Next up, I would love to welcome Cboe, a leading derivatives and cash exchange. With us today are Craig Donohue, the firm's CEO; Jill Griebenow, Cboe's CFO; Rob Hocking, Cboe's Global Head of Derivatives. 2025 was another really strong year for growth at Cboe, underscored by the firm's proprietary SPX options complex, which grew over 20% again this year. The firm also recently announced several strategic pivots, including plans to divest a few non-U.S. businesses and really push further into retail, as well as some of the exciting new markets, so we'll talk to the team about all of that. Lots to discuss. Thank you all for being here, and obviously, Craig, thank you for joining us for the first time as Cboe's CEO, so welcome. Welcome back, maybe. I don't know the last time you did it, maybe at CME, but that was certainly quite a long time ago.
It's good to be back.
Looking forward to the conversation. So let's start with 2026 and maybe key sort of areas of focus for you. As a new CEO, you recently unveiled a pretty comprehensive strategic plan, which included sort of parting ways with several subscale businesses. You announced Cboe Australia, Canada, and obviously a few smaller products you have, while also kind of reemphasizing your core areas of growth and leading into some of the newer things. We talked about prediction markets and crypto and retail. So lots to cover on all these topics, but key action items that you're trying to achieve in 2026 as you sort of embark on this plan, and what are the main targets we should all be looking at in kind of evaluating your progress on this path?
So coming into Cboe, I think the most palpable thing that I experienced was the duality of, on the one hand, we have incredible growth dynamics in a lot of our core businesses, and yet at the same time, there are also areas where I think we could be achieving greater growth and greater profitability. And so looking at all the things that over the last four to five years, my colleagues here at Cboe have been trying to do, a lot of our human capital was focused on growth in our secondary securities trading businesses in places like Canada and Australia and Japan, facilitating technology integrations onto our Titanium platform. And so my view of that was, looking at it fresh, was the growth there is not really the growth profile that we need, given the significant growth that we're achieving and heightened expectations for our performance.
And so what I've tried to do is help the team refocus on driving even greater growth and profitability in all of our core businesses. So obviously, we've had extraordinary growth in SPX and 0 DTE. We can do, I think, an even better job of being a better competitor, driving more growth and profitability and capture in multi-list. I think we can do the same in European and U.S. equities. I think we've had extraordinary growth. I think 17 out of 18 quarters in FX. But prior to me being here, I don't think we really paid a lot of attention to it. So a lot of this is about being objective and honest about where is growth, where can we be that is going to meet the growth profile and expectations that we have as a company.
And then how do we actually take our most valuable resource, which is our human capital, and make sure that it is intently focused on what I just described? So the strategic realignment is really kind of designed to pivot away from things that, look, our colleagues did a great job there, but even if we're really, really successful, it's not going to really move the dial in the way that I would like to see us do. So the biggest thing I can communicate is really an intense laser-like focus and making sure we have all the right people in the core businesses to drive that growth and success. And then the second thing is that while we've been focused on sort of the continuing to expand in the traditional finance segment of the market, we're living in a time where there's hyperbolic change.
And so I want to also make sure that we're thinking about not just event and prediction contracts, digital and crypto, tokenization, atomized settlement. How do we need to change and how do we begin to experiment in those things so that we develop core capabilities? I don't think any of us has a crystal ball for exactly how and when those different things that I just described are going to actually evolve, but we need to be present in that, and we need to be doing those things. So the strategic realignment is really kind of oriented toward achieving that.
Great. All right. We'll dive into really all three or four of those things, but the first, maybe we can start with some of the tangible things you announced, which is some of the divestitures. You named the businesses. There was some press around it, obviously, in the last couple of weeks as well, and this is probably really for anybody who wants to jump in on this question. But as you think about the timeline and execution of what you guys are trying to achieve with these divestitures, is the hope to get most of it done in 2026, or do you think that's going to trickle out further? And when you think about the benefits, you talked about the 5%-7% in terms of net savings off of 2025 base.
How much of that do you think ultimately is going to get reinvested to sort of support some of the growth initiatives that Craig talked about?
Well, let me let Jill take that question, but I'll just preface it by saying I would hope that much of this can be accomplished in 2026, subject to the caveat that we obviously have. I mean, we place a really high priority on customer relationships, making sure that everything we do is orderly and seamless in terms of transition for them. And then obviously, we also take really seriously our relationship with our regulators in those jurisdictions. So whatever we do is going to be with a view toward making sure we take care of our customers and also meeting regulators' expectations. But I would hope that we can get most of this done by then.
