All right, everybody. Next up, we have all three Co-CEOs of BGC Group. We're joined by John Abularrage right here next to me, we have JP Aubin over there on the end, and Sean Windeatt here in the middle. BGC is one of the largest energy and wholesale financial brokers in the world, or energy and financial wholesale brokers operating across rates, FX, credit, equities, and energy and commodities. Over the last 18 months, BGC has delivered mid-teens organic top-line growth, completed the OTC Global Holdings acquisition, which significantly expanded your energy franchise, and launched FMX into both SOFR and U.S. Treasury futures. A lot going on, gentlemen. Great to have you back. Thanks very much for having us. All right. You just put up a record first quarter. There's a lot of rate volatility, commodity dislocations, energy market turmoil. Broadly, a great setup for your business. Could you talk about how the year shaped up, where's the revenue strength most concentrated today, and how are you thinking about going forward from here, the outlook for the rest of the year? Yeah. Why don't I start? Look, you're right, Q1 couldn't have been a better setup for us in terms of the business. We were up 44% in Q1 compared to the previous year in revenue and generated $955 million of revenue. Then, of course, people say, well, it must be because of the conflict. Well, actually, pre the conflict, we were actually up 41%. Sure, the conflict obviously increased volumes, particularly in, as you mentioned, our biggest asset class in the ECS space, ending up that 44% for the period. The majority of that growth was what I would call standard market growth. It wasn't just market share gains, it's the targeted acquisitions that we've done, the electronic trading platforms that we've built, and that's what really drove our Q1. Then again, for the balance of the first half of the year, April was a quieter period for exchanges, right? As everybody sort of checked back a little bit. As you saw within our guidance for Q2, still, that would have us up for the first half of the year, 22% for the first half of the year as compared to last year, and 13% of that being organic. You saw a little bit of a tail off there in April as market participants were digesting what had happened throughout that really volatile month in March. Life has returned to, I don't know what normal is these days, but some level of normality for the month of May. Sure. Looking back, OTC Global Holdings acquisition seems exceptionally well-timed given the energy market strength that we've seen here recently. You're now much more of an energy play than you were before this acquisition. I think before it was 15% of your revenues. Today, it's between 30%-40% is coming from the energy and commodities business. What impact do you think, you talked a little bit about it, but the geopolitical setup, the things that you're doing in energy specifically, maybe cross-sell opportunities with the legacy franchise, where have you seen success there? I'll take it. Sorry. The biggest successes when it comes to the integration on the revenue side of OTC come from the OB business. The gem in the OTC business is OB, which stands for Oil Brokers, which I'm sure took them a while to come up with. They were number one franchise in London. We had a great franchise in Asia, they're number one in London, and we had a great franchise in the U.S. Those are mainly follow-the-sun traded businesses. To be able to have all three has kind of completed the circle for us, and where we were number three or four in the market, we've now taken that to number one or two, and as you say, look, volatility, people are going to go to number one or two who's got the biggest and the best liquidity, and that's what you've seen happen with the OB acquisition. Sure. One of the things that I think that's also differentiated about you that a lot of people, I don't think understand it, doesn't come up a lot in my conversations, but you have a shipping business that gives you very good insights into what's going on in the world. There's obviously been a lot of dislocation with global shipping lanes here recently. Could you talk about that business, how much of a revenue driver it is for you, and what sort of opportunities you're able to take advantage of with that business? It's exactly as you said. The integration of the OTC shipping business and the existing brand, it's branded Poten, which is the number one LNG shipping business in the world, gives you the insights to the actual brokers who are looking at a barrel of oil. Knowing where we're traveling around and being able to sit there on our data sales business and know what's coming in from those platforms, both on voice, hybrid, and electronic, and give that information to our desks. They're doing a much better job voice broking the barrel of oil on the back of knowing where those ships are going. Got it. I think we've also been fairly clear that we want to expand that business further. Sure. How do you think you'd go about doing that? If you don't mind kind of elaborating. Sure. If investors' return on capital is appropriate, we would make an acquisition in that business. Sure. All right. Fenics, I want to shift to