Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our next session here. I'm Ben Budish. I cover the U.S. brokers, asset managers, and exchanges here at Barclays. And with us for the next fireside, we've got Ian Lowitt, CEO of Marex. Ian, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.
Thanks, Ben. I'm really excited.
Maybe just to start it off, you know, Marex went public last year. You saw a lot of nice growth since the IPO. Just for anybody who's less familiar with the business, can you give a little bit of an overview of the story?
Sure. Yeah, I think, as you said, you know, we, we went public, towards the end of April of last year. It's, you know, stocks performed very well. We were up 85% year on year. And, you know, performance has been very strong. So I think, you know, pre-IPO, we were making sort of $230 million of PBT, and we're 75% ahead of that on a run rate basis this year with essentially doing a little bit north of $200 million in the first half of the year. So performance has been strong since the IPO, and the stock performance has sort of reflected that, and we're obviously very pleased with that. You know, in terms of the, you know, sort of the narrative, you know, I think that post the IPO, we've really sort of delivered in a way that's sort of consistent with what people would have expected.
Our business is one that is essentially about providing a really important part of the connectivity in the sort of ecosystem where people need to connect to exchanges. So people, I think, are very familiar with the exchanges and the clearing houses. What they may be a little less familiar with is how do clients just connect to those exchanges in a world where, you know, it's exchange, it's listed derivatives, so futures and options. And essentially, you need a clearing member if you're anybody other than sort of the very, very largest players in order to connect to the exchanges. And what Marex has done is built, you know, a business which is centered on our ability to connect clients to those exchanges. And that's a very sticky relationship. It's a, you know, it's a very profitable relationship.
It's a high-level relationship with those clients, and you can cross-sell, very successfully, you know, execution services and additional hedging services, so it's a market infrastructure component of the market and one where it gives you a lot of opportunity for clients to come in and provide, and you can provide them services either by providing access to market liquidity or clearing.
Before we dig into the business a little bit more, you know, earlier this year, Marex was the subject of a short report which made a number of allegations about the firm's accounting practices, among other things. I felt like you provided a pretty strong rebuttal on the last earnings call, but, you know, since then, you've had more conversations with investors. Are there any lingering issues or outstanding questions, you know, you've been hearing, that you'd like to address?
Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I've been very vocal about, you know, the value of being, you know, a public company. And I think we've got enormous benefit as Marex in terms of our brand and, you know, the way in which the firm is sort of perceived as a result of being a public company. Now, being a public company, you know, means people can short your stock. It also means that, you know, there can be short reports without any sort of requirement to be accurate, but that's just all part of, you know, how the overall market functions.
As you say, you know, we refuted the sort of points in the report, and I think that the investors, you know, who read the report, you know, looked at the points quite carefully and determined that there wasn't substance to the points that were sort of being made. The conversations that we've had subsequent to the report coming out have actually been very heartening. I mean, people, you know, took it seriously, as did we, and we needed to and did sort of address the sort of concerns of investors, debt holders, and our clients. There really has been, you know, very good receptivity to that. I think people ask the questions, and they're very comfortable with the answers.
You know, we've continued to see sort of clients coming onto the platform, increasing the amount of business they do with us, increasing the level of balances they have with us. There really are no lingering questions, you know, from any of the constituencies based on all the conversation I've had and senior management have had with clients.
Great. Okay. So back to the business.
Yeah.
You know, the macro backdrop, it's been quite supportive, you know, a lot of healthy volatility. You know, can you give us an update on what you're seeing most recently in terms of the operating environment? You know, how is Q3 shaking up? Anything you can share there?
Yeah. I think that, you know, the environment has been attractive in the sense that exchange volumes have been increasing quite steadily over a number of years. And certainly, over the last few years, we've had interest rates, you know, sort of rising and being, you know, quite a lot higher than they had been five years ago, even four years ago, and, you know, for our business, that's an attractive backdrop. And we've also had, you know, historically, you know, it's a quite high volatility, and volatility, again, is sort of helpful to our business. You know, as we think about the current quarter, it doesn't appear to me as though sort of the headwinds are sort of influencing us in a particularly negative way.
