Great. I think if we take a seat, we can get started. Thanks very much, everyone, for attending this keynote session with our very own Dan Simkowitz, Co-President at Morgan Stanley, and also Head of Institutional Securities Group. Thanks, Dan, for coming one more year.
Thank you. It's great to be back. Most of all, thank you to everybody in the room. I think over 100 companies, 400 investors. I get to spend the rest of the day meeting a lot of them.
600.
600 investors.
Registered, yeah.
Sorry, Alvaro. I think I often meet people who claim that they founded this conference, but you keep on making it better with your partners. It is a great conference. It is a, we'll get into this, pure expression of the Morgan Stanley strategy to bring all these great investors and great companies together. It is a pleasure to be here.
Great. Before we get started, I need to read a disclaimer. This discussion, and the one with Sharon Yeshaya and Clare Woodman later today, may include forward-looking statements which reflect Morgan Stanley's management's current estimates and is subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. Morgan Stanley does not undertake to update the forward-looking statements. The discussion, which is copyrighted by Morgan Stanley and may not be duplicated or reproduced without their consent, is not an offer to buy any security. With that, we can start. There's been a lot going on in markets recently, you may have noticed. What are you seeing on the ground?
You know, it's interesting. I've been at Morgan Stanley 34 years, and we've certainly had these periods of straight-up euphoria or real crisis. In terms of cross-currents, and I say that not with a negative view, cross-currents, this is the most I've ever seen. I would say it's in the context of things really being interesting. You have Alibaba up 74%, and yet Nvidia, I think in one day, had the largest market cap down move. This is all this year. Bunds down five points, and the DAX up, I think, 17% as an example. Yet in the U.S., there's this feeling of real, very unsettled feel. You had a degrossing, you know, some big de-risking elements in the market, yet some bellwether sort of consumer names. Coca-Cola, for example, is up 13% on the year, and U.S. credit is up on the year.
All these cross-currents that we're seeing, we looked at, for example, the last 15 large selloffs in the last 15 years in the U.S. This is the one with the highest level of dispersion, i.e., the lowest correlation. What we're seeing is, despite sort of an unsettled feel, real uncertainties, increased volatility, there's still risk-taking. There's still alpha to be had all around the world. It creates a really, I guess, tiring for many of the people in this room and for people at Morgan Stanley, but pretty exciting environment that you have to stay extremely active on. What I would say in the context of what we're seeing in the business is the capital markets, the primary capital markets are doing pretty well.
They're representing some of that dispersion and not just the negative tone that you may have seen out of sort of the broad U.S. averages or even the tech averages in that context. I think it's useful to take a step back. We're really lucky at Morgan Stanley. We're incredibly global in our markets business. We're multi-asset class. We're both public and private markets. The total market index, VT, the Vanguard ETF, is up 1% for the year. It doesn't feel often in rooms like this and the technology conference I attended two weeks ago that the market's actually up on a global basis, but it is. What's interesting is when things are really bad, you would typically think that the primary capital markets would be worse than the secondary capital markets.
Actually, the primary capital markets in both fixed income and equities are doing pretty well. Fixed income credit capital raises are right around record levels for the first two months of the year, both in the investment grade and in the non-investment grade space. I think what has proven to be more resilient on lower volumes, which I think is largely reflecting slower supply, but not demand, the equity markets have been resilient. For the market participants in the room, March 10th was a really ugly day in the markets, yet we raised, Morgan Stanley as lead bookrunner, $5 billion of equity capital across three transactions, one for Galderma here in Europe, one for consumer brand in the U.S. , and one for KKR. The risk-taking market looking through the volatility in the secondary market was really engaged.
Obviously, the big new news is that an administration that I think the consensus clearly was going to be pro-growth, pro-market, pro-business has, you know, over the last few weeks shown a willingness to both say and do to take pain to accomplish some of their objectives. I think the objectives are coming out around a complete reset of trade relationships, reindustrializing the U.S., and then ultimately taking both deficits and rates down. The use of the word pain, that's the new news.