Yeah. So as it relates to what's called the financial side of it, I'll go back to our messaging and what we shared in our October 31st earnings call and earnings release. In that, from a net revenue perspective, we expect the consolidated impact of Japan, Australia, and Canada, that aggregate amount, to impact about 3% of our overall net revenue. And then when you look at the collective action of all of the items mentioned as part of the strategic realignment, the expense savings should be somewhere in the 8%-10% range. So I think it is important to delineate the two as opposed to looking at them net because from a timing perspective, the net revenue impact will be fairly solid and known at the time that those transactions and the sales complete. The expense side of it will take a bit of time.
That will be more of a phased approach. Then to your question as to the reinvestment of proceeds and then where do we expect those expense savings to go, what I'll say is if you look at our expense profile, we did have really heightened expense growth. You look at 2021, 2022, we had 20% expense growth. 2023 was about 15%. Last year in 2024 contained it to 6% expense growth. Here in 2025, our latest guidance indicates a range of, let's call it, 3.5%-5.4%. So we've really implemented disciplined expense growth. That said, I wouldn't say that striking expenses even further, that's not the objective here. It's a balance between maintaining that disciplined expense management with continuing to find those growth areas to invest in. Craig talked about optimizing the core. You look at our core, you look at the opportunities in and around the core.
That's where we'll refocus our people. That's where we'll refocus the investments.
Great. Great. Okay. That's really helpful. Let's spend a couple of minutes in some of the new areas. Prediction markets have been kind of the buzzword for, I feel like, the last couple of months. We've seen a bunch of announcements in that space from yourself as well as the industry broadly. So maybe help us sort of level set kind of what does the product roadmap look like here? I know it also sounds like you're planning on going at it more organically versus acquiring anything. So maybe walk us through the decision-making process there as well. And do you still see this largely, I guess, as a retail play, or what are your expectations for some of this opportunity to become more institutionalized, especially in the way you design the products you planning to come to market with?
I'll start, and I'm sure Rob will probably handle the bulk of the question, but in the way that we are looking at it, maybe it's a case of the tortoise and the hare. I know there's a lot that's happening. There's a lot that's being announced, but we're taking, I think, a very methodical and longer-term approach, and it's based on kind of sustainability of what we're trying to create, and so at the outset, I'm just going to say, because everybody asks us about it, we're not focused on sports. We're really focused on event and prediction contracts that relate to economic indicators, economic events, securities, and financial instruments. Why? Because we believe that that's consistent with the core capabilities that we have. It's consistent with our brand. It's consistent with what we're good at.
And Rob likes to point out that in a way, we kind of invented event and prediction contracts when we started to develop 0DTE. And he could talk about some of the actual kind of trading dynamics and decompose that for you so that you can actually see that people are trading event and prediction type strategies in our SPX and 0DTE contracts today. So what we want to do is stay true to who we are, continue to innovate products that are interesting for people, that are giving people the ability to either create wealth or hedge risks using shorter-dated capped risk type of contracts. So we see a lot of opportunity.
In that, we see the opportunity for our existing customers to move into those contracts, but we also see the opportunity for new customers as they become comfortable, as they always have, to kind of migrate up the maturity curve into our more sophisticated and complex contracts. Rob can talk about how 0DTE has evolved in terms of retail and institutional. I think the other thing that I would stress is that while there's a lot that's happening and a lot that people are trying to do, our core capabilities of product quality, product clarity, helping people understand the risks in those instruments, how we oversee participation in the market, how we surveil, how we make sure there's market integrity, that for me is the key to the long-term success.
I think that these markets will be successful over the long run, but I also think that in the way that other platforms are addressing it, there'll be a lot of kind of ups and downs and fits and starts. And there's going to be, unfortunately, some bad experiences that are going to evolve over time just because they're not approaching it in the way that we have as a reference to our long-term history of what can go wrong in financial markets, so.
Yeah. I think it's a super exciting time. You think of how the sophistication of the individual investor is growing. That plays into Cboe's hands very, very well. And that's something we're excited about. If you think of 0DTE, and as Craig was mentioning, how are retail maybe trading events today in 0DTE? Just over 200,000, five delta, so five-point call spreads and put spreads trade every day in 0DTE. Those $5 spreads are roughly called binary events when you look at them, when you deconstruct how a payout would be in those spreads. And so if I were to compare that to the bigger market from a volume perspective and kind of lay the landscape, on the event and prediction side, some of the financial contracts that are trading, I think right now they're predicting, call it, just around 100 million contracts for the year.
