Good morning, and welcome to TradeLab's 2nd Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded and will be available for playback. To begin, I'll turn the call over to Head of U. S. Corporate Development and Investor Relations, Ashley Serral.
Please go ahead.
Thank you, and good morning. Joining me today for the call are our CEO, Lee Oleske, who will review the highlights from the quarter and provide a business update our President, Billy Holt, who will dive a little deeper into some growth initiatives and Bob Warshaw, our CFO, who will review our financial results. Our Q2 earnings release, prepared remarks and accompanying presentation are available on the Investor Relations portion of our website. I'd like to remind you that certain statements in this presentation and during Q and A may relate to future events and expectations, and as such, constitute forward looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Statements Reform Act of 1995.
Statements related to, among other things, our guidance, including full year 2020 guidance and the COVID-nineteen pandemic, the potential impacts of which are inherently uncertain, are forward looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from these forward looking statements. Information concerning factors that could cause results to differ from forward looking statements is contained in our earnings release and periodic reports filed with the SEC. In addition, on today's call, we will reference certain non GAAP measures. Information regarding these non GAAP measures, including reconciliations to GAAP measures, are in our posted earnings release and presentation.
Lastly, we provide certain market and industry data, which is based on management's estimates and various industry sources. See our posted earnings presentation for more details. To recap, this morning, we reported GAAP earnings per diluted share of $0.16 Excluding certain non cash stock based compensation expense, acquisition and Refinitiv related D and A and certain FX items and assuming an effective tax rate of 22%, we reported adjusted net income per diluted share of $0.30 Please see the earnings release and the Form 10 Q to be filed with the SEC for additional information regarding the presentation of our historical results. Now let me turn the call over to Lee.
Thanks, Ashley. Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining our Q2 earnings call. The world remains an uncertain place and we remain appreciative of all the efforts that are being made to combat this virus and restore the economy. We also recognize the various efforts both by our employees and external organizations to promote equality. On the business front, the 2nd quarter saw broader market stabilization that began at the tail end of March.
At Tradeweb, we continue to operate remotely, focusing on engaging with our clients and innovating to develop new solutions. The quality and frequency of collaboration with clients has increased along with their willingness to look at the entire Tradeweb product suite proactively as this pandemic forced them to reassess their electronic strategies. We remain excited by the opportunity ahead of us and remain committed to driving revenue growth and margin expansion over the next few years as our investments scale globally. Today, we are investing in developing and scaling new protocols across rates and credit, expanding our geographic reach, especially in the Asia Pacific region with early signs of success in Australia and commercializing our data to just name a few. Our sales team remains highly engaged and our technology team has a busy pipeline as we look out over the rest of the year.
Turning to Slide 4, we reported the strongest second quarter in our history and set multiple new revenue new volume records across our products despite a challenging macro environment. Specifically, gross revenues of $212,000,000 during the Q2 of 'twenty were up 11.4% year on year on a reported basis and by 11.8% on a constant currency basis. Our financial performance was once again characterized by strong growth. Our continued double digit revenue growth and the resulting scale translated into improved profitability year over year as our 2nd quarter adjusted EBITDA margin expanded over 200 basis points to 47.8%. Turning to Slide 5, you can see the diversity of our revenue growth.
While rates and money markets saw growth, but at slower rates than previous quarters, the other growth engines of our business were on display as credit and equities both grew by double digits, 24% and 38.6%, respectively. Within rates, cash rate revenues, mortgages and U. S. Treasuries benefited from Fed actions, while our core swaps business continued to do well too. Moving on to Slide 6, let me provide a brief update on our 4 main focus areas, global interest rate swaps, U.
S. Treasuries, U. S. Credit and global ETFs. Starting with interest rate swaps, in a tougher macro environment characterized by lower interest rate volatility where core IRS volumes dropped by 14% according to Clarus, our core swaps volume, higher fee per million longer duration swaps, grew by 5%.
