Okay, so we're gonna get started. Welcome back, everybody. Hopefully, everybody's well fed. So for our next session, it's my pleasure to welcome Chris Concannon, CEO of MarketAxess. Chris became CEO earlier this year. Under his leadership, MarketAxess continued to drive innovation in fixed-income trading through new protocols, enhanced use of data, and further customer expansion. The firm also made a number of acquisitions to expand its addressable market as electronic trading of credit continues to evolve. We'll obviously spend time with Chris on the ecosystem broadly, and of course, what MarketAxess is up to, and the strategy as we kind of head out into 2024. So thank you for being here. Oh. Great to see you, as always. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. I love this conference. Yeah. Well, thank you. It's busy times. Look, so I wanted to start with just the state of electronic markets in credit. Obviously, it's a big topic. It's something we talk about every year. It feels like volumes generally continue to move in that direction. More things are trading electronically. Recently, the pace of that electrification might have slowed a little bit, but what are your expectations for both U.S. and non-U.S. market when it comes to electronic trading of credit, call it for the next three years? I mean, it's a conundrum that everyone asks, right? Yeah. Everyone asks me in every investor meeting, you know, what's the true opportunity? How much can convert? We've seen other asset classes in the high levels of conversion to electronic, like high 90%s in some markets. So it's a very difficult question. I look at a couple of data points. The number one data point that I see right now is, and we'll talk about this, portfolio trading. If you think about the electronic market right now, we've penetrated the small ticket size. Highly electronic, a good portion of that, call it that 40% of electronic market, is smaller tickets. In a typical evolution of an electronic trading, you know, market going from phone to electronic, the last thing to go is the complicated block size market. Mm-hmm. This market did it in reverse. Like, we've obviously converted the small ticket to electronic, and then we jumped all the way to the largest ticket. Mm. Portfolio trades are $200 million-$2 billion. Very complicated. Dealers, two to three dealers, sometimes one dealer, pricing those portfolios. It's the more complex end of the market, and it's now been electronified. Yeah. We've actually made it clear that this thing can go pretty far, from 50% into the 90%s. Yeah Because we've just tackled the more complicated part of the market, the PT. The question is, w hat is the conversion ratio of the middle? Mm-hmm. I would argue that we're just now addressing what I'd call non-all-to-all size, more complicated use. It's I call it the $3 million-$10 million market. It's a little bit bigger than sending it into an all-to-all environment, where you're announcing the trade to all. Yeah By definition, so you wanna be a little bit more careful and selective in who you're showing that trade to. One or two dealers, fully disclosed, that is now being electronified. We see that opportunity. Our rollout of our new platform is targeting that specific part of the market. Mm-hmm. And it's the piece that we're hearing from our clients and from dealers that they would like to see move into an electronic form, and that last piece about from dealers, that's unique and that's new. From the client side, they, they would like to automate a good portion of their market. They're not hiring, this is across the board. I've been around the globe talking to our, our investor clients. Yep And they are not hiring traders. Mm-hmm. The workflow could increase. They're not hiring traders. They need more electronic solutions to get them to the same outcome, but doing it electronically. That sweet spot for us and for the market, I'm predicting, is $3 million-$10 million in, call it, high-U.S. high grade. That's a real sweet spot. The dealers, ironically, you know, certainly not fans of electronic in the early days. Mm-hmm. They're using it more. Yep. They've made the necessary investment to price bonds electronically, but they automatically execute up to a certain size. Mm-hmm. But they're still willing to price bonds that come in through an electronic means. They just need a human to price check it. Mm-hmm. They don't mind that. Instead of coming in through chat or over the phone to a very expensive sales trader. Mm-hmm Receiving that electronically and quickly pricing it, is beneficial for their economics as well. Yeah. So we're in this place where both dealer and client has made the natural conversion. Mm-hmm To electronic, and now they both want to grow that piece of the pie. That's what can get that sort of next leg of the trade going. That's the. We have. Yeah. I look at the numbers, and the overall electronification of the bond market. Yeah Has stalled. Right. All right? It's in the 40%s. Yep. I think the next leg of this. Ironically, we jumped to these. Yeah Giant block trades. Yeah And skipped the middle market. But what's important about the block trade is we've proven that the electronic solution works at all sizes. Yep. Now we're going back and finishing the rest of the market. I gotcha. I gotcha. So a little bit more bullish than you would've seen me here. Yeah A couple years ago. All right. Well, that's good to see. Well, 90%, it's 95%. Right. Well, we'll unpack some of the drivers, 'cause obviously you guys have