I think as a business matter, the dynamics we see around capital markets, if we can hit in particular an equilibrium around trade policy, and again, I think there was a great quote I read over the weekend, someone who agreed with their moves in theory on trade policy around resetting it with the world did say day trading trade policy, put it in a market context, was probably not the right way to execute on that method. If we can get to a place where there's a little bit more equilibrium, a little bit more predictability, then the underlying dynamics that we felt for some time around being in the early stages of a capital markets recovery led by M&A, but also reflected in the IPO market are all there.
You've got private equity with a lot of assets to sell and yet a significant amount of dry powder to participate. What I certainly saw when I was running both strategy and asset management at Morgan Stanley, when a banker would bring in an asset to be acquired, even if you said no, it led to a chain of thinking about, if we don't want that asset, what could we buy to grow? If we don't act and one of our competitors act, what is the second order effect? That type of thinking, which really began in earnest in the second half of last year, is still happening. It's just on pause as we try to understand both the income statement as well as broader macroeconomic impact of the tariff policy.
In that sense, we still see some of that M&A pause as not a permanent reduction. It's just a timing delta in the marketplace.
Right. Maybe changing to a bit more about Morgan Stanley specifically. We're hearing a lot of firms talk about and focused on delivering their full firm. What makes Morgan Stanley's integrated firm different?
You know, it's interesting. We, over the last, really since the financial crisis under James's leadership, refined our strategy. Ted has been super focused on this as well. You know, I think the strategy is really straightforward and powerful. We just help clients allocate capital. As I look at this room, this is mostly an asset management room. Hopefully we do it to asset managers. We do it to asset owners. That could be big sovereign wealth funds or pension funds, but it also could be wealth management platforms around the world. We certainly do it at corporates, the center of sort of what we do in our history, the corporations presenting here and all the other corporates we engage with. We do it with individuals. The strategy, that's all we do. We do it all around the world.
We can do it in one sentence. A lot of other financial services companies, it takes either an hour or two or an investor day. For us, it is one sentence. That is what we can do. What we have done is we love the capability and businesses that we have aggregated over the years to go deliver against that strategic mission, especially in the context where E*TRADE integration and Eaton Vance integration are largely complete. Ted put together a really integrated investment bank where all the pieces between the markets business and the underwriting and the M&A business are working seamless. We feel against that really tight strategy and great culture that there is an immense amount of growth at bringing the entirety of the firm's capability against those four client segments: asset owners, asset managers, corporates, and individuals.
If we bring it all together and sort of ignore any business segment, we can deliver a lot of value to our clients and therefore value to our shareholders. What we have done is put real structure around that. One of our leaders in the business, a member of our Operating Committee, Mandel Crawley, has taken the Chief Client Officer role and is leading that effort. Where you see it practically day to day and with some intensity and, I think importantly, with scale is in two places. The first is in the Workplace. Again, I think the Workplace started as a product. It is a product that came out of the acquisition of Solium. It is a product that came out of the acquisition of E*TRADE around the stock plan. It got us into the Workplace where Americans manage their money.
They don't really manage it at their bank branch. They don't manage it on their own typically. They get that capital and they manage it through their Workplace. We now have a very large Workplace business. At those workplaces, we also have an investment banking, a C-suite, often a lending relationship. What we are doing right now is taking that product, taking that relationship and turning it into a service. That service is to help that C-suite drive better value out of their employees, financial wellness for their employees. What you've seen in the numbers is we've gone from three or four million client relationships before that Workplace is built. Now it's 19 million relationships. We've had almost a 5x increase in our relationships into our wealth management business through the Workplace.
Driving the funnel and driving the value that we provide to both the company and its employees is a full firm effort because it's going to include the investment banking team talking to the CEO and the CFO. It is going to be both the Workplace team and that team talking to the head of HR and just trying to implement that fully through. I think as you know or your peers in the U.S. know, there are very few, really very few firms that have that access point in scale into the Workplace. That is why we've gone from 4 million households- 20 million households. The second big category is actually the group in this room, which is the asset management industry. We can be the holistic partner to the asset management industry.