Our total volumes were down 10% year on year during the 2nd quarter as a 30% decline in lower fee per million shorter duration swaps more than offset volume growth in higher fee per million longer duration swaps. We continue to focus on what we can control. Deepening our client wallet share and scaling new products like EM swaps. The focus drove global IRS share for the Q2 to nearly 10%, growing substantially year over year. We believe we gained meaningful share versus our closest competitor Bloomberg in both the U.
S. And Europe post March as our deep liquidity pools and recent investments continue to pay off. Longer term, we remain excited by the opportunity here as the rate cycle improves and the market continues to electronify. Billy will give you an update on our strategy treasuries, our volumes were up 14% year on year. Our share recovered nicely from the lows seen in March when voice execution was more prevalent as the exceptional volatility drift the U.
S. Treasury Markets. Amidst the backdrop of heavy issuance and Fed purchases, our organic growth initiatives have helped us to continue to take share using a variety of trading protocols in both the institutional and wholesale sectors. We estimate that our share during the Q2 increased year on year to a record 12.7 percent of the entire U. S.
Treasury market. The institutional business had several record days during the Q2, driven by record levels of new treasury bill issuance. We continue to sign new clients and push new functionality to both further differentiate our offering from the competition and electronify the market. Our recently launched institutional streaming effort, which we brand STACK, continues to see more interest from clients as new dealers are onboarded as liquidity providers. AIEX resumed its critical role in our clients' workflow and we further enhanced our functionality during the quarter, giving clients the ability to automatically execute at preset times.
On the product front, we also added the 20 year bond to our offering. One of our formulas for success has been our ability to scale our technology across sectors. On that note, amidst the more challenging backdrop for the U. S. For the wholesale U.
S. Treasury market, we continue to onboard new dealers to our streaming platform as an alternative to the traditional order books. Session trading has also continued to recover. Dealers more actively manage their balance sheets as comfort around working from home grew as the Fed purchase activity tapered, putting the onus on secondary markets to exchange risk. Shifting to our credit business, which continued its strong growth, generating nearly $50,000,000 in revenues driven by strength in both the cash and derivative franchises in credit, our U.
S. Market share rebounded from March driven primarily by the normalization of the RFQ institutional business as a result of innovations like portfolio trading and net spotting continue to see increased adoption and the growth of our anonymous trading protocols. The wholesale session trading business also rebounded as it generated higher revenue in each successive month versus March as spreads tightened. Our session trading business continues to trend towards highs seen earlier this year. Looking ahead, we see a lot of opportunity in credit and continue to be very focused on connecting the various components of our offerings as we use technology to converge our institutional retail and wholesale liquidity pools.
Finally, with equities, this quarter was highlighted by institutional ETFs. Volumes were up 39% due to the combination of volatility and our targeted growth efforts to continue to add new clients globally. Our other initiatives to expand beyond our flagship ETF franchise are also bearing fruit with momentum continuing in equity options, the Delta 1 business and convertibles. Looking ahead, we remain well positioned to benefit from the continued growth of ETFs globally, our newer product additions and an expanding client footprint. In sum, despite the macro challenges, we continue to operate with a growth mindset and we are focused on collaborating with our clients to capitalize on the various opportunities ahead of us.
These opportunities are spread across our multi asset class offering and this quarter showcased the diversity of our revenue growth as robust trends in credit and equities led the way with rates and our money market business continuing to grow as well. In addition to organic growth, we're spending a lot of time evaluating M and A opportunities as cash builds on our balance sheet. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Billy.
Thanks, Lee. Turning to Slide 7 for a closer look at swaps. The broader industry backdrop in the second quarter for interest rate swaps was challenging given the decline in interest rate volatility. Industry volumes, as measured by Claris, were down 30% during the quarter, driven primarily by a nearly 40% year over year decline in lower fee per million products, such as overnight index swaps and forward rate agreements. The higher fee per million core IRS market fared relatively better, down 14% year over year.