electronic revenues continue to grow. The transition of voice brokerage activity to electronic has been kind of an underlying narrative in the stock for several years. Some of your most recent acquisitions, OTC Global Holdings being one of them, that's a primarily voice brokerage business. How do you think about the balance between voice and electronic, and what's the strategy going forward to continue driving volumes electronic? What are the things you're doing internally to facilitate that? Look, remember, for those of you who don't know our company as well, think about the fact that we've got three elements to the business. You've got really the voice, the traditional voice broking business. You've got the hybrid business, where a trade starts off voice. Then the size increases through either voice or electronic, can go either way. You've got the fully electronic piece. Over 25% of our business is fully electronic. Some people were looking over the last year, they'd say, "That's slowed down a little bit. It was 25% a year ago or 24% a year ago. That slowed. By the way, over the last few years, the company's revenues have grown from $2.2 billion, just a few, $2.262 to be exact, a few years ago, up to over $3 billion for the trailing 12 months. As you quite rightly said, in our rates, our traditional biggest asset class of rates in foreign exchange and credit, north of 90% of those businesses have the capability to be traded electronically, which obviously gives a higher margin to the business. We're an exchange, right? We are an intermediary, therefore, it's how our clients choose to transact business. They either choose to transact voice, electronic, or a mixture of the two. In terms of the tremendous opportunity is we now have a huge ECS business, which as you quite rightly say, is pretty much today all voice. That really gives us fuel to take that piece of the business electronic. Let's not rush, right? We'll do it. It's as our clients want it, don't expect it to go there tomorrow. It's a great opportunity to do exactly what we've done in the other asset classes. Sure. If you were to build that Fenics equivalent within energy, what makes the most natural sense in terms of the offering and the products offered, the assets within ECS that you think could go electronic fastest? What does that market look like? In terms of the way that some of these are traded now is they're blocking to an exchange, right? I think when you say turning them electronic, if you're talking about listing a future on FMX. Yeah Yes. Certainly. I have one of my partners sitting in the stands over there, so I don't want to say too much or he'll hold me to it. Certainly that's got to be a discussion as to whether the partners in FMX want to do that. Taking advantage of the energy franchise at some point in the future makes sense in those listed products where you're blocking. In the products where they're traded completely voice, and that is primarily going to be in the non-standard part of the barrel, right? In terms like we're number one in biodiesel. As you know, we went and said last year bought a fats and greases business to pair with our biodiesel desk. Things like that, where there's no electronic element to it, bringing that transparency and price discovery in an electronic fashion is certainly part of the plan going forward. Sure. Maybe double-clicking there on FMX. Futures launched a little over a year and a half ago. Stepping back, how satisfied have you been with the launch so far, and the trajectory of volumes there, and how would you frame for the audience where we are in the J curve of adoption and revenue growth, volume growth, open interest growth within that business? Well, what's happening recently is great, right? I think we said on the earnings call that at the time when the war started, it was worrisome when you watch your volumes drop. We'd be lying if we said that watching that happen, and of course, in hindsight, everyone turns and says, well, that's what you would expect for a nascent exchange. W hich is SOFR and Treasury futures would move to where the most volume is. Now being back where we were prior to that gives us greater confidence than we've ever had that the market is demanding a second venue. We believe that, as we've said to you before, we've got the right partners, we've got the right clearer, right? We've got the right technology. We have the right guys leading that business. We are more certain today that the marketplace is apt for our entry to continue to gain more market share. You're seeing OI and ADV back improving on the trajectory it was before year end, which obviously gives us the ability to look back on that and say, hey, we're glad that happened. Sure at the time it didn't feel like that. I think as well, John, what's exciting, and with some of our earlier meetings today is you think it's really mirroring what happened in cash T reasuries. Right. In cash, in Fenics UST, that obviously started with lower market share. In times of particular volatility, you saw a dip, and then you saw a recovery. Here we are with our cash Fenics UST with a market share in excess of 40%. We're very encouraged. Actually, as John, JP and myself were talking about just