We can help them with M&A as they think about strategically where do they want to be. Do they want to be geographically diverse? If they're a public markets manager, do they want to get into the private market? If they were largely a PE firm, do they want to get into private credit? We have that strategic dialogue all the way at the top. We also happen to have taken public most of the private and public asset managers over the year. We can help them build their business. Because we have an asset management business and we have some IP and we're the largest wealth manager in the world, we can help them in R&D on their products and we can help them raise that capital. We have an entire business that helps asset managers build a business.
That complements and is next to the alpha business, which is to run conferences like this, deliver research, deliver great market access, deliver financing if they're running a hedge fund. We have got an alpha business with asset managers and a business building with asset managers. Oh, by the way, asset managers, some of them in the private market side, but some of them on the public market side have huge employee bases. We are doing Workplace back into a large private equity firm or many private equity firms where we will then extend that Workplace into all of their portfolio companies and all of their employees.
Again, bringing that all together under Mandel's leadership, who reports now directly to Andy Saperstein, my co-president and I, my partner, is a really powerful example on both the asset management side and the Workplace where we bring the whole firm together to drive value at the client level and real revenue growth.
When you look at the franchise across equities, investment banking, and fixed income, do you see any gaps in any of the businesses or regions which you want to improve? What do you think is the wallet opportunity of the markets business?
On the last piece of that, certainly on the, maybe I'll touch a little bit later on the investment banking side. On the market side of the business, I get asked a lot of questions. I think I got it last year at this conference. I get asked it in sort of private settings. Is the market business, is the wallet in the market business at peak? You know, have we hit secular top on the markets business? Our view continues to be no. When we look around the world, and again, you have to have a global view, you have to have a multi-asset view. If we look around the world in fixed income, I'll start with government debt, it is a growth business. The last few weeks have shown that is the case.
You've got defense spending, you've got stimulus, depending on what region of the world you're in, you have energy transition. All of these means the macro traded wallet is going up in that perspective. Secondly, in that context, when you have the bond moving where it has and you have the volatility we've had in the dollar versus all the other currencies this year, macro risk management is also a growth business, especially in the corporate client base and the private market asset management client base. When we think about helping our corporate clients or private equity clients manage interest rate risk, FX risk, commodity risk, these both the market is growing and our view somewhat around bringing the entirety firm, integrated firm or being focused, there's a market share opportunity. Macro risk management we think is still a growth business.
We continue to believe, even if there is some deregulation in the United States, that there has been a fundamental shift and an acceleration of this shift because of market dynamics away from banks being the sort of primary deployer of credit to the asset management industry. To a degree, we're indifferent at Morgan Stanley, whether it goes into private credit or public credit. If the deployment of credit is shifting from banks, commercial banks, regional commercial banks in the U.S. or domestic banks in Europe, if it's shifting from them into the asset management community, it is a very powerful secular trend for Morgan Stanley because if it's in the public market, we're obviously trading it. There's a huge gray area developing between the public credit market and the private credit market. In all those cases, we're helping to source assets.
We're helping to structure assets. We're financing those assets. Even in the private markets, we're trading some of those assets. That dynamic is also a growth dynamic in our fixed income business. In equities, whereas pure U.S. large cap equities may be a mature business, we're seeing real equitization trends and then large market share appreciation for Morgan Stanley and margin potential for Morgan Stanley in Japan, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Germany still to come. Our conversations with the German government are not just around stimulus and not just around defense spending, but should there be pension reform and should there be retirement reform in Germany to bring more of the capital markets and capital raising in Germany out of the banking sector and into the market sector.
I think it would have been a long conversation and it would have required max patience. What we've seen in Japan in the last four years is a pretty dramatic transformation through the work that the Ministry of Finance did, the stock exchange, GPIF, the largest pension fund, asset managers, asset owners, private equity, firms like ourselves, and the Prime Minister of Japan who knew more about the 401(k) program in the U.S. than many people in the U.S. did in running financial services companies. They brought it all together. The retirement program in Japan is now known on the street. The flow of funds into Japan, that we think is something that should happen in Germany in that it's a country that needs capital markets to grow. There is real science. There's entrepreneurial.