But as Lee indicated, while core market volume declined, our core swaps business grew and increased its share. Amidst this tough operating environment, we continue to invest for the future and remain very engaged with our clients. As a result, our market share increased to 9.8% from 7.6% last year, driven primarily by gains within core IRS where share rose to a record 16% as our growth efforts continue to pay off. These growth efforts are powering the next generation of our swaps offering. We are adding currencies, expanding our product set, introducing new protocols, responding to changes necessitated by the replacement of LIBOR, strengthening benchmarks and electronifying more of the wholesale swaps flow.
Specifically, in the second quarter, we saw record EM swap volumes as large asset managers that are fully integrated into Tradeweb for major currencies leverage the same infrastructure to trade EM currencies. Clients now have traded $289,000,000,000 over the last 12 months. The momentum is building. And today, we have more than 30 clients and 12 dealers, both numbers doubling since the Q2 of 2019. Looking ahead, we continue to add more currencies and actively onboard dealers to provide liquidity and satisfy the demand we are seeing from our clients in 2020.
Clients have now traded $65,000,000,000 in multi asset package swaps since our launch in August last year. Our efforts to build a competitive fraud offering continue, and the early signs are encouraging. We traded nearly $15,000,000,000 daily during the Q2. Protocol wise, we are growing RFM or request for market, which help clients protect their intent to buy or sell by requesting a 2 sided market. We are also investing to add other swap types to our platform.
Clients also continue to use our list trading protocol extensively with a record number of swaps executed in the 2nd quarter. Clients are utilizing list trading to trade bespoke risk, migrate positions from LIBOR to new risk free indices and switch portfolios between central counterparties in anticipation of Brexit. And finally, on the data front, we recently partnered with ICE on their swap rate, which will now feature Tradeweb institutional quotes to improve the resilience of the benchmark used to price swaptions and rate linked swap rate linked structured products. In sum, we are offering the tools and capabilities to further electronify the global swaps market. Honing in on U.
S. Corporate credit on Slide 8. We continue to invest to build a franchise that can handle both electronic and voice workflows by leveraging our unique and diverse liquidity pool shared across our wholesale, retail and institutional sectors. On the last earnings call, we spoke about our belief that the pullback in our market share in March was temporary. As the quarter unfolded, market share rebounded as expected, trending higher in each successive month, approaching the levels seen at the beginning of the year.
Our network continues to grow, and we now have more than 700 clients on our platform. In terms of drivers, the composition of our share has changed. The rebound in share has been led by our institutional franchise, which saw a record IG share in June as our innovations such as portfolio trading and Netspotting continue to resonate strongly with our clients and as our network continues to grow. Specifically, portfolio trading crossed the $100,000,000,000 cumulative volume threshold since launch with more than $30,000,000,000 single and multi dealer portfolio trades in the second quarter alone. Clients had a new record.
Our advanced net spotting offering saw another record quarter with nearly $100,000,000,000 of activity as clients increasingly commingle electronic and voice trades to maximize savings and eliminate the inefficiencies of manual processes. Continue to increase as our liquidity pool deepens. We also continue to invest in creating the broadest anonymous trading offering in the market, which today includes our Trading volume here rose to nearly $40,000,000,000 driven by growth in our all to all volumes, which have doubled over the last year to record levels as liquidity continues to build along with our network of responders. As Lee mentioned, we are very focused on connecting our 3 pools of liquidity. To this end, our effort to incorporate retail liquidity into institutional RFQ trading continues to see increased adoption.
Today, we have billions in unmatched inquiry that interacts with our platform. We are very focused on leveraging our technology to optimize price discovery and maximize matches by connecting inquiries across sectors. Turning to the rest of our credit business. We believe one of our strategic advantages is the diversity of our credit franchise, which allows us to participate in the electronification of a variety credit products. Our credit default swap business posted another strong quarter as we continue to gain more market share.