only half an hour or so ago, when you see something like that happen in the month of March, or end of February, beginning of March. When you see that, and actually you see the trajectory not then go, it actually went back to the levels it was and has continued to grow again, as John said, gives us tremendous confidence that with the partners that we have and the demand that we've got from the client base for the competition, gives us even more confidence today. One of the more cited, I think, selling points when FMX was launching was the ability to cross margin. For futures with swaps collateral at LCH, any chance you could help just break down or quantify how much of that benefit FMX users are actually realizing today? What are those conversations like? Any color on that? Sure. We've spoken about the number of FCMs that have onboarded, so what percent of the market that is, and like everything else that we talk about when it comes to FMX and how laborious it is to get to those next stages, this is part of that process. What's happening in terms of the benefit is you have six of those FCMs ready to offer a cross-margining benefit. At last count, I think three more would be ready by the end of the year, and then you would have something like the 12 that you and I have spoken about before ready by the end of Q1 of next year, which would give you 90%+ of liquidity available that could receive that cross-margining benefit going forward. As you rightly point out, in terms of talking to new participants or non-partner participants, that's a big part of the story. Offering it from the six that are ready to do it now is certainly a huge selling point for FMX. Sure. Switching gears, you've done three acquisitions over the last year or so. I mentioned one of them. At this conference last year, you told us that with OTC integrated, you expected to lean more toward buybacks unless other opportunities surfaced. A year on, can you talk about how that's played out? Where does the pipeline of potential M&A sit today? What's attractive, is there an appetite for maybe doing something more transformational? In terms of our capital return, nothing has changed. You saw from our overall share count was fractionally lower year-over-year. In terms of our buybacks, we tend to do those more in the second half of the year. You have slightly more uses for cash in Q1. Every decision that we make is EPS, is all about what's the best value to our shareholder. As you can imagine, when you do an acquisition, you mentioned three, when you do transformational ones like OTC, there's a lot of incoming calls, of course, to BGC. If something's going to be of good value for our shareholders, then of course we'll maintain acquisition mode, and if there isn't something that's readily available, then we'll continue to buy back stock. Both of those things will be highly beneficial for the shareholder. From an asset class perspective, do you feel like there's any gaps that are glaring that you would be looking to address potentially through M&A? How do you balance as you look across the different franchises investing for growth organically versus M&A? Oh, sorry, go for it. Sorry, JP. No, good. We noticed on ECS, where we are leaders now, right? The shipping market remains so fragmented. Obviously, we have incoming calls due to our current critical size on that product, on that asset today, and we're looking at every option. Definitely shipping is a segment where we want to invest. For people in the audience who might not be as familiar with that business, can you talk about the economics of it and how you make money in that business specifically? I think that would be helpful to kind of just help people get a better grasp of that. Do you mean the way we-? The way the shipping business works and how you make money off of that, where you sit, just an overview of what the business looks like in terms of the operations and also the revenue model. Again, thanks to our market share and critical size, we match in roughly all the shipping routes in the world, but we can grow more, definitely. We have OTC shipping business. That's Poten, which is the leading in this segment, but we can grow larger. Now with the war, the conflict, we have different routes in the shipping business. Again, that's where we have to invest more. We're leaders in oil, right? That's shipping the next move. Got it. All right. Earlier we had Yuval Rooz up here from Digital Asset. They're working with the DTCC on tokenizing Treasuries on Canton, which is the network that they use. One of the things he said was that banks and financial institutions, through tokenization, collateral mobility, increased collateral efficiency, could see 50%+ improvement in balance sheet efficiency. There's a thought out there that this is going to lead to volumes, especially among large financial institutions, just given the fact that they have these efficiency improvements. We're going to see a huge boost in volumes. How do you think about that as an inter-dealer broker, where you sit? Are you paying attention to that? Do you view it as a tailwind of the business? Is there anything maybe related to tokenization that you guys would be looking at or you think could