All right. Good morning, everybody. I am Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Capital Markets Technology Analyst here at Raymond James. Thanks everybody for joining us here this morning. Up next, we have Cboe Global Markets, and on their behalf, we have CEO Craig Donohue, CFO Jill Griebenow, and Rob Hocking, Head of Derivatives. With the format of this, they're gonna go through some slides for 10 or 15 minutes, and then we'll open up to Q&A. With that, I'll turn it over to you guys for the slides.
Good morning, thank you very much for joining us this morning. I'm Craig Donohue. I thought I would just start, 'cause I know some of you may not be as familiar with Cboe, with just a little bit of history. We actually invented equity options in 1973 and gained regulatory permission to first offer those for trading. We've had a great history of innovation over our more than five decades of history. A little over 10 years after starting trading of equity options, we started to trade cash index options based on the S&P 500. Had a very long-term, you know, growth trajectory in index options, and today that's our flagship product. Another decade later, we launched volatility indexes, the so-called VIX.
Since that time, we trade options, futures, and we license that together with S&P internationally. In 2017, the company transformed beyond derivatives. Today we have fairly large equity and FX businesses. For us, both FX is a global business. Equities is concentrated primarily in U.S. and European equities. You know, more recently in the last several years, we've been the first exchange to really create the ecosystem that has supported tremendous growth in 0 DTE options, which are options that expire on the same day that they are traded. Rob will talk about that a little bit more in just a few minutes. We've continued to set, you know, just records in volume growth as well as in our financial performance.
Our derivatives business in the aggregate produces $1.3 billion of net revenues, up 22% year-over-year. We also see continued growth data, and then also our risk management analytics businesses, and then our Cboe Global Indices business. There's an aggregate there. We continue to see tremendous consistent growth there. It's a $623 million net revenue business with 10% year-over-year growth, much of that coming from new subscriptions. We continue to see, you know, just extraordinary growth in cash and spot markets. That's a $465 million net revenue business, up 15% year-over-year as well.
Just to give you an overall picture of our growth and performance, on the right side, you can see that, you know, net revenue has grown at a 12% compounded annual growth rate over the last three to four years. You know, $2.4 billion in net revenue, up 17% year-over-year. Similarly, a 13% compounded annual growth rate in Adjusted Operating EBITDA, up 25% year-over-year, a 15% growth in Adjusted Diluted EPS, which I think shows you the power of the platform, and the power of the growth that we're achieving on top of effectively a relatively fixed cost base. With that, I think I'll turn it over to my colleague, Rob.
Thanks, Craig. Good morning, everyone. I think 2025 was a strong year across the portfolio, and particularly a strong performance in the derivatives franchise. Derivatives generated approximately $1.5 billion in net revenue, that was up 22% year-over-year, really driven by continued strength in our proprietary index products. SPX, VIX, and Mini-SPX continue to scale exceptionally well, really benefiting from higher volatility, growth in 0DTE, and strong global demand. In the cash equities, we saw continued momentum, particularly in Europe, where our market share gains translated into double-digit net revenue growth. Clearing remains a big focus of ours, as we look to extend into adjacent products like securities financing transactions this year.
Futures on the other side, growth has been a little more challenging, you know, really to shorter-dated risk management tools. That said, volumes in VIX futures are trending higher, with January ADV up 28% over a slow December and February up 16% over January. We're building momentum again. Lastly, I'll say that, you know, Global FX has delivered steady performance supported really by ongoing customer activity in our spot FX and non-deliverable forwards. Overall, 2020, 2025 results highlight the strength of our diversified business model, and we're quite excited to carry this momentum into 2026. So far, 2026, I would say, is picking up really right where 2025 left off with a combination of secular trends and cyclical tailwinds.
Macro uncertainty, shifting policy expectations, and more dynamic investor positioning continue to drive demand for hedging, liquidity, and really access to our portfolio. These along with strong, I would say long-term secular trends continue to work in our favor. Things like globalization of markets and data, more sophisticated retail participation have been a big contributor, and just a sustained shift towards shorter-dated options trading in our 0DTE complex. While at the same time these cyclical factors such as higher volatility, you know, an active rate and equity market and geopolitical uncertainty continue to amplify across our platforms, we're really kind of excited about how all of this is coming together and translating in trading activity.