Our efforts to grow our institutional muni business also continues to pay off, setting a new volume record. In sum, we believe our credit business has a lot of room to run, and we have an exciting road map to lead innovation across the credit markets. This includes investments in the next generation technology that we have already launched, like Net Spotting and Portfolio Trading and also the next wave of technology to drive the convergence in our 3 liquidity pools, enhance anonymous trading and optimize AIX for credit. Stepping back, innovation is a theme that continues across all our products and not just credit as we focus on growing share by helping markets digitize. We are investing in our electronic specified pools offering, which has seen a surge in demand as traders work from home given currently highly manual and spreadsheet based workflows.
We enhanced our agency bond platform, giving clients the ability to now request prices from all dealers in a single inquiry, proving price discovery. We continue to onboard new dealers and clients to our repo platform, both domestically and in Europe, where we expect upcoming SFTR regulation to encourage automation in this very manual market. We are expanding RFM from swaps to other rate products and maximizing the value of our data. During the quarter, we introduced the Tradeweb ICE CMT rates for market comment. Innovation remains critical to everything we do at Tradeweb, and we continue to work tirelessly to move markets forward.
And with that, let me turn it over to Bob to discuss our financials in more detail.
Thanks, Billy, and good morning. As I go through the numbers, all comparisons will be to the prior year period unless otherwise noted. Let me begin with an overview of our volumes on Slide 9. After posting record ADV last quarter across all asset classes, momentum in the business continued. We saw record ADV in global cash credit and posted our 2nd highest ADV across global cash rates, repo and equities.
We reported quarterly total ADV of $778,000,000,000 up 3%
with a mix of growth products, for
example, mortgages, swaps, over 1 year, U. S. Credit, CDS and ECFs that supported double digit revenue growth. Slide 10 provides a summary of our quarterly earnings performance. The volume growth I just described translated into gross revenues increasing by over 11.4% on a reported and nearly 11.8% on a constant currency basis.
We derived approximately 34% of our revenues from international customers and recall that approximately 30% of our revenue base is denominated in currencies other than dollars, predominantly in euros. Our variable revenues increased by 17% and our total trading revenue increased by 12%. Fixed revenues related to our 4 major asset classes continue to grow as expected. Information services increased by 5% led by Refinitiv and our APA business. Adjusted EBITDA margin came in at 47.8% expanded nicely relative to Q2 2019 as we continue to benefit from scale.
All in, we reported adjusted net income per diluted share of $0.30 Moving on to fees per million on Slide 11. The trends I'm about to describe are driven by a mix of the various products within our 4 asset classes. In sum, our blended fees per million increased 13% year over year, primarily as a result of mix shift away from lower fee per million short tenor swaps. Excluding lower fees per million short tenor swaps and futures, our blended fees per million increased by 8% year over year. Let's review the underlying trends by asset class.
All trends will be discussed in a year over year basis. Starting with rates, average fees per million for rates was up 10% year over year overall. For cash rate products, which include government bonds and TBAs, fees per 1,000,000 increased 5% due to positive mix shift in mortgages, which saw more income institutional activity during the quarter. Prolonged tenure swaps, fees per million stayed relatively flat year over year. The sequential decline was due to a normalization and compression activity.
In other rates derivatives, which includes rates futures and short tenor swaps, average fees per million increased 168% year over year due to growth in forward rate agreements, which carry a higher fees per 1,000,000 than overnight index swaps. Continuing to credit. Average fees per 1,000,000 for credit declined 13% as a result of mix that included a higher proportion of lower fee per million credit derivative volumes. Drilling down on cash credit, average fees per million increased 3% due to positive mix shifts towards U. S.
High grade and high yield activity, which carries a higher fee for 1,000,000 than the cash credit average. Looking at the credit derivatives and electronically processed U. S. Cash credit category, fees for 1,000,000 increased 5% on higher volume tier discounts due to growth in credit derivatives. Continuing with equities, Total asset class and cash equity fees per million were relatively unchanged.
Equity derivatives average fees per million decreased 32% due to mix shift towards equity futures, which carries a lower fees per million than the equity derivatives average. Finally, within money markets, fees per million decreased 12%. This was primarily driven by growth in repo, which carries a lower fees per million than other money market products. Slide 12 details our expenses. At a high level, we continue to invest for growth.
