Good day, and welcome to the Virtu Financial 2021 First Quarter Results Conference Call. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Andrew Smith.
On this morning's call, we have Mr. Douglas Cifu, our Chief Executive Officer and Mr. Joseph Maluso, our Co President and Co Chief Operating Officer and Mr. Sean Galvin, our Chief Financial Officer. They will begin with prepared remarks and take your questions.
First, a few reminders. Today's call may include forward looking statements, which represent Virtu's current belief regarding future events and are therefore subject to risks, assumptions and uncertainties, include, which may be outside the company's control. Please note that our actual results and financial condition may differ materially from what is indicated in these forward looking statements. It is important to note that any forward looking statements made on this call are based upon information presently available to the company, and we do not undertake to update or revise any forward looking statements as new information becomes available. We refer you to disclaimers in our press release and encourage you to review the description of risk factors contained in our annual report During today's call, in addition to GAAP results, we may refer to certain non GAAP measures, including adjusted net trading income, adjusted net income, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin, non GAAP measures should be considered as supplemental to and not period 2 financial measures prepared in accordance with GAAP.
We direct listeners to consult the investor portion of our website where you'll find supplemental information are referred to on this call as well as reconciliation of non GAAP measures to the equivalent GAAP term in the earnings materials with an explanation of why we deem this information to be meaningful as well as how management uses these measures. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Doug.
Thank you, Andrew. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Q1 earnings call. I will start with a brief overview of our near record results in the quarter and Adjusted EBITDA margin in the Q1 this year. I'll get to more of our results in a moment, but I want to point out how the market changes over the last year created lasting opportunities for Virtu. The levels of activity in the market in Q1 were extremely robust.
Our performance was driven, however, by the beneficial long term trends in the market as well as our organic growth initiative. Beginning in 2020 and to this day, we see a new level of engagement from first time market participants and the way they are engaging continues to evolve. A Deutsche Bank study from earlier this year reported that 45% of retail investors are new to the market in the last year and one of the major e brokers While it is difficult to estimate the levels at which these activities will continue compared to the recent past, we are confident the underlying trend will remain in place Supported by Virtu and a robust market ecosystem capable of handling this level of extraordinary activity. During the Q1, our market making results reflected continued strength across the board in our underlying businesses. Our customer market making business In total, our market making business realized $575,000,000 in adjusted net trading income or $9,400,000 are on par with the first half of twenty twenty.
We also provided a total of $470,000,000 in price will be receiving an update on our financial results. We will now begin the presentation of our financial results. It is important to note that while this amount is impressive as a standalone matter, it is more impressive When what we call size improvement is considered, we not only offer investors excellent execution prices, we do so at sizes that are often about are 3 times larger than what is available at the top of book National Best Bid Best Offer Prices. None of this are well this quarter. We realized $153,000,000 in adjusted net trading income, a record quarter performance for VES.
We have a slide in our supplemental materials which provides a snapshot of this business. The beginning of the second quarter And are connected to Virtu across a broad array of products and services. If you recall, our entrance into the Execution Services business began as an organic initiative and its growth was accelerated through the acquisition of KCG and ITG. At At the time when we acquired KCG and ITG, the profitability in each of their Execution Services businesses were struggling, burdened by legacy And the leadership of Steve Cavoli, we were able to successfully invest in the customer technology enhancements necessary to thrive and compete in this business, while at the same time managing the cost basis in a Virtu way. While we do not break out segment profitability, I am proud to report that the profit margins in this business are far superior to the marginally profitable businesses we required and likely among the most profitable global institutional businesses.
Along the path to improving In a more traditional prime brokerage model run by nearly every competing scaled player. These offerings are organic because of our scale and are accessing the multiple sources of unique liquidity by virtue of our global market making relationships In our U. S. 605 Wholesale Business as well as the 2,000 BES clients I mentioned just now. With this offering, our global client network of investors, including buy side and sell side institutions, RIAs, Asset managers and ETF issuers are able to transparently interact with pools of unique liquidity from across our businesses, Including retail order flow to achieve their investment objectives by trading with more offsetting flow and achieving larger size fills.