benefit the business? I suppose it depends for us on which part of the business you're talking about. Certainly when we look at tokenization, the same conversations are happening from BGC that you just referenced before, whether it's a DTCC or not. Remember, we also have the aspect of FMX and looking at it from that perspective. Our view on it is not dissimilar to what you said, which is it might have the benefit of greater volumes. I think what we try to do is prepare the business in the event that that won't happen. If it becomes a tailwind for us, great. Okay. Let's talk about non-bank liquidity. We have Joseph Mecane from Citadel coming up here later this afternoon. Citadel's been pushing harder into credit, harder rate liquidity. How do some of these alternative liquidity providers coming into the rates and fixed income space affect the competitive picture for BGC? Do you view them as a partner, competitor, both? For Citadel, we view them as an essential partner. Sure To what we do across asset classes and across FMX. They've been a great partner, continue to be a great partner. As they disrupt and we try to disrupt, I'm sure there are many more things that we can talk about and hopefully do together. We try to view innovation and disruptors as partners in these businesses and see where we can provide a certain element that perhaps aids what they're trying to do and vice versa. Sure. No, we very much see them as a partner. All right. Maybe just finishing off, if we look ahead three years from now, where do you see BGC as a company? What are the milestones investors should be paying attention to? Really, what are the things that you're most excited about in your business specifically as we look out over the next three to five years? Let's start to go back to the three parts of our business. You've got the traditional IDB voice hybrid business. Round about three years ago, after zero interest rates, we said that the company is a growth company again. We've grown 13%, 12%, 30%, and then another 22% for the half of this year. I think that is because we have interest rates again. Remember, think about us as an exchange for everything that doesn't trade on an exchange. Right? From 2008 to 2022 with zero interest rates, people were trading less. The business that exists today, where we're at in 2026, excluding our acquisition, really is almost where we were back in 2008, for all the things that we now own. For us, I think you'll see continued growth, significant growth within the ECS space. You'll see market share gains in terms of rates. When it comes to credit, you'll see movements in credit. John has spoken significantly on various calls about the movement away from what I would say traditional IDB credit into the PortfolioM atch, into the electronic trading, and that side of it within terms of the credit space. You've already heard the bifurcated market that exists in the ECS space. There's three or four main players in the other asset classes. There are still plenty of players in ECS. What we've started in terms of consolidation will continue. By the way, we haven't even spoken there in FMX, right? Yeah, for me, it's just the ecosystem that we're creating. I hate that word, so I apologize for it. If we think about the pieces that we're bringing together and what the electronification of our world, particularly with AI coming in, could look like. You're talking about API connectivity coming in. The data that we're capturing on fully electronic trading coming in on this side. You sit there, you're the exchange. The exchange spills off that data. Again, you are now doing a lot more with that data than what we've traditionally done, which is just basically sell the exhaust of our exchange to a client base. Now you're actually doing derived data products and being able to pair that, and then you're selling that data back to the client base over here. It's almost, if you've got a piece of paper in your hand, just folding back then. You're sitting there saying, no, you own front to back of that market. As you gain greater access to new client bases, and what we've seen thus far in terms of deployment, we internally use Claude, but it could be a different animal in six months, who knows? What we're able to do in terms of consumption of large amounts of data, and what we've got in terms of 15 years of verifiable bids, offers, and trades sitting there that we're now able to consume and use, it's incredibly exciting, and I think we've got the pieces to do something different with BGC than hopefully, I think you said two to three years. Hopefully in two to three years, we won't be sitting here talking about an interdealer broker. Sure. Something significantly more. Sure. I think that's an interesting point, too, because there's a lot of exchanges who the data business has been almost a drag recently, but in your business, in the OTC markets, it's still a relatively untapped opportunity. What is it? Less than 5% of revenues today comes from data, probably? That's right. Yeah. Yep. The rule of thumb on other exchanges is 15%-20%, so a lot of runway there. Gentlemen, I think we're out of time, but thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Thanks for having us. Thank you.