There has been no change to our philosophy here. As a reminder, adjusted expenses excludes non cash stock based compensation expense related to options issued primarily as a result of the IPO, acquisition and Refinitiv related D and A certain FX related gains and losses. Adjusted expenses for the 2nd quarter increased 6.9%. Recall approximately 15% of our expense base is denominated in currencies other than $1,000,000 predominantly in sterling. Q2 2020 operating expenses were higher as compared to Q2 2019 due to increased employee compensation costs and technology and communication expenses partially offset by lower G and A.
Compensation costs were higher year on year due to higher headcount as well as higher performance related compensation. Adjusted non comp expense declined 1.1% on a reported basis and declined 2.2% on a constant currency basis. Specifically, general and administrative fees declined primarily due to less travel and entertainment expense. As we continue to work from home, we expect G and A to trend between $7,000,000 to $8,000,000 per quarter during the back half of twenty twenty. Long term, our level of spend is under review.
Technology and communication costs increased primarily due to higher clearing of data feeds as a result of higher trading volumes as our anonymous credit volumes and streaming U. S. Treasury volumes continue to grow. In addition, this quarter also saw the impact of our previously communicated investments in data strategy and cybersecurity. Recall our guidance embeds a $4,000,000 to $5,000,000 increase versus 2019.
Slide 13 details capital management and our guidance. We ended the 2nd quarter in a strong position holding $560,000,000 in cash and cash equivalents and free cash flow reached $353,000,000 for the trailing 12 months. We have access to a $500,000,000 revolver that remains undrawn as of quarter end. CapEx and capitalized software for the quarter was 10,800,000 dollars an increase of 15% year over year and continues to be in line with our expectations. With this quarter's earnings, the Board declared a quarterly dividend of $0.08 per Class A and Class B share.
Turning to guidance for 2020, given the delay of our New York real estate decision to 2021 and reduced T and E expenses as a result of the work from home environment, we now expect adjusted expenses to trend between 4.95 $105,000,000 in 2020. We continue to believe we can drive operating margin expansion compared to 2019 at either end of this range. For forecasting purposes, we are using an assumed non GAAP tax rate of 22% for the year. We also expect capital expenditures and capitalized software to be in the range of $45,000,000 to $50,000,000 Finally, we have updated our quarterly share count sensitivity for 2020 to help you calibrate your models for fluctuations in our share price. Now, I'll turn it back to Lee for concluding remarks.
Thanks, Bob. The secular trends powering electronification and automation remain intact. We have an exciting plan that we are executing against across our asset classes and our diversity affords us a variety of opportunities to improve credit client workflows. Driving strong revenue growth and balancing associated investments with margin expansion continues to be our priority. With a couple of important months, month end days left in July, cash and derivative volumes across all our asset classes with the exception of rates derivatives are up double digits relative to July 2019.
Rates derivatives are down double digits given the lack of volatility and flatter yield curve similar to conditions we saw last month. These same conditions are benefiting our mortgage business and Fed issuance continues to help our U. S. Treasury business. Overall, electronic IG and high yield credit market shares are running higher in June 2020 levels.
I'd like to conclude my remarks by thanking our clients for their business and partnership in this quarter, And I want to especially thank my colleagues for their efforts that contributed to our strongest Q2 in our history. With that, I'll turn it back to Ashley for your questions.
Thanks, Lee. As a reminder, please limit yourself to one question only. Feel free to hop back in the queue and ask additional questions at the end. Q and A will end at 10 am Eastern Time. Operator, you can now take our first question.
Thank you.
Our first question comes from the line of Rich Repetto with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.
Yes. Good morning, Lee. Good morning, Billy and Bob. I guess, the first question is about competition. And can you everybody talks about market access, but excluding market access, could you give us an update on the competitive landscape?
And are there any other other electronic platforms that you feel are beginning to become viable competitors? I guess this would be for Billy, I guess.