More to the point, the underlying momentum that we have in gaining share, you know, is offsetting some of those headwinds. I mean, we always anticipated that rates would come down. They've obviously come down in, you know, 2025 versus where they operated in 2024. And I think that, you know, there's more conviction now that, you know, rates will come down again this year. And that's not something that we weren't expecting. But the effect on, our economics is relatively modest. I mean, I think we've estimated that 100 basis point reduction in rates over the course of a full year is something like $20 million of PBT. You know, and our current run rate of, you know, circa $400 million, you know, that represents sort of 5%.
So it's not nothing, but it's not something that is overwhelming relative to other things that we could actually do to offset it. So, you know, the environment is, you know, probably gonna be a little more challenging, but, you know, we've been growing the firm at 35% a year for the last sort of 10 years. On average, we've had sequential growth every year. Certainly, based on the first half of the year, it looks like, you know, this year will be another year of fairly substantial, sequential growth. And so we see sort of enough momentum in the franchise and the share gains and the extension into new products and new geographies and the impact of acquisitions that, we have confidence that, you know, we're gonna be able to continue to grow well.
So a lot of your growth historically, or maybe not the majority, but a helpful amount has come from M&A. You know, talk a little bit about the strategy there, your approach to integration, and maybe give us a little color on how some of your more recent acquisitions have been performing.
Yeah. I mean, you know, acquisitions are an important part of, you know, how we're looking to grow. And I think that, you know, it's not so much that we're looking to grow through acquisitions as much as we're looking to grow the firm. We're looking to grow the firm because we see lots of opportunity for us to expand what we're doing with our existing set of clients and also to add new clients onto our platform. If you can broaden the set of services you can provide to clients, then, you know, that's a great vehicle to sort of grow. And if you can add new clients, that's, again, you know, a great way to grow.
Now, you could do that organically, and we certainly have a lot of initiatives underway that will, you know, broaden our sort of product offering in particular, as well as, in some cases, geographically. But we also recognize that to grow organically in some of these circumstances, particularly as you look to grow in certain geographies, it's just really, really very difficult. And so, you know, we look for acquisitions that are gonna bring new capabilities and new clients and often give us presence in geographies which, we just see real challenge in building ourselves. So, for example, you know, earlier this year, we closed on a clearing business in the Middle East called Aarna.
You know, we were challenged by our board when we brought that acquisition to them to say, "Well, could you have built this organically?" And I think as we assessed it, we thought that it would be, you know, very, very difficult to build that out successfully and that three years forward, we'd probably be way worse off than we would be if we made the acquisition by way of example. So we made the acquisition. We were also anticipating fairly sizable day one synergies on the revenue side because, you know, they're a smaller firm, so they were generating less interest income on their client balances. And their sort of terms of trade as a small firm that needed to go through clearing members also meant that they were making less on the clearing activity than they would as part of Marex.
And as part of Marex, we actually, you know, saw almost immediately, almost a 50% increase in its profitability just because they were making more on interest balances and they were paying less, you know, in order to get access to clearing exchanges. So that's a perfect example of, you know, us recognizing that it would be very difficult to build it ourselves and being able to acquire it. We've also, you know, made an acquisition in Brazil, another marketplace that we're very excited about, but also recognize that it's difficult to build. And, you know, probably the most significant success we've had recently is with sort of the acquisition of Cowen's Prime Brokerage business. You know, we always anticipated that that was a gap in our service provision that if we could offer that to clients, would be something that we could make very profitable.
The Cowen business was making something like $85 million of revenue when we acquired it in December of 2023. And in the first half of this year, the revenue run rate of that business is about $200 million. So it does show how when you bring a sort of capability, you extend that capability and then put it onto our platform, it can actually, you know, generate meaningfully higher levels of profitability. And it's that combination of adding clients, adding products, broadening the firm geographically that we think, acquisitions really advance our strategic agenda.
You know, maybe just following up there, you know, can you talk a little bit about the current pipeline? I think you recently commented maybe six or seven deals are potentially live.
Yeah.