Again, access to all of this liquidity is only available through Virtu. I know we have spoken briefly about this offering in ask, but I provide this update to highlight the meaningful progress we have made over the last several months and the larger opportunity ahead. Continuing along our growth One aspect of the Virtu story that we are very proud of and I think will make increasingly important contributions in the coming years is the performance Overall, since 2018, the investments we have made in these various businesses on Slide 4 now comprise 8% of our adjusted debt trading income. You can see that our myriad avenues of growth contributed to our performance. Our $942,000 per day of ANTI from these growth initiatives represent 8% of our ANTI These initiatives are truly organic in that our ante from any of these revenue sources was immaterial only a few years ago, and we've achieved these results without Additional acquisition.
We achieved this the Virtu way, which means by leveraging our scaled infrastructure, supplemented with a handful of individual hires. There are a few initiatives that deserve mentioned beyond what is presented in Slide 4 in the supplemental materials. First, our options market increased over 50% in the Q1 of 2021. Options is a high priority growth avenue In late February this year, CBTS now have over $1,000,000,000 Canadian assets in Canada. Virtu worked with the ETF issuers to launch the products and become the designated broker or lead market maker and an authorized participants on a handful of the new ETFs, providing liquidity on screen and in blocks to our clients.
As an We create and redeem ETF shares with ETF issuers and trade in the underlying crypto asset. The takeaway here is that the growth of The liquid, tradable, crypto related product is another way that the total addressable market is growing for Virtu's scaled liquidity provision Our growing aftermarket business had a strong quarter, setting a new record, helping clients raise are nearly $900,000,000 of capital from the public markets by leveraging our existing electronic execution capabilities This is another example of how we generate very high incremental margin revenue due to our operating scale, The Q1 also included more than its share discussion around market structure rules and regulations, congressional hearings around the so called meme stocks, payment for order flow, investor education, continue to maintain an open dialogue with all of our global regulators about how to continue to improve the global market structure for all market participants. We believe that we operate in a transparent market structure in the U. S. That serves all the market participants exceedingly well.
In U. S. Equities, for example, U. S. Virtu returned $1,300,000,000 to retail investors in the form of price improvement in 2020 without Giving effect to the size improvement noted above.
We believe that the levels of activity in the market is eminent itself The open and transparent access that all investors enjoy today. Finally, given the strength of the results from the beginning of this year and the continued cash generative Which represents an increase to the existing $170,000,000 authorization. In a moment, Joe will provide more detail on And was a great man. Jack was the Chairman of the CME for the better part of 2 decades and among those responsible for guiding the CME into the modern electronic age. Jack, we will miss you and are grateful for all of your efforts over the years on behalf of Virtu and the capital markets more generally.
Rest in peace, Jack. Now I'll turn the call over to Jim.
Thank you, Doug. Measuring against the progress we have made versus the model that we presented in the second half of last year In the future long term growth of our business, we are increasing our share repurchase program meaningfully. Our share repurchase program began in November 2020 with an initial $100,000,000 authorization and increased 170,000,000 in total when we announced our Q4 earnings. As Subjeet mentioned, Our Board has authorized an incremental $300,000,000 increase to our repurchase program, bringing the total to $470,000,000 We have provided By an additional $300,000,000 is consistent with our prior guidance. This increase allows us to achieve our goals of returning To date, we have repurchased $151,000,000 of our shares at an average cost of $27.77 resulting in 5 point Our share buybacks are the result of excess cash generated by our business after making proper allowance for adequate amounts of trading capital and liquidity to allow us to Our ability to devote excess cash to our share repurchase program is also related to Given that our total debt to EBITDA ratio stands at 1 time trailing EBITDA as of March 31, We would expect to maintain our current level of indebtedness for the foreseeable future.
Turn to Slide 5 of the supplemental materials to review our Capital Management Snapshot. As you know, Virtu has consistently paid a $0.24 quarterly dividend since our IPO in 2015. There are two important things point out on this slide, consistent with guidance, our share count has been declining due to our buyback program. This decline is net of vesting of existing repurchase authorization within the next 12 months and net shares outstanding will continue to decline. Importantly, we wanted to point out With the acquisition of workflow and analytics products to the buy side and sell side, we continue to remain focused on capital efficiency.