Hey, Rich. How are you? That's a good question. I would answer it a couple of ways, Rich. Lee and I have kind of mentioned and we've talked about the fact that Tradeweb basically day 1 kind of grew up competing in our core businesses with Bloomberg.
So we feel sort of very comfortable in a competitive environment. We think competition is good for the space. It's good for the marketplace. It's good for clients. We think it helps drive innovation.
If I were going to sort of assess the landscape a little bit, and it's a good question, clearly, obviously, we're always aware of what's going on with Bloomberg. And we're also aware of what's happening in the wholesale space with companies like Fenics and their kind of movements potentially into more of the institutional space. So we have a sort of fine tuned awareness of the competitive landscape. That being said, I think interestingly, Rich, it's a balance. And we are also just very much sort of conscious around executing day in and day out and not spending too much time worrying about what our competitors are doing.
And we spend the majority of our time listening to our clients. And we feel like that ultimately is the roadmap for us to continue to flourish and to continue to take market share in the environment. So it's a real interesting balance between being kind of honed and aware of the competitive landscape and that being said, day in and day out, knowing what kind of company you are, how you engage with your clients and how you continue to move markets forward.
Got it. Thank you, Billy. I'll get back in the queue.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Arya Ghosh with Credit Suisse. Your line is open.
Hey, good morning, everyone. So maybe one for $1,000,000,000 on portfolio trading. You continue to see strong traction there. And then earlier this year too, you've talked about execution quality and high volumes even during the height of the crisis this year. So hoping you could just update us on changing client behavior.
Just curious, are clients now looking to execute greater percentage via portfolio trades? Have average trade size sort of increased as clients gain more lumped? And then just the overall any color on the overall impact to the credit fees of 1,000,000 for the credit
Yes, sure. Thank you for the question. I think while we're in this, at least talk about the sort of habits that are getting formed in this sort of unique moment in time around work from home. I think there are 2 really interesting issues that are front and center on our clients' mind around work from home environment. One of which is how do I increase my certainty of execution?
And the other is how do I minimize what I would describe as information leakage? And I think to your question, which is a really good one, there is an elegance around portfolio trading in terms of how it solves for both of those issues. And I think it just continues to build momentum. And I think these habits are continuing to form around this, this sort of search for liquidity in the market. And I think this is the moment where that light bulb continues to kind of burn very bright around portfolio trading.
And clearly, it is an innovation that is leading us around our institutional market share gains and credit.
Got it. Thanks for that.
And then if you could, any color on the impact to the P4 1,000,000 as these trends play out? Thanks, guys. I'll let Bob. Bob, you want to handle that one?
Bob,
you may be on mute. Sorry.
I was on mute. I apologize for that. Sure. I want to talk at the higher level, but as you know for credit, high grade and high yield session protocols basically, there's a bunch of pieces to it. And flow of trading does have a higher does have a good fee per million that we that's part of it.
And so as it goes up, it does have an impact. But the real mix trend there was our increase in high grade trading in general.
Our next question comes from the line of Alex Kramm with UBS. Your line is open.
Yes. Hey, good morning. Lee, thank you for the comments at the end there about July. It seems like generally doing pretty well, but the IRS business, as I think what you can see, is doing fairly poorly. So any comments on what you're seeing there?
I think you've noted it's your biggest business. So anything that you see there and what may change that? And then maybe to Bob, very related, if these conditions persist, is a weak IRS business enough to tweak the compensation a little bit? Or is that too small of a business to really have an impact as an offset? Thanks.
Yes. Thanks, Alex. Yes, sure. Look, our rates let me start off at a higher level and say our rates business is definitely facing a mixed macro environment, right? So we have volume headwinds, as you're pointing out, now due to the volatility, very low volatility, flatter yield curve, that reduce relative value trading and slow up the swaps markets, and that's really across the board.
So that's sort of a headwind. The flip side is a number of our rates businesses have nice tailwinds, right? So we're growing share and have some growth in things like treasuries, mortgages, which are doing quite well. And of course, the surge in T bill issuances has been a good thing for us. So the thing that we are very fortunate to have in our structure today as we've grown over the years is the diversity of these businesses.