There's the middle stab that needs to be monetized, but it needs a more robust capital market. To a degree, and we would not have predicted this, Japan is showing a path to that. On Monday, as you may know, Alvaro, we go to open our office in Munich. To a degree, we're investing in Europe where we think restructuring will happen into a more market-based economy. It has, you know, right now it's an imperative as an example. The other thing on the equity side is customization around return profiles in the form of derivatives is a real trend line. That's happening actually even in a mature market like the United States, but it's also occurring around the world. I believe the option market in India is one of the largest financial markets in the world.
If you're an asset manager, if you're a manager in this room, our belief, beta is going to be harder in the next 10 years than it has been in the last 10. In that context, if you've got a view, you may want to take off the tails on both ends and monetize those and only own the view you really have the highest conviction on. That's at the portfolio management side. On the wealth management platform, you also may want to have various forms of downside protection. The demands on Morgan Stanley in a very good way to customize profiles back to asset managers and to asset owners is also still a growth business.
When you put all those together, we think our markets business is not peaked out in terms of the opportunity, both in terms of market opportunity, but also in terms of market share.
You've kind of alluded to this indirectly, but there's a new strategic goal in ISG to achieve durable share gains. Can you give us any insights on the thinking there? Where have you or where do you expect to gain share?
We gained 100 basis points market share last year. Some element of the durables, we want to hold on to those. I think we're holding on to those around being in the right places. The dynamics I just described, movement to credit, we want to be a preeminent credit firm. We think that is good for our market share. Equitization around the world, when I talk about those markets, Saudi Arabia, India as an example, Brazil, we're bringing the best of the Morgan Stanley tech stack and equity monetization toolkit into those markets. When we go there with a client base or we go into these markets, not only are we gaining really large share, the margin is pretty good in these frontier, I guess, markets, which are still growing significantly. We do see the ability where we're investing against that durable market share.
We see in the early stages of this capital markets recovery a real opportunity to gain market share actually in our home core original market, U.S. investment banking. Where we're adding real headcount is at the very senior level of that group in sectors in the investment banking level. We're putting lending capital around large cap corporations behind that banking community. We're also, as a firm-wide matter, when we think about that integrated firm, the ability to gain share in the asset management community, but in particular in the private market asset management community behind a more robust or larger investment banking effort that Ted started a few years ago. I have continued, we see share there as well.
There's been a few discussions on regulation in previous sessions. In the U.S., Basel Endgame has been put on hold and some questions if it's going to happen at all. How do you see this affecting the business? Is there more capital to deploy to support those durable gains that you've alluded to? How much room is there to continue to gain share?
I think we were encouraged by the official appointment of Bowman in the last 24 hours. We have a very strong dialogue with her. We're a fan. I think, you know, to a degree, we've been one of the quieter parties in all this in the last couple of years. Our ultimate goal was rational, both regulatory capital levels and then process. I think in that context, we're excited with her appointment and to be able to work to come up with, you know, the right framework for us to deploy capital back to our clients. What I would say is at the client level, both in wealth management around lending, some capital deployment, but pretty focused on efficient returns. We're still at an intensely ROTCE-driven firm.
I think Ted, you know, developed a mantra a year and a half ago, which I think was exactly the right thing at the right time, given that we had set up the strategy to be so powerful. We had all the things we wanted to go to deliver value to the clients, the segments I mentioned, and to be really sound strategically after Smith Barney, E*TRADE , Solium, Eaton Vance, Parametric, et cetera. We wanted to sweat the income statement, meaning we wanted to deliver that sort of potent combination of both growth and operating leverage, which I think we did last year. At the same time, certainly in ISG, we wanted to sweat the balance sheet. We wanted to deliver really great ROTCE in the ISG business, which we did last year.