If I were to deconstruct a year-to-date total using the five delta spreads, we're at about $11.5 billion. So when you think of the size and where we're at, we're really a leader in this space. Now, how do we evolve that and bring the investor along in the journey, I think, is the interesting thing. So you have options, you have index options, spreads, complicated vehicles that people are trading today. And then you have investors that are nervous about getting into that space and like to focus in maybe long-only stock-picking portfolios. Well, event contracts can be a way to bring that investor along in the journey. You start with a binary contract. You start with a zero or one type of payout. You introduce them to kind of derivatives in a way, something that is dictated by a different underlying.
You can bring them along the journey, and I think it's a really interesting time to do that. Where are we going to focus on in the product space when you mention that? I think it's in that Craig mentioned risk hedging, and it's helping investors in their current portfolios today and probably less focused, like he said, on sports and things that are just kind of one-off events that are yes/no type of questions. So how do we build binary contracts around financial derivatives? How do we introduce them to SPX? How do we introduce them to single-name equities, events around earnings plays, maybe FDA approvals, any number of different company-specific events?
How do we pull that event contract space more into the traditional finance way instead of running and taking our event trading into what I would argue is more of the gambling, sports, that sort of what is Taylor Swift going to wear when she goes out with Travis Kelce next week? It's like that kind of space is not risk management, as Craig mentioned. It's more just one-off event-based. I think these events can also have a big role in kind of the overall risk management of the market. Yeah.
How do you think the competitive landscape in that will evolve though, right?
Because on the one hand, there's going to be a lot of product design, but that could be done by multiple different platforms, including some of the vertical integration we're starting to see between kind of the traditional brokerage models and the exchange models and some standard clearing models, right? So how do you make sure that if you guys do come up with something interesting, the likes of the Robinhoods of the world, etc., don't just copy it over because there's no real IP, presumably, that will be attached to that? Kind of how do you think that will evolve, and how do you sustain that advantage?
Yeah, it's a great question.
Not sure I have the complete answer, but I will say I think Cboe will take the traditional approach that we have with all of our products, which is create a toolkit, create interdependency of those products, and then with the intermediated model and the centralized clearing, create the capital efficiency around them that make them valuable to trade as a complete portfolio, and so you see that today with SPX options. You see that with VIX Futures and options. VIX Future is just a deconstructed portfolio of SPX options, and so having a VIX Future and SPX options in the same portfolio offer capital benefits. Now, bringing in your single-name multi-list portfolio, event contracts on some of these single names and indices, you just start to continue to expand the toolkit where coming to our platform and trading that toolkit is just advantageous.
And so ultimately, if Robinhood verticalizes, that's their business model. I'm still of the mind that we can create products that Robinhood's going to want all of their customers to have access to, even if it's not within their vertical, just as they're going to today. Maybe they'll move into that event space, and they'll use the newly acquired DCM, DCO, and that kind of event space category, but I don't see them leaving multi-list options trading and things like that. So if we continue to build our product set to serve in that type of intermediated model, I think we will continue to have the buy-in from all of the platforms because kind of the sum of the whole some of all the parts will be advantageous for each customer to trade.
Right. Okay. That makes sense.
I just want to add to that real quick because I agree with everything Rob said, but I think the other thing to keep in mind is that this is super early stages, and so there's a lot that's happening, but most of the entrants, most of the partnerships, a lot of the verticalization is really kind of oriented toward CFTC Designated Contract Market type products. A lot of what we're focused on is event and prediction in securities instruments. And so it's a lot easier, I can speak from experience, it's a lot easier to be a futures exchange and a futures clearinghouse than it is to be a registered securities exchange, a registered securities clearing agency, and to be able to do the kinds of things that are expected when you're facilitating trading in securities-based event and prediction contracts.
So that's an area where I think we have a real natural advantage, not just by virtue of our leading kind of franchise in options, but because of the superior kind of reach and distribution that we have with retail customers.
