other exchanges I also covered. So how do we think about that EPS algo going forward?
So maybe if we just talk about how we think about growth. We've got a tremendous return from capital allocation to organic initiatives over time, and so clearly that's going to continue to be a focus as we think about scale, and then Chris mentioned the scaled infrastructure that we have out there. We're able to enter new initiatives benefiting from that already pre-existing scaled infrastructure to take one capability from one region to another that put data closer to our customers, and then it comes back down to the strategic priorities again, the derivatives franchise, that product innovation around the core is really important to really leveraging that scale, the ability to launch new product around that core S&P 500 complex is really, really key, and then thinking about, as I mentioned before, new product ecosystems, for example, in the crypto space is really important for us.
And there again, when you think about us moving our margin futures onto our CFE exchange, clearing into our own clearing house, that sets up a really neat, streamlined infrastructure for us again to be able to continue to work with our customers to innovate in new potential exposures. And then on the growth side, again, on the Data Vantage point of view, 40% of our growth has been coming from international sales. So having data available in Snowflake, available on the cloud to get that closer to customers. And then when you think about growth from a pricing perspective between transactional and non-transactional as in the data and access on a transactional side, we've spoken about that for the multilist businesses. On the proprietary product side, we're really focusing on getting that new user and use case is really important to us.
When it comes to the overall Data Vantage pricing, we expect around about a third of the growth to come from pricing there with our real focus on delivering cost-effective, high-value data products to customers.
So maybe I'll add, I mean, so that all that speaks to driving revenue growth. And so we see that number and we also try to have some degree of operating leverage to keep expenses in check relative to that, which is Jill does a fabulous job on that. And you can see that this year when she stabilized the margins, we have good margins. So we're not trying to sort of maximize them, although there's always opportunities to enhance them. But as you go through time with that and you keep focusing on those long-term secular trends, it just keeps the revenue growth rate up and you can manage around that. And when you leverage that scaled infrastructure, it should give you opportunities over time.
And then when you come back to it, then you've got this cash flow machine, which will kick off a lot of free cash over the next five to 10 years. How do you use that, whether it's to be share repurchases or to go into inorganic opportunities where you see where you could enhance that growth profile and bring something to it? Is it a new asset class or whatever it is, is basic and making sure you allocate that capital wisely. And when it comes to share repurchases, taking a long view because we are in a business that has macro events that cause changes in how people perceive our growth. And at times when those events happen, how can we be in a position to take advantage of them?
That could mean more share repurchases or much more aggressive share repurchases, or it could mean you target somebody and be opportunistic at that time.
Thanks, Fred. Fred, I think it was maybe late October, early November, the 3Q earnings call when you talked about maybe being open to a big M&A deal. And I think that surprised some of us, but I was wondering if you could just flesh that out and remind us what is the M&A strategy today?
Yeah, so I don't remember saying that, but people certainly picked that up. So that has to be on me. What I mean by that is basically we historically have done a lot of small transactions. And I think the lesson we've learned is that basically, whether it's small or it's big, it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of resources in the organization. And so if you're going to do something, if we're going to do an inorganic thing, we want it to be worth our time. So all I was trying to say in that is if we're going to do an acquisition, it's got to be strategically make sense. It's got to make financial sense, but it's got to make a difference. So we don't want to do things that just to do acquisitions.
We want stuff that's actually going to make some strategic sense and makes a difference where we call it moves the needle and leans into the opportunities we see. Now, the exception to that is that if we have an area we're strategically focused, and I would say the Data Vantage business would be an example of that, where if we could buy something that's smaller that adds to the ecosystem and adds value to it, yeah, we would consider that. But when you're thinking about inorganic, it'd be very targeted in those things. It has to play to a strength, but we had done a lot of small deals, and I think we've learned from our experience they take a lot more time than you think.
So flipping that and thinking about dispositions, I know now is probably not the moment to call out a non-core business, but in the future, are there businesses that may not fit inside of Cboe that you might be looking to sell? We know you don't need capital today. You stand in a good position, but maybe they don't fit in the long-term strategy anymore.
You're always thinking about that. I call that just portfolio optimization. There's nothing that comes to the top of mind right now. And I would say, again, as we think about these things, we have businesses that are performing and we have businesses that are not. And if you're not performing, we monitor it a little closer and those types of things. But we got to think about it in terms of the whole ecosystem. And even if we had something, we said, well, we would part for that for the right reason. I suppose I think in the situation we're in today, well, we really don't need the cash. If it's working, it's kicking off cash, it's contributing to the ecosystem, it's got good margins, recent decent growth, then we'll probably just hold that.
And then if you did a big transaction for all the right reasons, then you might say that might be one of the ways that you finance it. I'm very big not to have a play on the word options, but you always keep your options open to take advantage of situations whenever they come your way.