The nature of our operations and services we provide In 2019, a trough year for market making and a year that also included our completion of the ITG acquisition, we were able to achieve This extraordinary outcome is due to a number of factors, including our disciplined management of capital and costs And our business model designed to leverage our global operating scale, all of which helps us generate more free cash flow. I'll now turn the call over to Sean for a review of our financial results before moving to questions
and answers. Thank you, Jim. In the quarter as presented on Slide 3 of our supplemental materials, our adjusted net trading income, which represents our trading gains, net of direct trading expenses, Market Making adjusted net trading income was $575,000,000 or 9 point are $4,000,000 per day, 10% lower than the year ago quarter, but 88% above the 4th quarter. Execution Services adjusted net trading income was $153,000,000 or $2,500,000 per day, Our $2.04 Adjusted EPS was just a penny shy of last year's record Q1 and well above $1.18 per share in the Q4 of 2020. In the Q1, our cash and overall compensation ratios were 12% and 14% of adjusted net trading income, respectively.
A note about our compensation ratio, consistent with past practice, we accrue year end incentive compensation to a range of percentages earlier in the year. Depending upon how the remainder of the year unfolds, this may result in adjustments to our compensation ratio in later quarters this year as we refine our specific compensation Overall, we believe our full year cost results will be consistent with the cost guidance we previously provided for 2021. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $565,000,000 for Q1, 1% lower in the prior year quarter and 64% above the 4th quarter. We delivered a record adjusted EBITDA margin of 77.6 represent for the Q1 by continuing to successfully leverage our efficient cost structure and by carefully managing our expenses.
Reflecting a $1,500,000
repayment in the Q1. Finance and interest expense was $19,000,000 for the Q1 of 2021 compared to $26,000,000 for the prior year Q1, with this decrease primarily due to the repayment of 2 89,000,000 are $289,000,000 of long term debt in 2020. We remain committed to our $0.24 quarterly dividend, which we have consistently paid over 23 quarters in every market environment since our IPO
and the
$300,000,000 increase we Announced today to our existing $170,000,000 share buyback authorization fully demonstrates our continued commitment to return capital to our shareholders. I will now turn the call back over to the operator for Q and A.
Our first question today will come from Rich Repetto with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, Doug and Joe and Sean. First, congrats on over the top quarter here. So I guess my first question has to do with cash slow. You did buy back shares and you have paid down debt in the past.
But in your previously sort of public statements you talked about a buyback commensurate with adjusted net trading income. So I mean, I'm trying to understand the timing of the buyback. Does it be more accelerated, I guess, going forward because of the increased Rich,
we put those handy charts out that show EPS and levels of cash flow had different levels of net trading income. So we think this is consistent. I mean, we would what we put out in the past, If you kind of look at this quarter, it's a quarter, right? So you want to take the full year range that you put out here. If you quarterize it, I think it's consistent.
And it's also a statement about the full year. Obviously, if we continue to print quarters like this, we would have more We would have share buybacks to sit in with what we've done for the full year. So I guess that's the first point. The second point is We've already bought back $150,000,000 worth of shares. It is Almost the full authorization of 170 prior to this.
And I would expect the authorize this new repurchase horizon of the year from now. And I would target it Starting now through the end of the Q1 of next year. So I would look at it as kind of rolling 12 month periods. We've chosen to not try to fix stock prices where there will be
a buyer and not fix other prices
Because we've been so specific about our guidance and we've tried to be just a consistent purchaser in the market
Got it. That's helpful, Joe. And then I guess my follow-up would be, you didn't update or address the sensitivity tables on Adjusted net trading income and EPS that you published, I'm assuming that you still believe the earnings and you far surpass ask this, but the earnings capability in a normalized environment is at least $3 in EPS. The question, it'll either from me or someone else later is just could you talk about have we returned to that more sort of the normalized environment and how close are we to it in 2Q to date in April?
Yeah. Look, I'd say, not to be flip Rich, I feel pretty good about $3 a share Given that we're at $2.04 So the year has got 12 months, which is a good thing. There's no reason to update the chart given that it's math, right? It's the adjusted the trading income per day Number of training days and then we've been really precise about expense guidance as we always are. So it's pretty easy math.
You were nice enough to host us Virtual Boca in March, we put a range of different outcomes around ANSI, And we think that's a relevant range. Now if anyone, if you look at the past year, year and a half, 2 years and can point to Something that's normal. You know, I'm I'm all ears. But, yeah. You know, the answer the answer to your question is is is yes.
Our next question will come from Dan Fannon with Jefferies. Please go ahead.
I guess just building a thought on that and trying to get a sense of, I mean, not what's normal, but just kind of what is happening in your business as we think about kind of the external metrics all moderating here in April and if you could kind of update us on how you're tracking within this kind of backdrop?