So what kind of businesses are you looking at? And maybe how do you also think about, you know, larger scale M&A? We saw one of your competitors not too long ago do a larger acquisition, versus, you know, the smaller tokens that have been more common for you.
Yeah. Look, I mean, I think we have a very healthy pipeline. It's, you know, we often get questions about whether we think there's sort of some natural point where we won't be able to continue to grow, as effectively through acquisitions. You know, our goal is to have 40% of our annual growth come from acquisitions and 60% come organically. So if we're thinking about it in the context of, you know, our current levels of earnings, which are, you know, call it sort of 400-ish, that means that you're looking to add $80 million to grow 20% a year, and we think that 40% of that should come from acquisitions. So we're looking to add, you know, circa $30-$40 million of earnings, you know, from acquisitions and then make those much more profitable in subsequent years as a result of being on the platform.
You know, we are seeing many, many opportunities. You know, those include some subscale, sort of boutiquey capabilities where people believe that they'll be a lot more effective as sort of part of the Marex platform. It includes some quite successful mid-sized, sort of companies, and then, you know, to your point, you know, we are certainly open to larger acquisitions, but we also wanna remain sort of very disciplined around returns, and we also wanna make sure that whatever we acquire sort of fits very effectively within a Marex culture. I mean, when we make an acquisition, we look to integrate it as quickly as we can and make it just part of Marex rather than run as a separate activity or business sort of standalone. We wanna integrate everything quickly.
As a result, we also wanna make sure that it's gonna fit well within Marex. You know, those are all critical components in making those assessments. You know, in the case of the acquisition that you referenced, you know, it was one that we were aware of. It's one where, you know, we engaged. We didn't get very far down the road because I think we didn't think it was a good cultural fit for us. You know, certainly, it's an interesting acquisition, you know, for our competitors, and I know they're sort of very excited about it. You know, what we saw in the case of, you know, sort of Cowen is, you know, we were able to acquire something for $25 million of premium that, you know, is now generating circa $100 million of earnings for us.
So you don't have to go out and spend $1 billion to get $100 million of earnings if you can get the right property and also integrate it and grow it effectively. So we don't feel sort of enormous pressure that you have to do the big deals, but we certainly are open to the big deals and to the extent that, you know, those would fit well with our culture. And we think that, we'll be able to deliver with a high degree of certainty, you know, on our financial targets. We'd certainly be open to those. But acquisitions are just part of the DNA of the firm now. We're, you know, we're looking to do, you know, four plus, you know, acquisitions a year. We have a very substantial pipeline.
We have, you know, a large number of opportunities, and they, they go to all elements of the firm. So we see opportunities in clearing. We see opportunities in agency and execution. We see opportunities in market making, and there are even some acquisitions that would help our solutions franchise. So a broad range of opportunities, and I think as we have more and more success with acquisitions, it actually becomes a virtuous circle. Instead of seeing fewer, you end up seeing more.
All right. Maybe, digging into a couple of your business segments, starting with clearing, you know, just sort of your, your largest part of your business, you've shown some pretty meaningful, you know, balances and revenue growth over the last few years. But maybe just to start, you know, how do you think about competitive differentiation in this business? Like, what makes one clearing firm better? How do you think about, you know, Marex's competitive advantage there?
Yeah. I think that, you know, when we speak to clients and they explain to us why they're, sort of coming to Marex, the themes are really the following. I mean, they, I think, are enormously impressed with the range of, sort of product capability that we have. So if you come to Marex as a potential clearing client, we can connect you to 65 different exchanges, and there's almost no product that we can't cover. So what clients say to us is, you know, they literally don't see a broader, a broader product offering than they see at Marex. Now, what they also see at Marex is clearing being the heart of the firm and sort of the, it's a thing that we devote an enormous amount of time and effort to being just absolutely expert at.