If I were to dive into kind of more product specifics, options activity reached historic extremes in 2025, including 41 days above 70 million contracts traded and the first-ever 100+ million contract day. We believe these numbers to be a point of a structural shift, which is super exciting for us. Investors are increasingly using options as kind of a core portfolio tool rather than viewing them as a niche product, really only understood by a small subset of the market. Looking at 2026, year-to-date performance, total index options are on pace for a quarterly record in Q1, averaging approximately 5.7 million contracts per day, and that's up over 3.5% from an already record fourth quarter.
SPX continues to lead the way with ADV on pace for 4.6 million contracts in Q1. That's up 25% year-over-year and approximately 6% from Q4. Mini-SPX is also scaling rapidly with ADV to start the year up almost 31% from Q4, and that's really reflecting growing demand for smaller notional size contracts. We think we can grow that even farther by introducing a more retail-focused Mini-SPX event-based contract later this year. Within SPX, 0DTE options continue to be a major growth driver. In 2025, ADV was up 51% to 2.3 million contracts, and that was representing nearly 60% of all SPX activity. That usage really is highlighting how customers are increasingly using SPX for really precise risk management and intraday risk management.
I've used the example a few times, in meetings where I was a former portfolio manager, and when you had to manage risk, you used to have to use longer-dated options to do so. In doing that, you ended up buying effectively an insurance policy, and you received more insurance than you needed. Now with shorter-dated options, it's really benefiting the market because you can be very precise, and if you need to buy downside protection for a day or two, those options exist. You don't have to spend a ton of premium to do it, and it really helps you manage your portfolio. So we're excited to see how that market is evolving. On the multi-listed options front, those continue to deliver strong growth. ADVs in 2025 were up 24% to a record 13.5 million contracts.
As we look ahead, our focus areas are really directly tied to sustaining this momentum. That includes pursuing things like extended trading hours to meet more global demand as it comes in, expanding usage of the Monday-Wednesday option expiries that you just saw launched in single stock options, continuing industry engagement around potential ORF reform. I won't go into it total in detail, ORF stands for the Options Regulatory Fee, and it's a fee charged on every customer transaction in our space by all exchanges. As more exchanges come into the mix, I think we're up to 20 to start 2026, that fee is taking on, I guess, more attention from the industry.
Jumping into slide 8 here, you know, I wanted to talk more about how we're capitalizing on the trends we discussed earlier and kind of extending our growth runway away from the core business. These initiatives really start to continue to build on our existing strengths, which as I mentioned, are index options, clearing global distribution and education, which we're heavily invested in. In Europe, we're expanding Cboe Clear functionality to include securities financing transactions for cash equities and ETFs. In this model, CCE becomes a central counterparty to both lenders and borrowers, and this significantly reduces bilateral risk. For banks and clearing firms, this can materially lower their risk-weighted asset requirements and really improve netting efficiency while reducing operational complexity.
This is really a natural extension of our clearing franchise into a large under really penetrated market that has a strong need for balance sheet efficiency. We kind of view this, provide more capital, get more trading in return. On the event and prediction side, we're pursuing event-based products through a combination of binary options, which you heard us talk about, and structured vertical spreads. This is designed to create a new user experience introducing a yes/no option and then a maybe choice into investors' trading of event outcomes. This plan takes really advantage of our existing industry-leading liquidity in the S&P 500 complex. While allowing investors to express views on discrete outcomes using a standardized and familiar options approach.
By combining the two, we're excited that we can effectively bring an investor along in an education journey where they're comfortable with a yes/no contract today, but can ultimately come down that journey and start to learn more traditional options and more traditional use of spreading of options. We also feel, you know, there's a huge benefit of this because we're focused in the securities side of the business where we can access a lot more end users. If you were to look at the number of retail accounts that are in the security side versus the future side, the security side represents multiples of what the future side does. By going down the security side path, we're excited about just reaching more people and really kind of capitalizing on that momentum that 0 DTE has had in SPX.