One thing we were very excited for was the Robinhood launch, like 24 million-25 million accounts, highly active. It's a different type of account than you get at a Ameritrade, Thinkorswim, or an IBKR. But I wanted your perspective on what you've seen in terms of activity from Robinhood to date. It seems like it's early innings. It's been very limited, I believe, but I would love your kind of view on that.
Yeah, absolutely. We talked about it on the call on Friday as well, and it's been a great alignment in terms of Robinhood strategy in general, going for the active trader space, more sophisticated trader space, a user base that would really find great appeal in the utility of our core volatility complex, those cash-settled European exercise index options with the potentiality for a 60/40 tax treatment, so it's exceeded our expectations in two ways. One, the speed of the rollout, and secondly, it was the level of uptake that we've seen since the rollout. The rollout to the mobile platform completed, I believe, on the 21st of January, and that rollout went really well from our perspective, and then the desktop platform Legend was rolled out on the 24th of January. Now, that's much earlier than we expected it to be during 2025.
We've seen growth in the activity levels over time. That growth has come in both in all SPX options, VIX options, as well as XSP options, with the majority, the large majority in SPX options. And so when we think about that broadening out of access, one of the pillars we think about retail, that's been really, really pleasing. The second thing is the effectiveness of education. The second pillar we think about for the retail brokerage community, we've seen customers increase their usage of spread order types. That's really allowed those customers to access that larger notional contract size and define their risk on the trades that they're taking. And then when we think about product, which is the third leg that we think about with retail brokerages, it's great to see them using the entire volatility complex, the SPX options, VIX options, and XSP options.
So really resonating nicely there, that cash-settled European exercise 60/40 tax treatment has come together nicely. And we're really pleased about what it means as we go forward because it almost ushers a new dawn in competition among that customer base of those retail brokerage platforms as new sophistication comes in. Price competition between those retail brokers is really great for us. And we lean into that through education, our own standalone, as well as joint and marketing, again, our own as well as joint marketing with a variety of retail brokerage platforms out there. So really excited for the setup for the rest of the year. And there's an opportunity to see more products rolled out. If you think about those Bitcoin ETF Index Options I mentioned earlier, that's a great way to get optionality exposure to Bitcoin in a standardized way for customers.
So in a cash-settled wrapper against a cash-settled European exercise exposure to Bitcoin, when that gets added to the Robinhood platform, that's another leg up. So really excited about that. And finally, last thing to say is the addition of the access to the U.S. index and single stock options market for U.K. customers. So you can see that alignment of the strategy we talked about earlier really coming together nicely as that international expansion as well as that increasing sophistication of the retail base.
Yeah, the cash-settled component is a real advantage versus the ETF option. But you've been very successful in IBKR where they actually trade commissions. Robinhood is a commission-free app. So my question, though, is on the commission delta between index options and ETF options, how do they think about that component?
Certainly, you saw Robinhood take a different view on pricing, though, because it's actually not free for Robinhood either, but they've taken a lower price point, and that's the competition I'm talking about in that space. But when the big part of the education is really pointing out the overall economic benefits as well as the certainty of index options. So cash settlement is the simplicity. The European exercise versus the ETF option is really key. If you're doing a spread, you've got two orders out there, and one of them can get called away if it's an American exercise before the end of that contract. Now, that is not necessarily what you want if you're not watching that position. So the European exercise is fundamental to that spread trading aspect of it in the exposure.
Then, you add on the 60/40 tax treatment. You get an economic benefit as well as a certainty as opposed to a trade you put on. You think you know what it is with an ETF option that might get a leg, might get pulled away from you, changes the game entirely for you mid-trade. Not the case with the simplicity and certainty of cash-settled European-style index options.
That's key because a retail broker in the long term will try to focus people that trade options on spread trading because they know they will consistently trade and they know their downside, their cap. If you're just buying call options, they'll trade and then they'll likely disappear. So they try to migrate them to that all the time. That's number one. But I think one thing I'd add with Robinhood, they've always had just the mobile phone. They were a mobile-first company. The fact that they've introduced this Legend platform, which is a desktop, is a big one because that will get the more sophisticated traders, give them more robust information for trading and things to do.
All right, a big picture question on your options business. What inning do you think we are in terms of growth, adoption, and what are the white spaces that you in the industry are not in yet?
Maybe I'll start and I'll let Dave pile on. I mean, I think I don't know what inning it is, but we're certainly not in the ninth. We're not in the first, but we're somewhere in the middle innings. But this has been going on for a long time, and you can see the interest in it as you go around the world. And so the retail brokers are moving into these other markets. Yes, they want access to the U.S. They also want to. Certain markets in particular are very, very interested in how to trade options. And so you just see that this is not just a U.S. trend; it's a global trend. And that's where I think one of the things that Cboe brings to all that is, yes, we give you access back to the U.S. Yes, we can bring it to your market.