I'm sorry, I would add. It's important to note that if you look at a lot of these retail broker platforms and you look at their estimates of kind of option saturation with their client base, Robinhood's very public about their stats. I think 4% of their 27 million users are options enabled today. If you were to talk to some of the other platforms, whether you're IB or Schwab, you're in that 4%-8% range. So when I think of growth, one, that customer base, you are in very early stages of that. And then to Craig's point, if we were to talk to these same platforms and you ask, "Okay, of those accounts, how many are futures enabled?" That drops significantly from there. So call it 4% are options enabled. Now you're talking sub, probably, I think, 10% of that number is futures enabled.
We have a long runway of growth, I think, for the whole industry, but even more so to Craig's point in that security side where it's kind of our bread and butter. We see better access and distribution to the existing clients.
Yeah. Okay. Let's double-click into some of the kind of existing businesses and places where you guys are trying to go deeper, so to speak, given the strategy. Starting obviously with the SPX, really unbelievable growth over the last several years has continued as your 0DTE options obviously a big part of that. I think ADV is up 30% + year to date. So maybe try to unpack sources of that recent re-acceleration because we've seen that, and then things have sort of plateaued a little bit, and you've seen a massive step up yet again over the course of this year.
Anyway, you can delineate that between retail, institutional, U.S., non-U.S. What are you seeing underneath the surface? And I guess more importantly, what do you think the next leg of growth is going to be? And maybe it's just as simple as, look, to your point earlier, 4% of retail trades options. So it's just more of the same.
Yeah. As a former portfolio manager, and even in the exchange space, I hate the volume begets volume. It's just one of those things like it's a throwaway. But in this situation, it is true. More and more people are starting to use options as the retail market grows, and hence the 4%. As that continues to grow, it adds more liquidity into a network, into a system that now institutions are able to take advantage of.
And so you saw on the 0DTE in the early days, it was predominantly retail, I think, from a data standpoint. Retail doesn't heavily depend on data. They are just looking at the individual trades, the individual investments. When you move into the institutional side, you now have backtests you need to run. You have strategies that you need to justify to a risk management committee. And as the data grew in 0DTE, you could now backtest over different market events, longer periods of time. And then you saw the institutional community grow behind it. And so now we started off, call it 60%-70% retail, 30%-40% institutions. Now we're pivoting right around 50/50, which I think is very healthy for the market. You have very different investors doing different things, which builds a healthy market. Where does that go from here?
One, just options penetration will continue to grow those numbers. I think also you create a little bit of FOMO in the market. So now you're even seeing other jurisdictions and some of kind of the international play coming in. You're seeing demand from APAC and retail brokers in APAC wanting to bring customers into U.S. products and specifically SPX. I think the Middle East is very interesting. You have very, very large asset managers and sovereign wealth funds that have 20%-30% exposure to the S&P 500, but very, very little options trading and, I would say, risk management hedging that's being involved in those portfolios. I think you're going to start to see, and we're actively working on access pathways there, bringing in and giving people outside the U.S. that kind of access point to 0DTE.
I think you'll continue to see the whole complex grow. Last thing I'll end on, and one thing that I like everybody to keep focus on is as volumes have grown, you see the percentage makeup. I think just over 60% is 0 DTE today. So I think a lot of people immediately think, "Well, if that's 60%, then the other SPX flows have decreased," which really isn't the case. If I look at since 0 DTE was introduced in April of 2022, and I look kind of at 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, roughly about 1.6 million contracts a day are non-0 DTE, and they've stayed consistent. It's just the growth we've seen has been the 0 DTE and how people, I would say, have changed kind of their investment profiles and how they want more immediate results, and they want to see outcomes more immediate.
And I think that's why you've seen 0 DTE grow. But overall, the complex is very healthy. And I think as we bring in international players, as retail grows, as options adoption grows, you'll see the liquidity keep building, and it'll just make more and more volume available.
Yeah. Great. No, that makes a lot of sense. I did want to ask a question around the licensing with S&P Global as well. And recognizing it's still quite some ways away, this is not a tomorrow's question, but we do get asked questions, so I figured I'd ask you as well. How are you thinking about just the contract renegotiation process with them? And also when you think about what CME's aspirations here might be, and obviously you can't speak for them directly, but they did get approval to clear U.S. Treasury.
So now there will be a SEC-registered clearinghouse, which gives them an opportunity to maybe compete a little more effectively for something like that. So how do you expect this to play out, recognizing that this has been a really successful venture for S&P Global so they're not complaining about it?