In addition to that, we're also focused on increasing access and education. One thing I'll talk about kind of on the globalization side is we continue to advance broker onboarding in EMEA and APAC. This is exciting for us. I'll use a good example in Korea, where 2 years ago we did not have a single broker onboarded. Of the 10 that we've identified targets, we now have 7 of them onboarded and offering SPX to their clients. We're excited about kind of what growth that can come from doing more of that, and we see other opportunities across kind of the APAC and Middle East region.
Lastly, as we onboard more users and focus on kind of expanding trading hours, as I mentioned, in other products like single stock options, we announced recently that we're gonna expand trading hours and offer a pre-market session and a post-close session, just once again trying to improve access and bring more users onto the platform. I guess in closing, before I hand it over to Jim, I'm sorry, Jill, key takeaways, like our innovation is highly intentional, and we're really extending our growth runway by building adjacencies around product infrastructure, which we think is important, and really capabilities that we do extraordinarily well. Our focus, index options, data, and access to these products. With that, I'll hand it over to Jill.
Just a couple comments here from a financial perspective. As Craig and Rob have alluded to, we have had some fantastic momentum. As you'll see, our 2025 results, we did generate about 17% net revenue growth compared to 2024. I think the important thing to note here is we did that on a 5% expense growth perspective. What you've seen is we have very healthy margins. But when we do have those periods of outperformance from a net revenue perspective, we do have a relatively fixed cost base in that when we have the revenue outperformance, you see much of that drop to the bottom line. For 2025, our Adjusted Operating EBITDA margin did stretch to about 68%, again, on the heels of the fantastic secular moves and some of the volumes momentum that we did see.
Taking us to 2026, as Rob shared on some of the growth momentum, the areas where we're making targeted investments, we did share our 2026 full year guidance with the street right about a year ago. From a net revenue perspective, again, targeting that mid-single digit growth range. We will, you know, as actual results come in, continue to formulate and update that guidance as we've done in the past. Also important to note that we really are focused on what I'll call disciplined expense management. Again, you're seeing that come through our 2026 guidance. I do wanna be mindful that we do want to make sure that we strike the right balance between, you know, investment in the business, especially to generate that future year, you know, net revenue growth, while also maintaining that discipline.
Going back to that Adjusted Operating EBITDA margin that I mentioned, we did see that deteriorate, you know, years back in 2021, 2022. Again, really looking to strike the right balance between making that future outer year investment but not overburdening the operating expense cost base to ensure that we can at least stabilize that margin. Again, our, you know, depreciation and amortization, capital expenditures, et cetera, very much in line with prior years, being very thoughtful about the targeted investments and making sure that we do have the framework in place that we need to position us for future years. With that, I will turn it over to Craig to just provide a few concluding remarks, and then we'll open it up for Q&A.
Thank you, Jill. Maybe just to wrap up, I mean, one of the things that I've tried to do in my time now at Cboe is just to sorta sharpen our focus.
Very early in my time there, undertook a strategic rationalization of our different businesses. We were for a while, trying to create exchanges in Australia, Japan and Canada. We determined that those didn't really fit our growth profile in terms of what we were trying to achieve for shareholders. We've been undertaking a strategic sale and rationalization process, shutting down some of those businesses and selling others, and that's really to drive much more intense focus on growth in our core businesses, which as you can see from what Rob and Jill have shared with you, we have great growth dynamics. We've got great opportunities.
We also exist in a very competitive environment. This is really an opportunity for us to reallocate our human capital and our investments into our core businesses and make sure we're capturing all the growth possible, also that we're continuing to focus on what we historically for decades have been great at, which is innovation. Innovation of products, innovation of solutions, and working with our clients around the world. That's a big area of focus. Our core businesses, as Rob really indicated, are really our index options, our multi-list options, our future segment, and then US and European-style equities and FX, all of which we see great growth trajectory on and great growth opportunities for.
Because of the, you know, changing environment within the industry, we've got tremendous growth occurring in event and prediction markets generally, in crypto markets for the most part, lots of changes as the industry tries to focus on not just what we call traditional market infrastructure, but the evolution of, you know, so-called DeFi, which is the migration toward other solutions that allow expanded access, people able to transact on blockchain through private networks, exchanging their own collateral, and basically moving toward atomic settlement. We don't see that as replacing our business system. We see that as an adjunct. Those are things that we want to be focused on. That's sort of the shift in the strategic focus. We have lots of opportunity, in my opinion, for continued growth.
