Okay. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the 2019 Annual Meeting of Shareholders of the CME Group and call this meeting to order. I'm Terry Duffy, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of CME Group, and I will be presiding at this meeting. With us today in our audience are members of the CME Group's Board of Directors and our management team.
Before I go any further on that, I'd just like to some of you may not know one of our directors from our newest acquisition, which is Michael Spencer. So Michael, why don't you stand up real quick so people can see you. Michael is you heard a lot about us talking about NEX from a year ago. Michael is the founder of NEX, originally iCap, and he's come a long way. He's now a member of our Board, but obviously we're integrating the transaction and very happy to have Michael part of the team.
Also next to me is Kathleen Conan, our General Counsel and Corporate Secretary. Kathleen will act as secretary for the meeting. Our representatives from Ernst and Young, our independent registered public accounting firm, is also present at the meeting and will be available to answer questions regarding their presentation, a part of proposal number 2. A representative from Broadridge Financial Solutions has been appointed to act as our independent Inspector of Election and is in the back of the room. One of the things we are constantly doing is meeting with shareholders throughout the year, and we recently announced our Q1 2019 earnings on May 1.
Information on the Q1 performance is available on our website. Therefore, today, we will focus on the formal business of the shareholders meeting. I will also be doing a financial presentation that John Pachowicz, our CFO, will conduct after the proposals have been presented. We will conduct 2 separate Q and A sessions, the first covering the official proposal to be voted on today and the second covering the general business of CME Group. Please reserve your questions and comments that do not relate to the specific proposals to the general question session.
As a reminder, audio and videotaping and photography during the meeting is strictly prohibited. Now Kathleen Cronin, our Corporate Secretary, will present. Kathleen?
Thank you, Terry. All shareholders of record at the close of business on March 11, 2019, are allowed to vote at the meeting. An affidavit has been provided by the Inspector of Election attesting to the fact that materials relating to the meeting were furnished to all shareholders of record beginning on March 22. A list of registered shareholders entitled to vote at the meeting has been available at our offices for the past 10 days and is available for examination by any shareholder during the meeting from the Inspector of Election. I have been advised by the Inspector of Election that a quorum is present for all proposals either in person or by proxy except for the proposal relating to the election of the Class B3 Director and the Class B3 Nominating Committee.
In the absence of a quorum for the Class B3 shareholders, no valid election of the Class B3 Director or the Nominating Committee members can take place under our charter or bylaws. As we disclosed in the proxy statement, if we did not achieve a quorum for a proposal, we would not adjourn that portion of the meeting to solicit for more votes. As a result, Liz Cook, our current Class B3 Director, who is running unopposed in this election, will become a holdover under Delaware laws and our bylaws and will continue to serve until her successor is duly elected at the 2020 Annual Meeting or her earlier resignation or removal. Also, the Class B3 Nominating Committee members who served for this election will continue to serve until their successors are duly elected at the 2020 meeting.
Based on the Secretary's report, declare that this meeting is duly convened for Proposals 1, 2 and 3 and for Proposals 4 and 5 with respect to the Class B1 and Class B2 shareholders. The polls for voting on all matters are hereby open at this time. It is now 10:0:7 a. M. If you previously voted, there is no need to vote today.
If you still need to vote, please raise your hand and a ballot will be provided to you. So anybody that needs a ballot? Okay. No ballots? The polls will close after the proposal have been presented and discussed.
All votes submitted today during the meeting will be subject to final verification by the Inspector of Election. The next order of business is a description of the matters to be voted on at today's meeting. Kathleen, please present those matters now.
All proposals being presented today are described in more detail in our proxy statement, copies of which may be obtained from our Inspector of Election. The first item is the election of 17 Equity Directors as set forth in the proxy statement. Item 2 is the ratification of the appointment of Ernst and Young LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for 2019. Item 3 is the approval of an advisory vote on the compensation of our named executive officers. Item 4 is the election of 3 Class B1 directors and 2 Class B2 directors as set forth in the proxy statement.
Item 5 is the election of 5 members to each of the Class B1 and Class B2 nominating committees as described in the proxy statement. The Board of Directors has recommended that shareholders vote for proposals 1, 2 and 3 and no recommendations were made in connection with proposals 4 or 5. As previously discussed, the matters for Class B3 shareholders under Proposals 4 and 5 are not being presented due to lack of a quorum.
Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes the introduction of the proposals to be presented at the meeting. The floor is now open for questions or comments from shareholders relating to the proposals being voted on at today's meeting. As a reminder, a separate discussion period has been scheduled later in the proceedings for general matters relating to the company. Please limit your questions to a couple of minutes or less. If you wish to speak, please raise your hand, wait to be recognized.
Once recognized, please identify yourself stating your name and indicating whether you are a shareholder of record or a proxy holder and the proposal that you would like to discuss. So we will take questions on the proposals that were put forth by the Secretary. Anybody have any questions on the proposals? Thank you. As it appears, if you have no questions, we will proceed to the closing of the polls.
If you have not returned your ballot, please raise your hand and someone will collect it for you. I know there was one ballot still outstanding, so we'll give that a moment to that ballot to be counted. We'll wait just a moment until that ballot is collected. As there appears to be no more votes outstanding, I hereby declare the polls closed as of 10:11 a. M.
Before I ask Kathleen to present a preliminary unaudited report to the Inspector election, I would ask our Chief Financial Officer, John Petrovich, to give a quick update on the financials so you can see what we've been doing. John, so I'll turn it over to you. It will be very brief, but think also very important. I've
never been accused of being brief. So all right. So let me start by talking about our full year 2018 performance. An exceptionally strong 4th quarter contributed to overall record of 2018 ADV of 19,200,000 contracts traded a day, up 18% versus 2017. Our adjusted earnings per share increased by 43% to $6.82 We had record volumes across 4 product areas, interest rates, agricultural products, FX and metals, as well as record levels of total options and electronic options volume.
So between 2016 2018, CME Group's revenue grew by $580,000,000 excluding NEX, while total adjusted expense increased by only $55,000,000 during that time. We've built a very scalable platform and we intend to operate the CME and NEX businesses very efficiently. With the strong tailwinds to finish 2018, we made the most of it. Turning to 2019, market conditions have changed significantly and volatility has dropped across virtually every asset class. Nevertheless, the Q1 of 2019 was our 3rd highest volume quarter in our history behind Q1 of last year and Q4 of last year.
CME Group has a track record of growing in different macroeconomic environments. We continue to launch innovative new products and to support customer needs and to create capital and operational efficiencies for our market participants. In Q1, we had multiple volume and OI records, including sulfur futures, FX Link, Bitcoin futures, invoice spreads, copper options and our new WTI Houston product, just to name a few. Our recently introduced MicroE Mini Futures contract launched on Monday traded over 300,000 contracts in its debut and more than 475,000 contracts yesterday. This was the best new product launch in our history.
We had significant customer engagement running strategic targeted campaigns, educating market participants on new products and cross selling our products along with our new cash markets and optimization services. During the Q1, all 6 product areas had an increase in the proportion of their business coming from outside the U. S. Latin America volume was up 19% and Asia was relatively flat despite the low volatility environment. While continuing to execute on strategic growth drivers, we kept our core expense base relatively flat in the Q1.
Total average daily volume so far in 2019 is approximately 18,000,000 contracts per day. It's worth noting that this week our open interest reached 136,000,000 contracts, the highest level we've seen in the last year and close to the all time high of 138,000,000 contracts, which we hit in March of last year. So we're very pleased with how the NEX integration is progressing. Terry mentioned that. The teams are working well together as we execute our synergy and customer outreach plans.
Our goal is to provide increased benefits to our market participants who have been providing us helpful advice and feedback along the way in terms of what they'd like to see. We expect to achieve $50,000,000 in run rate synergies by the end of 2019 and expect to realize $25,000,000 in P and L impact mostly in the second half of this year. Our price our stock price is currently trading at about $178 per share, and we reached an all time high in November of last year at $197 per share. We're up considerably from the same day a year ago when the stock was at $159 per share and 2 years ago when we were trading at $118 per share. The total shareholder return from the end of April of last year to the end of April of this year is 16%, higher than our U.
S.-based exchange peers and higher than the S and P 500. Even more importantly, since our annual variable dividend was implemented in 2012, our total shareholder return has been 4 20% compared to 173% for the S and P 500 during the same period. That concludes my remarks and we appreciate your participation today and I'll turn it back to Terry.
Thanks John. Appreciate very much the update. Now I'd like to ask Kathleen Cronin to present the preliminary unaudited report of the Inspector of Election. Kathleen?