In essence, the core to that has been where can we deliver the most value to our clients around deploying capital. That's again, working with our wealth management clients around lending product. It's working with our investment banking clients, both corporations and private equity firms around helping them deliver against their growth objectives and the capital they need. Then teaming up again in the most optimal capital way, risk-prudent way with the asset management community. I think over time, we will be able to do that with a lot more predictability than we have been in the past if the regulatory environment shifts the way we think it will.
I mean, changing topic on, there's a lot of excitement around AI. How are you thinking about that as part of your broader tech strategy?
You know, it's interesting, and please take this the right way, okay? We have 100 companies and 600 investors here at this conference. I think the other important stat, and this is around dispersion, this is around the Morgan Stanley business model. It's around us opening the office in Munich, staying fully invested. I think Claire and Sharon will talk about this later. In Europe, you know, we think this is really, really critical. Two weeks ago when I was in San Francisco, we had 1,800 investors and 400 companies at what is now the flagship, actually has been for 30 years, flagship technology conference. Back to the integrated firm for a moment, we had big wealth management clients and advisors there, as well as the 1,800 institutional investors. We had all the companies there.
You know, it's interesting if you use AI as a microcosm, we had Elon Musk, Sam Altman on different days, CEO of Anthropic, Google, Microsoft. We had our board meeting last summer in Menlo Park, and we took Nvidia public. Jensen hosted us for a day at the Nvidia headquarters. What was great, and so you have something to aspire to, however, is he said, "I've only had one person come to our board meeting." Jensen goes to other board meetings. We do not have an exclusive Jensen at our board session arrangement, but he's only had one person come to his board meeting. That was his research analyst at Morgan Stanley, Mark Edelstone, who took it public. That's the specialist we have.
What's fascinating about the conference last week is we're advising around capital, data center capital, IPOs, fixed income offerings, other strategic ideas with all these companies in the AI ecosystem. We're connecting them to all those 1,800 investors. I don't have the count, but the AI one-on-ones at that conference probably measured close to 1,000. What's been phenomenal as a business-building matter is that we're getting great insight early on how do we change how Morgan Stanley operates. We were very fortunate through the curiosity and intensity of my partner, Andy Saperstein, in late 2021. Think about how long that is in AI terms. In late 2021, he was out in California having meetings on AI, and we built a relationship with Sam Altman and OpenAI. They presented at our board meeting in the spring of 2022.
What that's allowed us is to be on the leading edge, even though we're a very regulated company around how to use AI in our own business. I think the model quality has moved so dramatically in the last year that we're seeing not really use cases. We're seeing the ability to take huge swaths of our business processes and think about how to apply it and generate productivity savings, increase client value, and it will change the way we do a lot of our businesses. It will change the way we do a lot of the sort of research and analytic functions in our investment bank, in our research department, and in our markets business. It will change the way we do customer service in big chunks of our wealth and asset management business.
We are a big technology firm, and we have bought big technology enterprises, E*TRADE , Parametric, even MSET, Morgan Stanley Electronic Trading and Equities. These are all three leading technology franchises in their own right. They're all really successful fintech companies in their own right. Our ability to bring coding productivity and real technology transformation capabilities through GenAI and partnerships with all the companies I've mentioned, we think will be a real tangible productivity efficiency play for Morgan Stanley. I think it'll extend through almost every industry. The unique element for us is we have a partnership dialogue from before day one with these companies because we're their advisor, because we're connecting them to investors, and we're using them as a partner in our business.
We feel very honored to have that early look and be on the edge of what this can do in terms of productivity and value to both clients and shareholders.
Maybe we can move to wealth. Can you talk about Morgan Stanley's competitive positioning in wealth? What is the business focus on now, and how has the strategy been playing out?