And so the headwinds and the tailwinds, while we're really not in any kind of environment that we've been in before, this is largely unique, I think, for all of us. Things change, and so we're not terribly worried about a period of this type. And when it comes to the swaps business, I think the most important thing when you have this kind of slowdown as a result of the markets is to look at our market share, to look at how we're doing with our clients and the percentage of business we're doing. And on that measure, we're doing quite well. We are not doomsday believers.
We think markets will continue to go up and down, and we may have a period here of for sure some prolonged low rates certainly on the short end. That's been established. But we have other markets that we're in that actually are doing quite well in the rate space. In terms of your follow on question about compensation, the way we view compensation is the holistic performance of the company. We look at how we're doing as a company 1st and foremost.
That's how we all stay together, and we're very well aligned on that as a team. And individual products might have ups and downs based on markets and we'll adjust accordingly based on our performance. And then, of course, we look to individual performance to see how individuals are doing. But it's a holistic approach, and I think we had a very solid quarter, and it is a little difficult to kind of see into the future given where we are in the overall very challenging environment.
Very helpful. Thank you.
Yes. Thanks, Alex.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Chris Harris with Wells Fargo. Your line is open.
Thanks. Just to follow-up a bit on that last question. The low rates seem to be having a much bigger impact on the derivative side than they are in cash. So what is it about the cash business that's more resilient? And why wouldn't low rates and therefore low volatility ultimately affect the cash side of the rates franchise?
Well, I think the thanks for that, Chris. It's another really good question. We what we're seeing right now is kind of a unique situation, right? So the massive surge in issuance is really unprecedented. And there's no doubt, while it's hard to project things going forward, but it looks like we're going to have a lot more issuance in global government bonds in the future.
That seems to have a real positive effect on trading volumes. So that dynamic has supported our government bond And we're taking market share, as Billy pointed out in the recorded comments, which is a positive, of course, but we're also seeing a nice activity in the government bond space really across the world from China to Europe to the U. S. So that's a real kind of positive thing that's relatively unique to this environment. The other thing is we have a very strong mortgage franchise that you're aware of, and that's reacting very nicely in this environment as a result of refinancing and a whole bunch of other things.
So these things tend to kind of run on slightly different cycles. I would point out that when you have a surge in cash issuance, both on the corporate bond side and on the government bond side, derivative trading is a byproduct of that. Now there's no doubt derivatives have slowed, as you can see from our numbers. And so that's there's no doubt that's happened on some level of the trading. But derivatives are a byproduct and a component of the overall rates markets and overall credit markets.
So we expect to continue to see them be important tools for folks managing risk in their portfolios. So yes, no doubt right now we're in a bit of a slowdown with respect to derivatives, but I'd say look at our results. Look at the business we're doing in this second quarter while we've had this slowdown.
Our next question comes from the line of Mike Carrier with Bank of America.
Maybe shifting over to capital. Bottomly, you guys generate a healthy level of cash flow. You had the modest dividend. But just wanted to see where your head is at in terms of priorities at this point and if any of the M and A kind of opportunities are starting to pick up?
Yes. So I'm going
to let Bob go off mute and give him a chance to I'm
off mute.
Thank you.
You're off mute. Okay. Go ahead, Bob.
Yes. I think that, look, we're still we believe a number of things. We think there's going to be consolidation. We're looking we have a very active effort to look at opportunities that are particular of interest, as you indicated. It's really a matter of sort of does it fit our strategies as to price and all of the things that we look at.
And we are very focused in terms of, as we've talked about before, looking for places where we get new product or new networks, new technologies perhaps. And sort of similar to what we did, we added our retail business and our wholesale businesses some years ago. And so that's our sort of drive is to continue to look. It's we're being very careful because we wanted to make sure that it in fact enhances our business. It doesn't just sort of sit it long side.