One of the things that we'll be focusing on is globalization through regional leadership of sales, marketing, and customer education into our existing products and new products that we will offer rather than trying to create market infrastructure in different countries. We've got lots of opportunities, we think, also to better capitalize on what has been really strong and consistent growth in our data businesses. As Rob talked about, you know, doing new things, particularly in the fast-growing event and prediction markets. With that, I think I'll thank you for your time and turn it over for questions.
All right. That was perfect. Thank you very much. Really good intro to the company and still some time left over for questions. Maybe to start off the Q&A, how has your thinking changed over time in terms of use cases for the SPX contracts and the zero days to expiration in particular, both on the retail use case as well as the institutional side?
You want me to jump in? I think they haven't changed a ton. I think they're still a great risk management tool. I think the speed at which people are managing risk has changed. You still look at $20 trillion benchmarked to the S&P 500 in some form or another. I think it's $13 trillion that's passively marked that has to track exactly. We just wanna keep providing the products and the tools that people need that allow them to hedge and kind of define their outcome in their, in their portfolio. I think that's now becoming...
That used to be more of an institutional designed answer, and now it's becoming retail as well, I think, as more and more people are understanding the power of options and removing volatility from their portfolio by structuring option trades around either a long only, kind of equity exposure. People are seeing the benefits, and I think we're excited about the growth that that represents.
How are you thinking about the competitive dynamics in that short-dated risk exposure world? Nasdaq had their investor day last week, and they're talking about Nasdaq-100 index options. You have zero days to expiration on individual equity options that you guys are working with and other exchanges as well. How do you see the SPX kind of competing in this world where there's more options to hedge short-dated risk exposures?
I think it's a great question. I actually see it growing the overall pie as opposed to stealing one from the other. I think if you have a, you know, broad-based market exposure and, S&P is your best hedge, that's where you live today. I think by introducing Monday, Wednesday expiries in single names, you know, you're not replacing single name trading with the SPX, and you're not replacing SPX trading with single names. I think they actually feed each other. By having more like for like, I would argue, tools, so Monday, Wednesday, Friday options in single names the same obviously every day of the week in SPX, you can start to build strategies that you can apply to multiple different product sets, and I think ultimately that grows the industry as a whole.
I think a lot of these, it's easy to say that they're competing, but I would actually argue they're not. They're just more holistic to growing the entire usage of options in the industry.
I don't know if it's on. I think it is. You should talk a little bit about the differences between cash-settled and European-style, American and...
Yeah, yeah. Good point. It's something that we're focused on heavily from an education standpoint. That's the other thing. With SPX, you're looking at a broad-based cash-settled index option that when you're doing risk management. That end-of-day expiry goes right into your account in the form of a cash settlement, and you have that cash available next day to reposition. In single name equities, while we're excited about the introduction and expansion of the product set, single names are physically delivered in American-style exercise. What that means is you have early exercise risk. In SPX, approximately 50% of the 0 DTE trades that happen today are spread-based. In single names, if you were to see a similar mix, early exercise exposure allows you to get potentially assigned on the short end of your spread.
There's an early exercise risk for the options that investors need to understand and actually manage around. Additionally, as I mentioned, they deliver into the stock itself. If you have a high churn strategy that is using 0DTE options, you have to take into account that at the end of that day, they're gonna settle into the underpinning stock, and that stock you will then have to trade out of. You have things like overnight risk until you can get out of that stock position, and then you just also have delay in that it's just an extra step that you have to add to the trading. All of this goes kinda to my point that one doesn't replace the other, but yet I think the two kind of augment each other and help build options usage.
Rob, you used an interesting phrase when you were talking about your slides. You said that trading volumes are at historic extremes right now. I would infer that, you know, your commentary about there's a structural shift doesn't mean that this is the maximum that we're gonna see, that we still have a lot of structural volume upside relative to current levels. Is that the right way to think about it?