Yes. Dana, obviously, you look at the same metrics I do, just to give you a little commentary on them. I mean, April volumes were a Under 10,000,000,000 shares per day, which is down 32% -odd from the Q1. I would point out, it's only down 5% From Q4 of 2020 and on a notional basis, which is important as well, it's actually up from Q4. So there's participants have some distortion in these periods and they can look particularly like the Q1 can look very exaggerated by a lot of these lower priced names Like an FNDL that will trade a couple of 1,000,000,000 shares a day and attempt to distort the data on a notional basis, The changes are really not as relevant.
Realized volatility is down in April as well, down to are about 30% from Q1. I'm really trying to stay out of the commentary game going forward. It really has not served are well. Frankly, either way, I'm excited about the future of this company. We're very, very proud We're very committed to capital return to our investors as is witnessed by buying back 100 I am running this company for the next 20 quarters.
And also what April means as compared to April of 20 3 kind of doesn't really matter to me. We will continue to focus on the organic growth initiatives that have more significant are on the 8% of our adjusted net trading income. So, we're executing on everything that we said we were going We have integrated 2 massive companies that were materially larger to us that frankly in many regards were a mess. We created an enormous amount of value. We created an execution services business that I'm proud to say is unparalleled.
Provide a lot of value to you.
So that's really the investment case for Virtu. And obviously, I understand you have a job to do and investors look at monthly, daily, weekly I'm trying to stay in the middle of the fairway and run this firm for the next 5 or more years, and that's what we tend
Understood. And then just the disclosures did change and so transparency has kind of narrowed over the last So just could you maybe talk about the prospect versus global equities and some of that?
Sure. I mean, first, it's consistent with how we report on a GAAP basis, right? So a lot of it was historical when we were a smaller company And didn't have a customer or non customer segment, didn't have execution services business, etcetera. So the company has gotten a lot are larger and more complicated. But again, it goes back to the point I just tried to make, which is Virtu is a story of not whether or not our metals business is up consistent in a quarter with some metric that somebody's look at.
The vagaries of that type of analysis are not consistent in my view with shareholder value creation. And so I'm all about providing transparency. This is not the easiest business in the world that we get to explain. But my conclusion was with the support of my colleagues here in this room and my Board was that providing that level of granularity I guess was not consistent with the long term long term shareholder values we're trying to create and all it did was encourage folks to trade in and out of the stock, which they have done with alacrity and they're entitled to do. But certainly we're not going provide additional information so that people can do that on a more regular basis.
We want people to understand this story as a scaled electronic provider. And Rest assured our FICC numbers are completely in line with historical averages, but just and we said this on the last earnings We're going to narrow the focus of this firm, if you will, and the review of this firm as a technologically enabled financial services firm that is broad and is unique in the market
Our next question will come from Chris Allen with Compass Point. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. I wanted to ask a little bit on Execution Services. Last quarter, you noted a growing recurring revenue base within that line. Maybe you can give us some color in terms of framing that out, just how big that is as a percentage of that segment, because obviously Q1 was a good of the industry backdrop as well within that business?
Yes. Great question, Chris. I mean, we don't additionally kind of break it out into recurring versus nonrecurring. There's a little bit of a mixture in there. As you know, if you think of the recurring segments, we have a workflow solutions and analytics business.
We're are obviously very focused on that. We launched some new products which we outlined in the quarter. Our open Intel, are open Python products. Really replatformed in large measure our Triton product and delivering our analytics solution In a very, very material way. So the way we look at it is These are like reoccurrence revenues, right?
We have 2,000 global clients. The vast proponents of them use 2 or more products, including are in
the position of management, which
is really part of that. And so, sure, there's going to be elements of transactional activity that will impact those products, but it's no different than an institutional business And a large scale broker dealer, as I've pointed out, absent, of course, the vagaries of prime brokerage and risk taking, right? So we're providing The key though to this quarter was 2 years after the acquisition, having launched a number of these new products, having re platformed virtually all of the ITG products, it's working, right? There was concern that clients wouldn't resonate to the offering because of the market maker HFT and actually we thought the opposite was true and indeed the opposite is true. Our clients that have opted in to our pools of natural liquidity and our ability to cross clients against each other have given that service rave reviews and I would stipulate or argue that we're the only firm in the planet that can provide that type of Unique liquidity provision coupled with a technologically enabled view of global equities markets and indeed markets So we think it's a very, very unique scale business.