The Inspector of Election has tabulated the preliminary voting results, which show they were for 1, 2 and 3 which show they were approved as recommended by the company. The preliminary voting results also show that in the election of 3 Class B1 directors, Geden Hirschton, William Hobert and Robert Tierney have been elected. In the election of 2 Class B II Directors, Ron Pankow and Dave Wescott have been elected. These results are subject to final verification and we will file a report containing the final tabulation with the SEC within 4 days. Liz Cook, our current Class B3 Director will continue to serve on our Board until our successor is duly elected at the 2020 Annual Meeting.
The report of the corporate I'm sorry?
In addition, the results of the election of 5 members to serve on the Class B1 and Class B2 nominating committees will be distributed to our members as soon as possible following the receipt of the audited Inspector of Election Report. The members of the Class B3 Nominating Committee will continue to serve until the 2020 election.
Thank you. The report of the corporate secretary on the preliminary voting results is accepted and that completes the formal business of the shareholder meetings. I hereby declare that the 2019 Annual Meeting of Shareholders adjourned as of 10:16 am. At this time, I will take general questions as it relates to the business of the company. If you wish to speak, please raise your hand, identify yourself, and obviously, it's state if you're a shareholder of record or a proxy holder.
But we'll take any general questions that you may have with the business. Yes, sir?
Okay. I'm Terry Brady. I'm a beneficial shareholder from York Hill, Illinois. Harry Brady. Harry Brady is official.
Same as your except spell it different. Yes, I came with one question and I suddenly have 2. It's a 2nd year in a row now. I've seen no quorum on your other class shares. I don't know what's going on.
I'm just I see press releases on reorganizations coming out in the news. I just want to know what's going on. I'm not affiliated with this company. I have no knowledge of what's going on other than maybe being a customer. I've had no relationship at all with these companies.
And I'm just concerned what's going on inside? Is this something I should be concerned about as a shareholder? Is there some disruption or some problems in your management organization or structure of the company? Just what's happening there?
As it relates to a quorum, is that what you said? Yes.
You just Class B1 and B2 shares don't have a quorum. Last year, you had the same It's
really I assure you that the company that we're running it in a very professional way. You just heard a quick financial update as it relates for the shareholders from my Chief Financial Officer. My management team, myself and the entire organization is very focused on this organization in running its business. As it relates to a quorum of any of the particular classes whether it be B1, B2 or B3, this is one of the reasons why we had a proposal as you recall a year ago in order to eliminate that because of the voter empathy of people not wanting to show up to vote their governance issue. So that is the reason why we are not getting the quorum as it relates to the B3.
We have to have 2 thirds remind me of the number to get a quorum, is it 50% of these outstanding?
A third, right. It's 1 third of the outstanding.
1 third of the outstanding. And when you have remind me of the number of B3s. 1287. 1287 votes, which are mostly held by a lot of them are held by individuals in the B3 category. We're in the B1 and B2, very institutionally owned.
So it's a little bit different and there's smaller amount of participants in both B1 and B2. So there's no issues with the company. It's just trying to get the individuals in the B3 to devote their shares for their governance issues. So that's one of the reasons I put forth a proposal to buy back those governance rights.
Okay. But as a an outside looking in, I see 5 8 more members of the Board of Directors representing shareholders that haven't got enough interest to even vote for them than make a quorum or make the President's offer. I'm just wondering what kind of structure is that where you got people representing that aren't even enough interested make their presence known and to even elect them. I just it befuddles me just what I see going on. And I don't know what's going on inside.
I'm just concerned because Yes.
No, sir, there's nothing going on inside. I think what your question is, is why do we even have these B representatives? And they came about back in the demutualization of 2,000. And when we went public, one of the concessions was to allow what was then required as members to be on the governance of the company. And under CFTC statues as our primary regulator, we do also have regulations about the makeup of our Board to make sure we have expertise within the Board room.
So that is historically how that obligation has been filled is through the member, old member structure of their expertise in running the business and then we had to have other qualifications associated with it. Again, that's where this all came from and as the business has evolved over the last 18 plus years, there's just like I said earlier, there's a lot of people that just don't care about the governance of the organization. This is a publicly held entity, and everybody on that Board has an obligation to all shareholders. And I think what you're referring to is where this came from, and that's just a legacy issue that I tried to eliminate a year ago, but we did not get the votes in order to do so. And so there's nothing wrong with the company.
It's just a part of the legacy structure that was originally brought forth. You want to add to that?
No, I think you covered it unless you have further questions.
Go right ahead, Kerry. Keep going.