And so when we're sort of competing for mandates, we're competing, you know, often against banks where so the clearing client, the clearing offering is, you know, maybe the 10th or the 15th most important offering they're considering for a particular client, whereas for Marex, it's the core of what we actually do. And I think clients feel that there's a level of expertise that we bring to bear when they talk to us about, you know, metals products or agricultural products or energy products or many of the financial products that they just don't see replicated elsewhere. Our systems are also newer, and so we can be more adaptable in terms of, you know, making adjustments to meet specific client requirements. And then the whole notion of how we service those clients and bring them on and their onboarding experience, I think, is also sort of differentiated.
Because it's the heart of what we do, I think we're just differentially good at it, and we can offer sort of a broader and higher quality, sort of product than others. I think the fact that we're not a bank is seen by some clients as quite important because they don't wanna only have banks as sort of their clearing provider. They like the fact that they're getting an investment-grade counterpart that is a non-bank FCM and isn't going to respond to periods of stress as banks do in aggregate, and that diversifies their service provision. For many clients, they've indicated to us that that's critically important. Those are really the main ways in which I think our clearing offering is differentiated.
Maybe thinking, you know, from a P&L perspective, can you talk about the key revenue drivers? You know, what are you seeing in terms of new customers, cross-sell versus, you know, kind of organic growth and existing products where they're active, you know, adding new customers? And maybe unpack a bit how this sort of sets the foundation for the rest of the business.
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's a little hard. What we're seeing is sort of a lot of clients looking to come onto the platform. And so, you know, every year our pipeline is, because it takes quite a while to onboard clients in clearing, you know, we have a pretty rich sense of you know what that pipeline is and you know how many clients are likely to sort of join over a 6- to 12-month period, so we have sort of a sense that we're probably adding something like $750 million-$1 billion of IM from new clients each year. And you know that remains pretty robust in the sense that we're seeing more and more sort of clients being open to and sort of coming onto Marex.
So, just, you know, by way of example, you know, one of the large trading houses that I think has only used banks historically and has, you know, is now coming onto our platform in Australia, you know, at some point in September. And some of the big hedge funds who, again, have typically, you know, only cleared at banks are moving books onto Marex. And some of our, you know, and one of the sort of big trading houses, you know, has just moved another one of their sort of larger books, sort of to Marex. So we're gaining new clients, and we're adding to the level of business we actually do. And then, you know, the other variable is just how much business individual clients are doing sort of within any particular area.
And that's hard to differentiate between that and, you know, how much sort of cross-selling is going on. But there's a lot of cross-selling. There's a lot of new clients. And all of these things feel like they're virtuous circle, which mean that as I sort of look out over the next sort of series of years, I see those things as not diminishing but actually getting larger. So as we get more credibility as a clearer, it sort of opens up a bigger TAM, and more large hedge funds or more of the largest trading houses will consider sort of coming to Marex. As we get better at sort of cross-selling and engage more with clients around the range of products that we have, you know, that feels like it's accelerating, not decelerating.
So, there is a number of reasons to feel that there's a lot of positive momentum in what we're doing.
Just following up there, one final question on the clearing segment. So one thing we've noticed is that, you know, your transaction growth is outpacing your revenue growth. The revenue per transaction is coming down.
Right.
You know, can you speak to that at all? Is that a function of product mix? Is it a function of serving, you know, as you noted, larger hedge funds and trading firms? What are the key factors?
Yeah. I mean, what it absolutely is not is as a result of sort of pricing pressure per se. So what we find in sort of the clearing world is, you know, for smaller clients who, you know, at their scale, it only makes sense for them to have a single clearer. You know, there's almost like a market clearing price for clearing. And so long as you're within that band, you don't actually compete on price. You compete on service and a series of other sort of factors. And then if you're talking about the next level of client who, you know, conceptually is big enough to have two clearers, there's another sort of pricing band that you have to operate in in order to be competitive.
But at that point, what sort of determines where the business goes is more a function of, sort of the quality of service and the range of services you can provide. And then if you're talking about the largest clients who would typically have three to five clearers, again, there's a sort of pricing that's expected. And so long as you were in their pricing, again, you can win the business based on the quality of your service. And so what you're drawing attention to is the fact that our volumes are growing faster than our revenues because we're making sort of differential progress with those larger clients who just have a lower sort of cost per contract.