We're very excited about it. Again, Steve Cavoli has done a great job integrating it and we've Indeed, we've gotten a hell of a lot better. So I'm very, very proud of what we've created in Execution Services 2 years in.
Got it. And then just on the organic growth opportunities, maybe you could give us some color on, I think it was the big data analytics launch You noted on the slide, and one thing I did not see on the slide was corporate credit, which you talked a little bit about in the past. So any color there would be helpful.
Yes. Great. So, look, I mean, I just kind of went through our commitment to the analytics business and we look at that as Again, this is probably a little bit of a silly analogy, but we kind of want to be the App Store, Chris, right, as opposed to we always have provided consulting services and whatnot, but we want to enable our clients to access their data in a scaled way and enable them to have That information, along with the library of APIs that we're going to provide and drive significant value for it. That's really what our They don't want to be pushed a bunch of PDFs that say, okay, well, here would be your impact analysis on your apparent algo. I mean that's literally like the late '90s type of delivery.
And so we've revamped the way that we look at that business We want to be in the platform data delivery and data provisioning business and clients have really resonated to that. So we think that's certainly unique and we've got, 1, the technology footprint to do that and 2, the peer of clients to be able to provide that. In terms of corporate credit, again, it is something that we're very committed to. I told you that we launched it late last year, early this year, so its contributions are swallowed up by the rest of the results. But it's certainly something that we're very, very excited about.
It's not a standalone product. It scales and leverages very well our existing capabilities globally in ETFs, and it further just bolsters the fixed income ETF market making offering So we will continue to invest in it and we think we'll be a significant player. And the addressable market in fixed income ETFs just continues to grow. And so it's a very exciting opportunity for us going
Our next question will come from Sean Horgan, who is with Rosenblatt Securities. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my question, guys. So just one on crypto. I was wondering if you could expand on the market making initiative there. Can we get a sense of the contribution of crypto market making to organic growth And how impactful do you see this opportunity?
How should we think of the business ramping up?
Yes. I mean, look, I mean, God bless Canada. It's a great country with the home of hockey and all that kind of stuff. I love hockey. So the Ontario Securities To approve a couple of ETFs, we look at that as an opportunity for us to be a significant market maker right in our wheelhouse, it's an equity security against either a cash or a future or both, right?
And that's what we do as a market maker.
We like being
an authorized participant. We want to partner with issuers so that they issue products We want to partner with issuers so that they issue products that are attractive to investors. Otherwise, And it scales very, very nicely into our existing infrastructure. So the incremental Right. So, we've been a market maker in crypto futures for a long time.
As a part of a contribution, it's a small market and these are small products right now. The exciting thing, however, is there's obviously been a
lot of talk about what's going
to happen in the United States. I think there are 5 are 6 or 7 in Fidelity, WisdomTree and other world class issuers that have proposals pending at the SEC. I think the Chairman is extremely well versed on these issues. He lectured about them at MIT. I He is very, very thoughtful on it.
And so I am guardedly optimistic that product or products will launch in the United States and then the sort of We'll have gates open up and we can grow very, very quickly with these issuers, excuse me, and partner with these issuers. It's just another example. Again, I'm not a Bitcoin guy. I'm not talking about whether or not the underlying asset and sort of you shouldn't come to me for that kind of question. The opportunity, however, for us as a market maker is if this is viewed as a store of value, people are going to want to You have this entirely new addressable market with presumably 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of value that needs to be market made and It needs to have price discovery on it.
We can do that without increasing our risk at all, right, and without any real investments other than the Technology plant we have and the personnel that we have today. That's why we're very excited about it.
Okay. Got it. Great. Thanks. That's helpful.
And just one other one, I guess, same question with the options market making. How should we think about the trajectory going forward there?
Yes. Obviously, as I said in the script, a 50% incremental growth against a really good quarter in the 4th quarter is exciting, Right. And so we're building that business the Virtu Way from scratch. And as I said earlier in my prepared remarks, we're adding a couple of Really talented free agents, if you will, that have some subject matter expertise that frankly we were lacking here. And so doing it the Virtu way, having a team right now that is smaller than a red box, if you will, will grow somewhat, but will never be a giant are a large scale group of folks and so will have a significant margin.