I was going to come in later. Yes, I just again, this is don't take this as a personal attack, right? It's on the combined thing of CEO and Chairman of the Board. And I'm not disputing your performance on the job. I'm just thinking that it's sort of a conflict of interest on the Board.
If you were only a member of the Board and not the Chairman of the Board, you could still have communications to the Board, but you wouldn't be reporting to yourself as far as Board issues went.
I do report out to the full Board. I am accountable to my full Board of Directors. Even though I am the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, I am still accountable to the full Board of Directors for my daily activities.
I just got sort of a sub proposal
here just to think about.
You've got Larry Gurney's, as I proposal here just to think about. You've got Larry Gertes. And as I look at his background, you would make an excellent Chairman of the Board.
He makes a great lead director too, which he is right now.
He's a director, but I mean he's a lead director. But looking at his experience and everything, he would be a good candidate for Chairman of the Board and you replace him as just a member of the Board, and of course, you won't be independent, but that to me would be a structure I would like to see just as an investor that would give me a little more feeling of balance in the company. Just passing comment.
Kerry, I appreciate it. And listen, I am the only Chairman of this company since it's been public. I am the only one who's ever sat in the Chairman's seat since 2002. I took company public as Chairman. And so there's a lot of continuity associated with my role, not only as Chairman, but as Chief Executive Officer.
Mr. Gerdes, we did institute a Lead Director. We've had 3 of them over the last several years. Mr. Gerdes does do an excellent job.
I appreciate you promoting him to the role of Chairman. I'm sure he is looking forward to accepting that nomination of yours. But at the same time, I think the Board leaves its options open, and we understand that there can be a difference of opinion to separate the roles of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and I think there's pros and cons to both in the Board and its governance committee and they go through this quite often to make sure that we're under good corporate governance standards. And right now, I believe we are. Thank you, Mr.
Brady. Mr. Lurch?
My name is Bill Lurch. I have B shares and A shares. And the value of the B Shares, of course, comes first. There's so many required for clearinghouses and then lower commissions. And years ago, we used the B shares.
Going back in the '70s, there was a request, 15 minutes, please. Well, that was an informal request for the seed holders or B Shares to go into the new pits and stimulate to get the new contracts off the ground. At the time, we were competing with New York for gold and we ended up winning it. We ended up with the dominant gold. It wasn't just Maury.
But anyway, B shares could be used to stimulate Negro. And do we have any plans to use the B shares for new contracts coming in, give them a cut in commission for a certain time or whatever, but what's being done by CME Group to use the assets of the B shares?
Let me break it down into 2 parts because I think my CFO hit on a very important point. We had the launch of a new contract on Monday and then followed up again on Tuesday. The trade on Monday was bigger than the entire exchange trade 15 years ago for the average daily volume on the one day launch of a new contract over 308,000 contracts. Our average daily volume in 2002 was less than 300 1,000 contracts a day. The reason I know that because when we're doing the IPO and they were fixated on the amount of ADV and our then CFO might have miscalculated something at the time of what the ADV could or could not be.
I remember that number. So unfortunately, Bill, you and I have been around a long time, so we hear some of these numbers today is pretty amazing. And then do 475,000 contracts yesterday on a brand new contract 2 days old, it's pretty remarkable about the way we built the distribution of this organization. And when you look at the demographics and where this came from all over the world and the geography, it's just truly amazing how we launched new contracts. As it relates to the Bs, I believe that and I've always believed this, I think there's a value added into having members still trade our products and we do give them their core rights as you pointed out and one of the way we do is we still give them a discounted rate to trade and we think there's a value to that.
And that's a practice that we have followed at CME. In the Chicago Board of Trade, it's in their core rights under their DCM to have a lower rate for contract for a member. It's in the New York Mercantile Exchange's core rights to have a lower rate for the member. And at CME, we've always followed that practice. We have a core right language that's a little bit different, but essentially, the practice has been followed.
So I think we've done a lot of prudent things to help stimulate new contracts and new business along the way. And I think we've continued to evolve. So and the B shares are a part of that, what I like to say to the members. I think when you look at ICE, ICE is, as you know, is very much not a transactional type business like it used to be. They're in mostly market data now as a big part of the revenue.
They diversified their primary contracts. One of the biggest one is Brent. If you look at the open interest in Brent, we're holding a significant amount of open interest in Brent today where we never had that just as little as a couple of years ago. And I don't have the exact number with me and maybe one of my team does, but we reported on this yesterday and about the open interest that we are holding in Brent contract, which is primarily an ice driven contract, which is truly remarkable. And when you look at our new contracts such as SOFR, which is the new secured overnight financial rate, which is going to be one of the potential replacements for LIBOR, we are holding 93% of the open interest against ICE.