What we're also seeing, you know, is we've also been making a lot of progress with clients who are more financially oriented, so people who, you know, are trading fixed income or trading, you know, some of the equity options. And there, the sort of price per contract is also lower. So what's driving this is not price pressure per se. It's about mix shift in terms of the size of clients, but also mix shift in terms of the products. And the combination of those things is quite rapidly increasing revenues, quite rapidly increasing balances, but faster growth in volumes than revenues. But that's not concerning to us because our infrastructure is extremely scalable, and the cost of servicing that extra volume is very low.
That's a good segue into the agency and execution business.
Right.
And securities in particular, you mentioned you're seeing a lot of growth in equity derivatives and things like that?
Right.
Your securities business has grown quite handsomely over the last couple of quarters. Maybe talk about what you're doing to kind of drive that ramp and what more can kind of be done to continue that growth.
Yeah. I mean, look, I think we made a strategic decision a number of years ago to sort of grow at what we could think of as sort of a financial franchise. So essentially clearing and doing agency and execution in financial products with those, sort of equities, fixed income, credit rates, even FX, to augment what we were doing in commodities. So I think we thought about, you know, at the core of the firm and its history has been around commodities. We recognized that, if we really wanted to be able to deliver sequential growth through a whole range of market environments, it was necessary for us to diversify away from just commodities and to extend into sort of financial. I think we've had a great deal of success in that.
It's a combination of acquisitions that we've made that have sort of created sort of a basis for that business, and that's been augmented by you know a very number of sort of organic initiatives. And that combination has got us to a point where financials are now something like 40% of the firm. We think that you know you could get to 50% or even above 50% of our revenues coming from financial products. And you know it was a deliberate effort to diversify the firm to put us in a position where our earnings were more resilient across different you know cycles. You know we've been able to increase profitability sequentially for the last 10 years. This year it looks like it'll be another sequential increase.
We wanna set up the firm so that through a whole range of environments, we will be able to do that. This investment we see as critical. A lot of what we've been able to do in terms of driving growth and in particular profitability is, you know, acquire businesses which were not at their full potential and restructure contracts with producers, improve the quality of businesses, sort of upgrade productivity, just make it part of Marex. A lot of that growth is a function of being able to integrate those acquisitions successfully and expand them.
You know, one of the concerns or questions I get a lot on the securities business is that it's perhaps more competitive, maybe more commoditized than some of your other offerings. I guess, what would your response be? And, and how do you think about Marex's differentiation in trading securities specifically?
Yeah. Look, I mean, I think that what I would point to is just the success we've had in, you know, growing that out and getting our margins up, you know, sort of, you know, into the 20s. It's, you know, it, if we weren't competitive, then there's no way we would've been able to succeed in that particular way. So the question for me is almost a different question, which is, what is it that we're actually doing, that is what we would need to have done in order to generate that type of, performance? And clearly, it can't be just providing very commoditized product in the face of sort of very, extreme competition from very large players with some set of advantage. 'Cause if you were in that real world, you just wouldn't be able to show the growth that we have been able to show.
And I think that, you know, where we've found those opportunities are in the following places. And we see a big opportunity in Prime not competing directly with sort of the Goldmans or the Morgans of the world in terms of their Prime offering, but in providing Prime for, you know, sort of firms somewhere, you know, between 100 and a billion dollars worth of, sort of requirement. And that turns out to be a very attractive place to participate. You're not competing directly with, you know, what are very skilled and effective competitors, but they're not interested in clients of that size. So that's what we've done in Prime, and that's been very successful.
I think the other thing that we've realized is the agency and execution business in securities is quite an attractive business and one where you can there isn't the same level of competition. There's a requirement for you know equity options for single stock options which is not met successfully by others. And you know when we've spoken with some of our investors around you know sort of clearing single stock equity options by way of example you know they say "Well you know we put out an RFP. We only had one person respond to it. It'd be great to you know engage with you." So I guess the point I'm making is that there are components within the securities business which are not just you know low margin heavily competed places. That's not where we play and it's not where we would be expected to be successful.