Yeah. I'll start, and Rob will add. I mean, I think first of all, we've had a 40-year tremendously successful partnership with S&P. I think that partnership is as strong today as it has ever been. I would say that if you look at the last five to six years in particular, I mean, the kind of growth that we've had with SPX and 0 DTE, and when we look at the total pie, all of the different exchange-traded instruments and exposures based on the S&P 500, I mean, we have increased our market share dramatically.
I think we've gone from the mid-50s to kind of the low to mid-70s in terms of aggregate market share when you look at E-mini S&P 500 futures and micro futures when you look at the SPX and 0 DTE complex. So we've been delivering outsized growth, especially relative to all of our competitors. And I think that puts us in a really strong position. Secondly, we've created this whole ecosystem over multiple decades. Our technology is hugely scalable and specifically designed to help facilitate trading in SPX and 0 DTE. Don't forget also that a pretty significant amount of activity that happens in those products is actually in more complex options, strategies, and trades that are happening on our trading floor where we have decades of human capital and trading capital that are facilitating more complex and sophisticated transactions in SPX and 0 DTE.
And so we have a lot of kind of natural advantages that are not, I think, easily kind of extensible. And while you point out the clearing angle with CME, I'll say a couple of things on that. One is that these are obviously securities-based instruments that have to be traded on a registered securities exchange and cleared through a registered securities clearing agency. Again, a natural advantage for us and one that isn't a natural advantage for CME. But I'll also just say, going back to it, that I've been around a long time. And as you recall, during my time at CME, I oversaw the mergers and acquisitions with the Chicago Board of Trade and the NYMEX, went through incredibly intensive antitrust reviews.
I'll tell you that in the course of, and I was the CEO at the time, I mean, interfacing with the Department of Justice on those reviews, in the way that they look at and in the way that they define the market, they're looking at who are your competitors. Well, our chief competitor when I was at CME, in terms of the stock index futures franchise, was the Cboe. It's the Cboe. It's those products because I can synthetically replicate the same exposure trading stock index futures as I can trading cash index options. So there's a whole body of knowledge, analysis, and determination that's been made by the Justice Department with respect to who are the natural competitors in these markets.
So I just say I think we're in a really strong position just in terms of not just the natural advantages that I've described, but it's not the case that somebody else can just step in and say, "Okay, we'll dominate the market for all exposures based on SPX."
Got it. Great. All right. Maybe pivoting away from the trading businesses for a minute, let's spend a couple of minutes here on the clock on Data Vantage. It's been a really good story for you guys also. Again, this year, the growth really accelerated. I think on track at about 10%-ish year- to- date relative to your 7%-10% target. So squarely in the upper end of that. What maybe has led to the sort of acceleration we've seen over the course of 2025?
I guess more importantly, any early thoughts on how you're thinking about that for 2026?
Yeah. So just looking back on 2025, our initial year guidance was mid to high single digits. And as you alluded to, trending very well on a year-to-date basis. We have recently taken that guidance up to high single to low double digits for 2025. We'll come back to you in February with the guidance for 2026. But what I will say is we really are focused on new unit growth to drive that performance. So I think if you look at our third quarter results, 90% of the Data Vantage net revenue growth was driven by new units. So we're very committed to deploying great products at a great value for our customers. For 2025, if you look at what's driven some of that success, it has been some of the newer product offerings.
think the dedicated cores, the timestamping, etc. We do remain very, very committed to investments in technology, especially around data and access. And I think it ties right back to some of the trading and volume commentary too that Rob was alluding to earlier.
Yeah. Great. Maybe to wrap up the conversation, I'd love to get your perspectives on capital management, capital return. And I'll kind of include the M&A point in here as well because it does sound like larger deals or really any really material deal is kind of off the table. I mean, your last comment sounded a lot more focused on the organic growth. The balance sheet is in great shape. You guys are generating a ton of free cash flow. There's going to be probably some proceeds from the divestitures that you've announced earlier.
How are you thinking about the capital return evolving over the next, call it, 12-1 8 months?
I'd say our share repurchase framework remains consistent. We'll continue to be opportunistic in that regard. To your point, we do generate a lot of free cash flow. As of September 30th, we had about $1.5 billion on the balance sheet. We like the flexibility it affords us. We're not afraid to build the cash. To Craig's earlier points, we do see opportunities. And again, refocusing our time and attention around the core and the areas around the core, it's great to have that dry powder.
Yeah. Great. Okay. We'll leave it there. Thank you all so much. I appreciate you spending some time with us this morning. Great.
Thank you.