I'm going to say the same thing I said, I think, a year ago. I feel it even more passionately today. If you look at the opportunity set from here, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management in the United States and from here forward, next five, 10, 15 years is what I think is the best growth opportunity in all of financial services. I've got a lot of clients. We're a great advisor to financial services firms. All of our team covers all these clients. If you had a situation where you've got a premier brand, you've got all the product offerings, you've gone from 4 million households- 19 million households, you're in the early days of leveraging technology and putting AI that I just mentioned to monetize that move from 4 million- 19 million.
As Ted put up, once they become an advisory client, we have 99% client retention. We are getting those clients now, not in their 60s and 70s. We are getting them in their 30s or 40s. Therefore, we have decades in front of them. We have limited competitors who can do all of those things. It is the core growth strategic center of Morgan Stanley. It gets even more powerful when it gets connected to an investment bank that can bring it incredible trading opportunities, investment opportunities on the private side, workplace relationships that I mentioned, asset management product, and R&D. It becomes a global firm, even though it is largely domestic, because it gets connected to our securities and asset management businesses. Again, there are very few firms who have the access point to the client that we do.
We have an access point at the Workplace to already 19 million households, and the number will go up. We have everything they want. If they want to engage digitally, we have E*TRADE . If they want to engage with an advisor, we have the best and largest advisory network. If they want to engage self-directed, we have E*TRADE . We have the ability to service them. If they want to invest in alternatives, if they want to know how to manage their taxes in coordination with their philanthropy, we have all those tools in-house. We are just in the earliest stages of revenue monetizing that move from 4 million- 20 million.
What I see is if you can acquire a 30-year-old through the Workplace who's got pretty good job prospects, by the time they get to 40, they will be over $1 million household net worth. They will want an advisory account. If we've serviced them and we can service them really efficiently with a digital bank and with E*TRADE , then at 40, if the 99% holds and the life expectancy holds and the accretion of their capital holds, they are a phenomenal client for the next 50 years. When you think about that annuity business and the cash flow that comes out of that, it's a really exciting business model. We think we are a, you know, we're a category of one in that context.
We are not standing still, not standing still around technology, not standing still around what products and services that client base needs. We are going to leverage, as I said earlier, the fact that we have got a great banking business or a bank that we can put into that network as well. You will see, I think, phenomenal growth over the next, you know, I was going to say the next five or ten years, but that growth is set up if we do our job right for decades.
Right. What role does asset management play in the overall context of the firm?
To a degree, asset management, which I ran, is a really pure, and I'm speaking to a room full of asset managers, it's like really pure form of Morgan Stanley strategy because it's a fiduciary form, right? To a degree, asset management is helping clients allocate capital. Helping clients allocate capital is the one sentence Morgan Stanley strategy. Asset management does it in fiduciary form. I think what's particularly interesting and something we're focused on is we want to be there where we can provide differentiated value to our clients. In particular, in customization in the United States, we are the largest firm providing customized index capabilities by a factor of several times. I think Parametric assets are now over $500,000,000. It's the market leader. It's grown dramatically since we acquired it.
It's both a market trend and a market share grower in a business that has really good secular growth prospects. We are excited about that. We do not have the same fanfare maybe as some others, but we are now, I think, up to about $250 billion, a quarter trillion dollars in private market or alternative assets available to be invested. There is secular growth as a firm, we believe, in the private markets and then the alternatives market. We have real capability sets there we are growing. At the same time with Eaton Vance, we had a view, it has been expressed in our securities business, as I mentioned, we had a view around credit being more important in the asset management industry. Eaton Vance brought a much bigger credit business to us as an example. We are a great long-only concentrated equity manager.
We try to find places where we have distinct value to our clients and where there is secular growth. I think in that sense, that business is set up really well given the industry dynamics that everybody in this room deals with.
If we can run a bit more over time because I want you to touch on alternatives that you referenced. How are you thinking about alternatives offering and what's the opportunity here?
I think I'm going to borrow a phrase from some of my quote alternative asset managers and leaders. We don't really want to always call it alternative because it's sort of, I'm not sure it's mainstream. It's just a form of asset management. Maybe I'll refer to it as private markets, but I would include the hedge fund product suite in there. We think we're, if not the most important, one of the most important private market firms in the world. It epitomizes both integrated firm and client strategy that's really tight, which is in our wealth management business, we think we're the largest allocator to the private market/alternatives universe in the world. I think it's close to a quarter of a trillion dollars.