But there are many, many ways in which we can participate, which we are able to generate attractive market margins. I mean, one of the areas that's just a surprise to me is just sort of the whole FX world. You would, I would've thought from the outside in that it'd be very, very difficult to create profitable FX businesses. But it actually turns out that the spreads in the FX business are still sort of surprisingly robust, and you can actually develop quite an attractive FX business even in a world where when you look at it from the outside in, you would think that there'd be very little chance.
Interesting. Okay. So maybe moving to market making.
Yeah.
You know, Q2 was pretty volatile for all asset classes, but I think your revenues were flat year over year.
Right.
You had some very tough comps from Q2 of the last year. Maybe just, you know, high level, walk through what's important for this business. You know, how do you benefit from volatility? What matters from a macro standpoint?
Yeah. So look, I think that within market making, there's two things that drive it. I mean, you know, one is just sort of the volume of opportunity in market making, and then the second is, you know, what's the bid-offer spread that you're able to extract in making those markets. You know, higher levels of volatility are, you know, usually, or maybe almost always, you know, lead to higher bid-offer spreads. So the environments that are attractive for market making are ones where there's a lot of volatility. There's sizable bid-offer spreads, and the volumes are quite high. So you know, the comparison for us, which was, you know, the second quarter of last year, was a particularly attractive marketplace in metals. And you know, that was a combination of high levels of volatility, a lot of activity.
Because there was uncertainty, many players who typically provide market making capabilities were restricting how much they were willing to do, and that created even more opportunity for a firm like Marex. Now, what we saw in the second quarter of this year, as you point out, was, you know, quite a lot of volatility. That was sort of helpful. We had our second best quarter in metals. Our metals franchise, you know, performed very well. The investments we've made in creating some market making capabilities in energy were also meant that, you know, we actually had good results in energy. Now, that's not sort of competing with the big trading houses, but in, you know, some of the refined oil products.
The area that was just very tough in the second quarter, as I think we talked about on the earnings call, was in ags. So, you know, that's a what you do find in certain markets is you're gonna have high volatility and very low levels of activity because there's just not a lot of flow. Those are sort of the hardest markets to operate in. That's broadly what sort of characterizes the ags markets at the moment.
Maybe moving on to, you know, how you finance the business. You've issued some senior debt recently, transitioned a little bit from a heavier reliance on the structured note program. You know, how do you think about the funding mix over the longer term? You know, what should investors expect in terms of, of more issuance?
Yeah. I mean, look, we want to establish a very robust U.S. issuance program. I mean, part of the reason that we came to market in April with a debt offering was, you know, the view that, you know, we need to issue each year. And while we didn't have a need for the liquidity at that point in time, you know, we did want to go out and sort of raise money in part to sort of broaden the participation in the name, but also to get the market to a point where it's sort of expected that we were gonna be a regular issuer.
You know, we're not going to get our spreads down to the levels we think they should be at until we have a very robust issuance program that's sort of multi-year and the balances are sort of quite high and the levels of liquidity you know in our name are quite high. So we saw this as an investment in that, and it's a multi-year effort, I'm sure and so we do expect to continue with that. I mean, we were quite happy to do the issuance. It was $500 million. I mean, at that point in time, we really were unsure what you know the market changes were gonna be with sort of tariffs and you know all of that good stuff.
And we always felt that, you know, even if we didn't need it because the world was sort of very dislocated, we wouldn't be able to deploy that liquidity, you know, even if it was worth a bit of a lag. So we were very comfortable doing that. And, you know, the market, I think, should expect that we are going to, you know, look to grow, you know, our public issuance programs. Structured notes are a, you know, an important part of the firm's liquidity, an important business for us. So we're not, you know, looking to sort of change that in any fundamental way. But I do think that the share of our liquidity that comes from public, the issued debt, will go up relative to structured notes just simply because it'll grow faster than structured notes will.
We have just set up a capability to issue structured notes in the US, so we are investing in that and looking to broaden it out, but it won't grow as fast as the public issuance.
Maybe on the other side, in terms of allocating capital, you know, we talked earlier about the M&A framework in terms of how much PBT you're looking to add or how much revenue you're looking to add every year. But, you know, high level, how do you think about the balance between M&A or other types of capital return, you know, dividends or, or anything?