We are holding 67% of the average daily trade against ICE. So I think we're competing quite well doing all the tools that we have including using members at a discounted rate and other sales tools that we deploy and other value propositions that we believe others cannot replicate. Bill, I'll say it again. I think that it's hard for me to manage the valuation of a potential asset that gets a discounted rate for trading. My job is to bring in more business to the institution and I believe prices will take care of themselves, including the share price, and that has been the situation.
I think I clearly outlined under some of the new products, and I can go on over some of the products we've launched just in the last 5 years that have generated millions of contracts of ADV to this organization and it's grown the business exponentially and both members have benefited by that and also the shareholders who own the institution. So I think there's been a benefit to both.
My question is in regards to the interest in eliminating the B Share representation of our members, The B Share representatives that we have, our elected members, really represent a lot of people that are out in the field and from the floor. There's questions that come up, there's problems that come up. And these are the guys that the people out in the country go to and guys from the floor go to. And to eliminate them, I think, we'd be doing our institution a disservice. And I think that we need them and we want to keep them.
I mean, I'm still involved in different agricultural type of business as well as other institutional business as well and bring them into our company. And if there's Board members that have to be eliminated, I don't think it has to come from the members. And also our members helped to build so many of these contracts that have become successful and there's people that are still around that I don't think that the exchange is really utilizing to help to promote new contracts, solve problems and grow our institution.
And I
appreciate it, Stuart. And I think that the proposal there is no proposal to eliminate any governance at today's meeting. You're referring to a proposal from last year, and I appreciate that. And I think when you look at the proposal that was put out last year, I clearly stated in that proposal that we would maintain a number of what we would call members in the composition of the Board regardless of the proposal passed or failed. So we were not going to eliminate that expertise that you just eloquently outlined.
So for sure, that wasn't the case. And I'm a big believer that everybody brings value to the company. So we don't have that proposal on the today's agenda, and I'm not sure I would ever bring that proposal back, to be honest with you. And it's not because I don't believe that it should not pass. It's just because I think that we have a lot of things to do around here, and I can't focus our time on the elections of the B Directors.
And I'm happy that we have a corpsman of B1 and B2 today. I'm happy with the structure of the Board that I have in place today. I think when you look at the performance of the overall company, the Board is a reflection of that, a big reflection of that, and we've seen the growth of the business. So it's really hard to undermine the value of CME since 2,002 when we had a valuation of just around $1,000,000,000 and today we have a valuation of $64,000,000,000 So that's a really hard thing to refute. When you talk about ADV, you have 300,000 contracts a day and today it's 18,000,000 that does not just benefit people that own this stock, that benefits to participants who are looking to trade these marketplaces who never had opportunities like this ever in the '70s, '80s or '90s.
This is the pie is so much larger today, and I think it benefits both participants in the marketplace, makes it more efficient, and in return, I think that generates revenue for the people who own it and that's the way a good business should be run. But I appreciate your comments, Stu. Yes, sir.
Thank you. Stuart Ellison. I applaud management for the direction that CME has taken over the last few years. With record income and record open interest for 2018, it's great, yet the variable annual dividend did decrease from 2018 to 2017. My question is, is there a new strategy that the CME is taking for its cash or are there some unforeseen expenses, maybe legal expenses that the CME is expecting?
Legal expenses are always a treat. I won't deny that, Stuart. So I don't want to be de minimis miss of it because my counselor here won't let me. But the reason why the annual variable dividend and there's a language in there called variable and there's variable for reasons, a whole host of reasons. And one of those reasons can be strategic in nature.
And one of the things that I, the management team and our Board felt was strategic in nature was to do an acquisition of a company called NEX. And that acquisition was an enterprise value of $5,900,000,000 So in order to do that, we had to facilitate not only some cash, some stock and take on some more debt. So our EBITDA, so went to about 1.5 times, John, 1.6 times in that neighborhood and then we paid it pardon me? And it's down to 1.36 times. So what we're doing is paying down debt at the same time.
In a way you pay down debt as you might take last year we took away from the annual variable dividend to do so in order to take on the strategic transaction. So I think we paid $1,000,000,000 plus in 20 18, 2017, paid in 2018. And this year we paid $675,000,000 in 2019 from 2018. Roughly half of the former variable debt. So the policy hasn't changed.