I think it is. The best way that I can sum this up is if I look at it, and I'll use retail as an example. If I look at retail broker platforms in the U.S., Robinhood's very public with a lot of their numbers. They've said 4% of their 27 million users are options-enabled. You go to some of the other platforms, and I would argue it's anywhere from 4%-8% is what people come back with and say that's how many users on their platform can trade options today. It's hard to believe a 52+ year-old industry only has mid to high single-digit penetration and access from an options perspective.
Now while I don't think those numbers will ever get to 100, I do think that you could realistically see a 50%-60% type of saturation in those markets. We have a lot of upside, I think, room to grow. It makes sense, right? Like, as people get more and more comfortable... Nobody likes volatility, right? Nobody likes uncertainty. The more people get comfortable with using an option to, say, cap upside and downside at the same time, now they know their outcomes. They know at a certain point their band that the market can move and impact their portfolio is now smaller. They get more comfortable. They'll put more money at risk. They'll grow their portfolio. Like, all these tools, I think, are really leading towards taking that 4%-8% and growing it.
You talked some about some of the new opportunities ahead of Cboe and binary contracts and prediction markets were on that list. How do you carve out a competitive moat in that space when other exchanges are also trying to roll out new products along those lines?
I'll, you know, I'll start with that and then let Rob continue. I think first of all, you know, we're really focused on developing event and prediction products that are really based on financial instruments and financial and economic events and forecasts. We're not really interested in the broader landscape. If you look at what's happening in Polymarket and Kalshi, for example, not a lot of that activity is actually in the areas that we're focused on. Yet, I think we see extraordinary untapped potential, in the way that Rob was describing if we just focus on that, starting with security-based products. There's a whole product plan behind what Rob is talking about in terms of the SPX yes/no contracts and the yes, no, maybe so contract.
The other thing that I guess I would say is that I think we have a distinctive advantage, which is that, you know, we have the reputation, the infrastructure, the reliability, and the distribution network. When we talk to our partners at Schwab and Robinhood and places like that, they prefer to do business with us because they're doing large-scale business with us already, and we just have that sort of reputation in the market for, you know, market integrity, market quality, you know, quality of product design, market supervision, market oversight, technology, and operational resilience. I think it's a fertile area.
It's very early stages, but who we are makes a huge difference in our ability to compete, even if we're getting beyond, you know, proprietary product or products that may have, you know, intellectual property associated with them. I just think our identity makes us much more attractive and much more competitive over the long run as the industry matures and grows.
All right. Maybe time for one last question. Craig, you talked about the portfolio rationalization efforts. Do you feel like you're pretty much done with those at this point? Maybe other side of the coin, you guys have a lot of cash on your balance sheet. How are you thinking about deploying that going forward?
Yeah, I'll take the first part and then let Jill address the second part. On the first part, I think we are very, very largely done. We've done a lot. We've gotten through it very quickly in my tenure. I would say the only thing that remains is, you know, we're continuing to just think about within DataVantage, as I said, we have, you know, real-time data, historical reference data, but then we have, you know, a portfolio of small businesses in the risk management analytics area. We just have to think about where we're going with that and what we think makes sense and what should be an area of focus for us. Then we have obviously our Cboe Global Indices business.
We're just gonna continue to look at those things, but there's not really any kind of major additional changes that will be happening. We're focused now, and what this strategic realignment has really afforded us the opportunity to do is to shift the focus to the core business and to new growth opportunities like what Rob was talking about.
I'm conscious we're over time, I'll try to be rather quick in my response here. As you alluded to, we do have an extremely healthy balance sheet at the moment. You look, we have very low leverage. What I will say is we generate a lot of free cash flow, and it's a good position to be in. We do have a history of paying quarterly dividends, and we have increased that dividend payout rate, historically during the third quarter. If you look back August, we announced a 14% increase to the dividend rate. We will continue to be opportunistic with the share repurchases. Finally, as it relates to the new growth initiatives, you know, that Rob mentioned, it's great to have that flexibility to be able to lean into organic investments as and when they make sense.
Again, coming back, you know, especially the position we're in, it's really nice to have the flexibility and just, you know, dry powder that we have available to us.
Terrific. Well, I think we'll wrap it up there, but we have a breakout session downstairs, and thank you, everybody, for joining us.
Thank you.