We can give you index options, which have all the advantages they've talked about, but we bring you all the education, the infrastructure, the technology, and everything to do that because it is technically different. And maybe Chris can come out later, but to run our SPX complex in the C1, what we call our C1 platform, is not technically simple. It's a big and volume-intensive business that a lot of people don't quite understand the technology that goes underneath it. But I'll turn it over to Dave.
Yeah, I don't understand baseball, but I do understand a little bit about cricket. I would say that we're in the early innings. When I stand back and look at it, a lot of these secular trends have been going for a long time. But if you look at the retail growth, it's still really the last five years, the true adoption of options. If you look at derivative income and defined outcome products, 19x growth to hit $200 billion assets under management. That's the indirect access to the options market that you can put in a wrapper for the end investor. All that is early innings, the competition with retail brokers, the growth of those same retail brokers internationally, and the adoption of it internationally has grown hugely in the recent years in the US. But you can see it repeating itself as you go around the world.
So the desire and need for access to the U.S. market continues to grow. Options in general continue to grow. Retail brokerages continue to grow along with the need for the access to the data are all kind of in that early innings phase for me. I don't know what the definition is in baseball, but I'll tell you maybe it's good.
Craig, I might just add, I mean, I would agree it's in the early innings, and technology has transformed nearly every industry, and it's facilitated this growth of options over the decades. We give credit to those like Thomas Peterffy, Interactive Brokers, that have used technology to expose them to people around the world. Through technology, you make what is complex simple and allow customers to define their outcomes in a simple way, although using somewhat complex products. Fred mentioned it's not easy to run a very large options exchange, but we've tried to do that in making the complex simple at incredible scale. Underneath, we allow that so that retail brokers and other brokers can expose that to customers around the world. A lot of growth we think that's going to be durable for, frankly, decades to come.
We went pretty far without talking about 0DTE yet. I thought I'd bring it up now. And this will be my last question here. We'll see if there's any questions in the audience. But 0DTE is about 50% of SPX right now. I just asked an opening question, but similar, where are we in that trajectory in terms of growth? What can drive that higher? We will move into other indexes too besides the S&P 500. Maybe talk about that long-term trend.
There's been some good growth. Even if you look at Q4 for SPX options, the growth of 0DTE trading was about 6.4%. And then coming into January, when we've seen that whole volatility toolkit come into its own, allowing customers to be flexible, allowing them to be nimble around news and events, tremendously powerful there. We saw the growth of January 2025 over January 2024 of 10.9% in 0DTE. And then when you talk about other products, other exposures, XSP for that same period, January to January, 0DTE grew about 38%. We said on the call as well, Russell 2000 options grew double in 0DTE year over year. So greater exposure of more users, more use cases coming to that shorter end of the curve.
And then also on an indirect basis, those derivative income funds we mentioned are being added out there with the zero and the one date of expiry products coming to market. And then there's the structured product desk themselves as well, adding new exposures and capabilities. So continued growth in the ecosystem there. And the liquidity in that ecosystem is something that we've heard liquidity providers speak publicly about, using that to actually hedge the exposure they've gotten into from customers submitting orders and strategies into the complex. That ecosystem really growing and creating new opportunities for products to be developed and new opportunities for new use cases to come to the market.
Great. Let's see if there's any questions in the audience. Please raise your hand. We'll get you a mic. We got one in the front row.
Hi, thanks for doing this. Can you talk about the IEX options launch? You're getting new competition in 2025. I think their primary differentiator is they're bringing their speed bump that they have in cash equities to the options market. Is that something that you've ever heard from clients that they want? Do you think it's going to be successful in taking some share?
Yeah, so a highly competitive market. We're going to get a 19th options exchange. I didn't hear anybody asking for a 19th, but we're going to have a 19th options exchange coming. When you look at the marketplace of the new entrants recently, as I mentioned on Friday's call, the focus there has been for that lower capture flow. What we've seen is a kind of a stabilization or plateauing of the market share guarded by those venues and now a strive for that revenue profitability we talked about earlier with new fee schedules coming out. The speed bump model is really already out there in many different ways. When you look at the functionalities available across options markets, there's a variety of market maker protections to allow them to manage risk effectively and continue to provide liquidity. Options is a quote-driven market.
You need liquidity providers to create a stable balanced market. And so already there's a range of capabilities out there to offer market makers some level of protection. Is the speed bump a better answer to everything that's already out there? I guess we'll see as things come to market. Chris, I don't know whether you have any other thoughts.
I'd just say we welcome competition. Multilist options is a very competitive marketplace, but as we've talked about, we compete with talent, technology, great functionality, and price where we need to. And so there's a whole list of market maker protections we have. And so we welcome competition, but we like our chances, especially with Meaghan Dugan having joined the team.
Great. Well, Fred, Dave, and team, thank you very much for joining our conference. We hope to see you next year.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much.