Yeah. I mean, you know, I don't think we've changed our approach to this, so you know, what we described to the marketplace at the time of the IPO, I think remains the case, which is, you know, if we're making, you know, call it $400 million of PBT, you know, we're gonna be making whatever that is, you know, $320-$330 million of profit after tax. That's a lot of capital generation. You know, the first use of capital is to support organic growth and maintain an investment-grade rating. You know, beyond that, we look to return some amount of capital to investors in the form of dividends. We pick dividends as a way to return capital because we thought the signaling effect, particularly as a newly public company, was really, really important.
And dividends were the most effective way for the board to signal its confidence that the firm would be able to continue to grow, you know, to the marketplace. We do see substantial opportunities to deploy capital to create a lot of value for our investors through the M&A process. And while we see those opportunities to acquire things at, you know, call it three to four times, so the goodwill, you know, the premium that we pay is sort of three to four times what we're acquiring, and then see opportunity to grow that, you know, as part of the Marex platform, that's a hugely value-creating way to sort of deploy capital. And we would look to continue to do that. You know, the last sort of, you know, element of this is, you know, what about buybacks?
I think up until this point, our view has been that what we really wanted to do was create more liquidity in our stock and that buying back stock was really undermining that. Our hope had been at the time of the IPO to get to a point where we had $20 million of trading in our stock each day. Now, we're over the most recent period, you know, been operating well above that, so sort of probably closer to $50 million on average a day.
So I think that, you know, that whole question of liquidity in our stock has sort of been addressed through managing down the overhang as well as sort of the interest of investors in, you know, in Marex and the fact that, you know, we're now part of, you know, the Russell 3000 and, you know, a series of other steps that we've taken. And so now I think the whole idea of, you know, buybacks, while I don't think we've changed our basic position on it, I think it just becomes something we would need to consider potentially differently to the way we have. But at the moment, our view is we can deploy the excess capital that we're generating very successfully in acquisitions, and that's the most value-enhancing thing we can do.
Maybe just one final question. You talked about this a little bit, talking about M&A and growth initiatives earlier. But, you know, can you kind of unpack what you're seeing and what you're doing more recently in some of the newer geographies, Middle East, your APAC expansion? You know, you talked about being able to scale up through M&A, but, you know, where are you today versus where you wanna be? How do you think about the sort of near-term, longer-term opportunities there?
Yeah. Look, I mean, what we've been trying to do in our strategy is increase earnings resilience, increase the diversification in the firm, and create a firm that is able to continue to grow sequentially through a whole range of different market conditions. Geographic expansion, to my mind, is really critical to that strategic objective, because I do believe that, you know, there will be, you know, that there just isn't the same level of correlation across the different geographies. And I think that there are clients, you know, really, really attractive clients in all of these different geographies that are looking to do business with firms that will feel sort of local to them.
So if you're trying to get clients in sort of Abu Dhabi, while they might actually be willing to set up with you in Dubai, in most cases, they just wanna deal with an Abu Dhabi-based entity. So you really have to, if you're going to attract and then service those clients, you do need to sort of broaden yourself out geographically. And we see tremendous opportunity to grow in the Middle East. It's a really attractive set of clients, very interested in the set of services we provide, you know, very relationship-oriented. So the Middle East, we think, is, you know, a very, very attractive environment, and it feels like we're pretty early in our development. I mean, we have quite a large office in Dubai. We now have an office in Abu Dhabi. But we really see a lot of opportunity there.
I mean, similarly in Brazil. I mean, Brazil is a really sizable marketplace, particularly for commodities. We have a presence there, but it's one of those areas that I think could grow very substantially. Similarly, Asia, we're very excited about, you know, the possibility of growing out there. Then the United States remains, you know, the largest market in the world by, you know, some substantial margin. While we've made a lot of progress, we still see very substantial opportunities there.
Great. Well, we're out of time. We'll leave it there. Ian, thank you so much.
Thanks, Ben. Cheers. Thanks, everybody.