The legal fees haven't gone up to a point that it would cause any variable dividend issues. It's really paying down some debt, taking a strategic look at the long term health of the organization, acquiring the NEX Group with all its optimization businesses, its cash businesses and U. S. Treasury debt on the cash side, its cash businesses on EBS, which is the foreign exchange side to marry those with our suite of products that we have here in the future side. And we think that offering will be very powerful in the years to come.
So that's why the strategic direction was made to acquire that firm and then also we wanted to pay down some debt and when you do that you have to take down some take it from somewhere else. And that was very well we telegraphed that multiple times to shareholders. So that was not a surprise to the shareholder base because we did say that we would be paying down debt. We think it's prudent to be in that one times EBITDA in that neighborhood and when you take on a transaction, you get the 1.6 times, you need to pay some of that down. It helps with your rating, it helps with your borrowing cost and it helps run your business.
Does that make sense, Stuart?
Yes. Thank you, sir. There is a big court case coming up this fall. Would you care to comment at all on it?
I don't know what court case you're referring to in the fall, sir.
I believe the Langer case.
Yes, I don't know the timing of the Langer case. All I know is I was deposed about a week or so ago for 8 hours, and I'm still tired from that. I believe the court case
is called for September, October.
We don't comment on pending litigation and the timing thereof. So we would only be speculating as how that is proceeding. Right now, we're still going through working with our outside counsel. Is that fair?
Yes. And we don't expect those expenses to be material to the company.
And I don't know if you heard the general counsel. She said she doesn't expect the cost to be material to the company of their legal expenses.
As much as I support lawyers.
Does that answer your question, Stuart? Thank you, sir.
Okay, stand up please.
Hi, Mark Hickerson, proxy holder. Hi, Mark. With the growth you've seen in retail volume, do you anticipate rolling out more weekly options, for example, Tuesday Thursday S and P option or making the universal settlement times for CB options for bond options instead of different Wednesdays Fridays?
Whether we decide to list additional products is something that we're we try not to telegraph too soon. Obviously, we don't want to give our weekly options, Mark, have been very, very successful and they've been an amazing risk management tool for the participants that are using them. So we will continue to go down a path that we marketplace needs not only here in the United States, but globally. So those are decisions that we make all the time and it's no different than when we listed the new products like we did this week and we have done over the last several years. So I'm a big believer that options are a big growth part of this business.
They continue to fortify your institution because they're strategy based products that protect the risk management based products associated with them. So I like that fact. Derek Salmon, he's not here today. He's in New York working. But when he was originally hired, his background was more in options and that's one of the reasons I really liked having him on here because we've built our options portfolio over the last several years with him, Sean Tully and the rest of the team.
But in order to do that, you have to have an amazing tech and operations folks in order to facilitate all of these problems. And our Chief Operating Officer, Julio Holzrichter, has done an amazing job. Our President, Brian Durkin, does a really good job help facilitate this. So we are growing this, but at the same time, there's always capacity issues associated with anything you do and there's priorities associated with it. But we are not holding back on something that we think that the market needs today.
Does that answer your question, Mark? Brian, you want to add or is that okay? Okay, thanks. Thanks, Mark. Any other questions?
I won't talk about anything.
I have no questions.
Did you
get a question for me?
No, no, no questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm happy to listen to both call this very relaxed atmosphere. If anybody has anything, please don't hesitate. And if you don't want to ask a question, I understand that, don't hesitate to reach out to me. One of the things I'm going to finish up by saying is, I'm going to go back to Stu a little bit here and I've known Stu my entire career of 39 years here at CME. I talk to members all the time.
I talk to 2 today about particular issues. I don't think the members and the shareholders, whatever you want to call them, all shareholders, have any concerns or qualms about picking up a phone and reaching out to anybody in this organization. And I don't know anybody on my management team or anybody on my Board that would ever turn down that call. So I think that we are very open to all constituents of this organization, and that's what makes us a very strong and powerful offering in the world of global finance. So Stu, I hope that gives you some confidence that we're not dismissive of that.
We don't walk around pounding our chest about how great thou art. We are grateful for every day. We are grateful for every one lot that comes into this organization to every size. So we're going to continue to act like that, and that's what will help us grow both the value from the members and for the participants and the shareholders. So I want to thank you all very, very much.
And that concludes our meeting and we are adjourned. Is that it, Counselor?
That's it.
All right. Thank you all very much.