So I would say we're in the 1st inning right now. We have not addressed Individual names, we're certainly not in the retail 605 business, which I've read can be pretty profitable in options, right? And so There's a lot of opportunity and a lot of growth for us. Again, the significant thing is it's a Virtu style growth story. We have the fixed cost plans, the Technological infrastructure, we had a we will continue to address and tweak it for options.
I'm very confident we will get there because we've had meaningful success there. We have all the connectivity to the exchanges. We have the relationships. We have prime brokerage. And more importantly, we have relationships with the Retail providers or the retail brokers, if you will, for all these options.
So we have all of the makings of a global scaled options business. It's just a question of blocking and tackling and executing and that's something that I'm very proud to say we have been excellent in Over the last 13 years, so I have every reason to believe that we will continue to see very significant improvements in this area. We're making awesome progress. I'm very happy
Our next question will come from Alex Kramm Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, everyone. Sorry to harp on the transparency discussion from earlier, but Just coming back to the question that was asked, I think twice about 2nd quarter trend so far, it Seems to me that historically speaking, just as recent as conferences or your Q1 earnings call, you've been very happy to provide us with Kind of like ideas of how things are trending from an anti perspective when things were trending fairly decently. So with all these Metrics or industry metrics suggesting a little bit of a softening here quarter to date and your lack of giving us some insights. How are we not supposed to infer that things are running decently softer quarter to date?
Not sure if that's a question, but just wanted to clarify.
You just wrote your note, Alex, and I guess I'm not surprised. So, look, we have tried to be very transparent. We gave monthly Report in 2020 and we put out an August report that I guess was lower than someone's expectations and the stock went down 15%, Right. So there is no benefit to our long term investors to continuing to do that. So I'm just not going to do it.
And you obviously will write whatever you're going to We will write whatever you're going to write. You continue to be very negative on the stock and that's fine. That's your prerogative. I've had you at Virtu. I've shown you everything about the InterSancs and with Virtu And we've shown you how we're going to grow this firm.
I'm running this firm for the next 20 quarters. If you think April is important to that story, then write the note that you're going to write. I would candidly disagree with you. And so therefore, I've given you my commentary on April, right? I've given you where we're Where we're going to be in 2026 is a lot more important to me than what you think about April.
What I'd add is in the past, what Doug just mentioned there late last summer When we stopped the monthly guidance, we did that for a reason, because we tried to be more transparent. And frankly, it didn't help anything. It didn't help anyone's understanding of the stock. It didn't help Our shareholders, we heard directly from them. And frankly, it didn't help any of the people who lied on Virtu.
That's why we stopped doing it. And I think since And we've been very consistent. I don't think this is new. When you look at the Q4 and the Q1, we've tried to kind of outline Nancy, per day, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, what is the range available for share repurchases? What is the range For EPS, that's meant to be a long term tool, right?
That's meant to be a very long term tool To help people understand what to expect to build your models on the revenue side and on the cost side. So I think that's the best we can do. The month to month and quarter to quarter guidance just didn't help. And I don't think it's new. I don't think it's been this Something that we're just
starting there.
All right. I appreciate the comments. I guess, sorry to harp on it one more time. Just It's obviously not a question about being positive or negative on the stock, but if I think about it from a new investor perspective, if you think about your firm, I think from the beginning, you've prided yourself of being an open kimono company with regulators, With your customers, etcetera, and it just seems to me considering that you're complaining about the multiple that your stock trades at that to attract new investor interest, Wouldn't you want to give people transparency that they can actually see the path for growth? So again, sorry to hear.
I I candidly disagree with your characterization, okay? We have given more transparency than any public company in this space, Right, about what we're trying to do to grow this business. You had a note 2 years ago that Virtu was a melting ice cube and you were wrong. We've shown you all the growth initiatives that we have initiated. We've started options.
We've started block ETFs. We're going to be a major player in crypto assets as they move into a more We've taken out 100 of 1,000,000 of costs. We've recreated an execution services business that, candidly, your firm would love to have. Okay. And so if all of those things don't attract new investors, then I don't know what else we can do.
Whether or not we should HARP on monthly results on a stock that is a 5 year story to me is not the right way to approach a stock. You're going to write your note. I know exactly what the headline is going to see.
There being no further questions, we'll conclude the question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Douglas Cifu for any closing remarks.
Great. I want to thank everybody for joining today, again, particularly those that are interested in long term investing in Virtu. We're here to answer any of your questions anytime, and we look
The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.