And we understand that the market is looking for us to deploy our excess cash, and we are and it's not our intention to sit on it for over the long term. And so we are, as I said, very actively looking at ways in which we can, in fact, identify things. The markets there are opportunities. The markets are a bit rich at the moment. They tend not to be distressed.
And we'll kind of look at each of those and determine whether the value is there for us in each case. And we have looked at a good number and we continue to.
Our next question comes from the line of Alex Blostein Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Hi. This is Cherick filling in for Alex. On the expense front, we want to get a sense of how much expense flex do you have if the industry wide rate volumes continues to face headwinds? As in what is the minimum expense growth in absolute terms you would require to pursue your growth initiatives?
I'm not going to maybe talk about the exact specifics of each of those dimensions. A good part of our expense is variable. So it depends on how you calibrate it, it's 45% or 50% of it is theoretically variable. But we have to we need to continue to shed to manage and to invest. We're not going to really change our investment strategy dramatically in this environment.
We continue to invest forward and we think that's kind of been the art of Tradeweb over time is taking our investments and looking ahead short term this year and medium to long term 2021, 2022. So even with in the current environment, we think that we can continue that strategy. We are being very careful how we manage resources and making sure that investments in new hires and in some cases replacement hires where people have left are very much focused on the next things we want to do. And we've talked about in the past our initiatives and data. And we've talked about those in general where we are already investing money, as well as what Billy talked about in terms of all of the swaps initiatives.
We think it will be important to continue our increase in market share and our growth of the product in spite of some of the headwinds we're facing. So our general mode is to continue to focus on investing in the business. Our flexibility is that if revenue goes down, we have a lot of compensation expenses tied to revenue growth and that it will have its impact in a natural way if that's what happens.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Chris Allen with Compass Point. Your line is open.
Hey, morning guys. I wanted to ask about the mortgage franchise. You mentioned the strength there. Maybe you could remind us like what areas within mortgages your business is predominantly focused on right now? What's the opportunity set going forward?
Are you seeing any movement by the banks in terms of electronic trading within mortgages broadly, which I know has been slow moving relative to other asset classes?
Hey, it's Billy. So yes, so our mortgage franchise, as we mentioned, has been a very strong one for us for a long time. It's a big brand for the company. We have historically very much flourished in what we would describe as the TBA, the to be announced space, the most liquid aspect of the mortgage market. And we continue to do extremely well there as the environment kind of fits this moment very well.
I think a very specific area of focus for us inside of the mortgage world going forward is going to be around specified pools. And I think in a very intuitive way, there's going to be a lot of potential efficiencies around the specified pool market, which tends to trade around bid lists and offer lists. And that search for liquidity at various points of time can be challenging. There is a certain aspect of how that market trades that resembles in a certain way the credit markets. So some of the functionality that we've built for credit can be very well leveraged into the specified pool market.
So without question that will be an area of focus for us. And then the other piece that I would just mention to you and it's a good question is just around a continued sort of marketing aspect to the origination client group, which again at this point in time obviously with rates as low as they are and in this COVID environment, I think, the origination volumes will continue to flourish. That will be an obvious area of focus for us.
And just a quick follow-up, how big is the specified pool market just from an overall perspective, similar to the TBA market or?
It's a smaller market than the TBA market for sure. There are environments where that market gets bigger. It's a smaller market, but the need for efficiencies in that market is very strong. So we're getting a lot of feedback from clients that this is a moment in time where more efficiencies around how specified pools trade is a tremendous value add to them. Okay.
Thanks a lot guys. Yes.
Thank you. I'm showing no further questions in the queue. I'll now turn the call back over to management for closing.
Okay. Well, listen, thank you all very much for joining us this morning. As I said, we're really proud of the solid quarter we produced in such a challenging environment for everybody. I think I'll just say we wish you all good health, stay safe, and we do see the light at the end of the tunnel here coming. I just hope it's not a train.
And we're all looking forward to talking to you on the next quarter and hopefully to progress our collective situation from where we are today. So thanks again. Take care.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. Everyone have a wonderful day.