a lot going on in terms of innovation and new protocols, but, let's kinda zoom in on the most recent trends. I know you guys put out the monthly metrics for November, so maybe at a high level, but just kinda hit on some of the key notables market share trends look like. Stabilized, improved a little bit, obviously slightly better fee per million as well. Any notable trends that stood out to you from the November trends, that you saw? I mean, hitting records again is always nice to release. Yeah Into the market. It's always well-received when you hit a record. Look, record total credit volume, record Eurobond volume. That's a market that we've done well in this year. And then, record munis. And when I arrived at MarketAxess, I got fixated about the muni market. Right. It's a market that is way behind. It's still operating almost in the 1990s, and that transition to. And it's all small tickets. So I'm super excited about what we're doing in munis. It's a big deal to have record volume in November when the muni market isn't as robust as some of our other markets. But the market backdrop, I think, was more favorable to MarketAxess. Just, you know, we're still not seeing high levels of credit spread volatility. Right. Volatility has ticked up a little bit, but it's really, I think the stable rate environment is helping our clients move back into certain credit products, and we're seeing it in volume, and we're seeing it in turnover in the overall market. Market volumes have. Yeah ... been up in November. Yeah. No, it's certainly, certainly helpful. All right, let's go through some of the products, starting maybe with the U.S. credit. And, you know, look, on the last call, you mentioned that you guys weren't happy with the recent performance in the U.S. credit business, and then certainly there's been some, you know, environmental issues that we're all aware of, and then, then maybe, maybe some things that are more, kind of MarketAxess-specific. Can you help us maybe unpack between these two, the recent performance in IG or high grade, rather, for you guys? How much of this was just the environmental problems and kind of low volatility and the duration issues that we've seen versus maybe some of the capabilities issues, and how are you looking to solve those? Yeah. And, look, I do think November is a little bit more of a better market environment. We are addressing the product, and the product suite challenge. Look, as a manager of a large global institution, we should offer products and solutions that are good in all different times. So we shouldn't be vol dependent. We should be really. You know, and portfolio trading is a perfect example. We're coming from behind in the portfolio trading solution. We've done a lot in that suite of products, and I think we're going to achieve a much better outcome, particularly for our clients in the next phases of our PT offering. But that's a product that's much more attractive in low vol. Yep. All to all, it's highly attractive in high vol. So as we enter new levels of volatility, we tend to, MarketAxess tends to do better. We really need a product offering that is offering solutions in both times. So a portfolio trading solution, or a block trading solution. Mm-hmm. Those solutions tend to grow in lower volume. They're easier to price products and use the platform. So we definitely have to deliver kind of a complete offering. The PT offering is interesting. I think that's an area that we have a lot of ground to cover. Pretty encouraged in November, the growth of our portfolio trading solution, really the next round. What's interesting about portfolio trading is, early days portfolio trading, you know, it was a PM dropping a portfolio that they preselected to a trader to go, hey, go and trade this. Yeah. As a PT. Yeah. The clients have finally gotten a little bit more sophisticated, and traders are now kind of massaging the basket. Mm-hmm To optimize price. Mm-hmm. And a critical ingredient in that optimization is pre-trade data. Mm. The clients came to us, and they said, we want to see more pre-trade data so we can make better selections at the line items to improve the overall price of the portfolio. We're seeing that. For example, if you correlate your list of line items to an ETF, lo and behold. Yeah Your pricing tightens and gets better. Mm-hmm. Because the other side of the trade is really trading this as a basket relative to the ETF. Yeah. If you remove large, chunky line items, your portfolio pricing gets better. Mm. And so what we've been delivering to clients is pre-trade analytics that help them optimize that basket. We've done that in November. There's another series of development coming out in January. So we feel good about that product offering. More importantly, it's proprietary data. Mm That we don't think the competition holds, and so we can deliver an offering that is a competitive advantage, using our proprietary data. That's great. How do you think about the opportunity set for portfolio trading for you guys relative to the existing offering? So if you think about the market share, and I know we're kind of slicing and dicing. We're going from, like, overall, like, IG market share among a couple of providers to now specific kind of protocol-level market share stats. Anything you want to share with us in terms of where you are now and where you'd like to be with respect to portfolio trading specifically? Yeah. I mean, it's a global offering. I think we're still kind of massaging the product in U.S. credit. Yeah. We have