Our asset allocation team in both wealth and asset management think the percentage of assets into the private markets should be higher longer term versus that implied allocation in the business. We think the prospects of us continuing to be the largest allocator in the world. We do not just allocate. We partner with asset managers in, you know, as I've talked about in the past, open architecture system. We partner around creating the vehicles and creating the structures that are appropriate for the wealth management community. We are an R&D partner with the private market ecosystem. In asset management, as I mentioned, we are both a direct manager of private markets in infrastructure and real estate and mid-cap private equity and special situations. We are a co-invest partner with the industry as well. We have got a very large now private credit offering.
It supports the private equity industry. We have a big co-invest fund that also co-invests with the private equity industry. Obviously in the securities business, whether it's in M&A or it's in underwriting or it's in risk management, as I said, macro risk management, or importantly in credit, where some of our largest and fastest growing clients are private credit managers, it's also an important part of it. If you believe in the secular growth of private markets and alternatives, and obviously we have the largest, we're one of the largest prime brokerage businesses in the world, if you believe in that growth, there is no better sort of partner, both as a shareholder or as a client, than Morgan Stanley.
What Mandel and his team will increasingly do, because our touchpoints with the asset managers are so broad, is bring that all together in a cohesive way so that we can bring the best advice, the best network, the best alpha, the best business building capabilities to all of those private market asset managers. It is part of why that durable share comment is out there. It is why, you know, Ted is so focused on this integrated firm is we have got a real opportunity.
Again, in a world where dispersion is higher and beta is harder, you know, whether it is in the private market or in the public market, we think the value equation that we can provide to asset managers, whether they're public or private, and the connectivity that we can then take to corporates and therefore provide real differentiated value to corporates is at its highest that I've seen in the 34 years I've been at Morgan Stanley. We are pretty excited.
Right. We're a bit over time, but if anyone wants to ask one question, we can fit one question in. Massimo, you're in the front.
You made some comments on primary activity being quite strong, but I was wondering whether you're detecting any sign of the policy induced uncertainty in the U.S. filtering through boardroom mindsets, delaying investments, and potential changes in primary pipeline going forward. Thank you.
Yeah, it's a good question because it always, it allows me to then make sure I reflect my answer correctly from the original. The execution quality in the equity markets is surprisingly good when deals are coming. The amount of deals coming is still pretty modest. I think that modest flow is exactly, it reflects the policy uncertainty. I think the flow of equity new issues, and again, I would extend it to M&A announcements, is certainly a bit on pause or the bar is high because of some of the policy uncertainties. In contrast, both the credit market in the secondary market and in the primary market has stayed really, really strong. You have got continued really strong credit dynamics in the primary market, reflective of pretty strong fundamentals and technicals in the secondary market.
That underpins whenever the M&A decision maker wants to go, they have the credit market behind them. On the equity market, those who have gone, I think both they and we have been surprised at the breadth of demand. I think it does reflect this need to go try to find alpha and feel like you're being rewarded as an asset manager to go get alpha because beta is going to be harder. That has been better than we expected, but the flow is still light. I think the flow stays a little light until we have some more policy certainty. Equity flow around raising capital either in primary form or secondary form is very similar to M&A. It just gets paused. It doesn't get deleted.
I think that's important as we think about business building and you think about investing is the need for someone to monetize their stake in a company or their need to go raise primary capital to grow. It doesn't go away. It just, the decision on when gets pushed out in periods of uncertainty like the one we're in. At the same time, whether it's Honeywell buying a company called Sundyne out of Warburg or KKR raising capital or Galderma raising secondary capital, you know, those companies who did raise either do M&A or raised equity capital, the execution quality still remains very resilient.
Great. I think in the interest of time, we're going to leave it there. Thanks very much.
Thank you again for the conference and for today. Thank you.