products globally, so we have a portfolio trading solution in Europe and in EM. But our rollout of our new platform, X-Pro, is really where we're putting all of our energy. Mm And all of our proprietary data. And it used to be, like I said, here's how to trade the portfolio. Yeah And get a best price from a couple of dealers. Now we're saying: Here's how to optimize to improve the overall outcome. Yeah. I think that's the strategic advantage that we can actually hold. We made a decision back in the spring to stop building on our legacy platform and build everything in the new platform. Mm-hmm. We're still rolling that platform out for portfolio trading. Yeah And starving the old. I gotcha. I gotcha. Okay, let's talk about high yield in a little more detail now. You know, there's been probably more volatility in MarketAxess' market share when it comes to high yield in the last, I don't know, six to nine months than I've seen, you know, in. A couple years. Yeah, yeah Coverage company, right? So, you know, I think you've got as high as low 20%s, I think at the end of last year, and, you know, as low as kind of mid-teens, at some point of time this year. So help us just kind of level set what's been driving such big swings in market share. What's the ideal environment, for your high yield business? High yield is definitely. We've seen a lot of volatility in our share. Yeah. When you unpack it, what you see is high levels of ETF market maker activity. The best market, which was probably last year, this time last year, was long only coming in and looking at high yield or dispersing of high yield. Mm-hmm And turnover of high yield, and then the ETF market maker activity, so ETF turnover. Mm-hmm. When I look at high-yield ETF volumes, I see better market share for MarketAxess. Yep. So highly correlated to that. We've seen some, particularly over the summer, a number of the ETF market makers, the high yield ETF market makers, struggle through that low volume. Mm-hmm And low volume in ETF. But, certainly, our ETF market makers activity in November was up 18%, so it obviously is helping to drive some of that market share gain. But I'd say there are better environments that we've seen in the past for high yield. The good news is, if you're kind of long fixed income, which I am, and. Yeah At these higher rates, I think the fixed income market is certainly ready for growth from a capital asset allocation. Yep. High yield is an interesting asset allocation, and there's a strong demand, and we're hearing it from all the, you know, the institutional investors. They're creating ETF products, particularly in high yield. Mm-hmm. That's an attractive product offering. So we do think there are more high yield ETFs coming to market, more growth in high. Mm-hmm The current high-yield ETFs in 2024, which turns into turnover. Yeah. We're pretty bullish about what that high-yield market will look like in 2024. Yeah, and we've heard from a couple of asset managers earlier today, speaking exactly to this point, that the, the bid for credit as an asset class feels as like getting better. Much better Into 2020, you know, 2024, as opposed. Yeah To people just kind of sitting in cash. So that should be obviously helpful to the underlying asset class. I do think the biggest driver of that, and what helped the macro market backdrop that we've seen, is stability in rate and rate forecast. Mm-hmm. If you're predicting that rates are gonna go up, people are hesitant to move into fixed income, because you're gonna buy into a declining market. Right. Once rates stabilize and the forecast are stable to down, it feels like a much better asset class to move into. Yeah. One of the other topics I was hoping to discuss is just the matter of sort of relative size of trade as a constraint, and we touched on that a little bit, you know, in the beginning of the conversation. But there are a couple of ways to think about penetrating the market further, right? Like, either you move up market into these larger trades, like the block stuff is taken care of by portfolio trading, but this middle, or there's an ability to maybe break up some of these trades into smaller orders. Where are you in that journey? What are you guys doing to kind of facilitate that? And could that be also another element to drive electrification in the market further? My view was, rather than bet on one or the other, do both. Yeah. We had this opportunity, with X-Pro rolling out a brand-new platform to retool our delivery of our offering. So we've delivered a very successful all-to-all offering. I'll just focus on high grade. Sure Because that's where share is most interesting. We've delivered an all-to-all offering all the time. Mm-hmm. There's limits to all-to-all when you move up that trade size. Mm-hmm. Traders do not want to announce a $10 million size order for sale to the market. They'd much rather go to trusted partners and show them that. Yeah And then work through, you know, an RFQ in a more private way. And so we're missing those orders from MarketAxess. Now, what's interesting is, depending on what you're trading, if it's Verizon 10-year, it should go to all-to-all. Mm-hmm. You're gonna get lots of responses. We have data that will tell you what's the best way to treat that order. Mm-hmm. Traders don't have that data readily available, so they just say, y ou know what? Anything $3 million and over, I'm going direct to chat. Mm-hmm Which is not an efficient way to. Yeah Trade a bond. And so the new rollout of X-Pro is really targeting above 3 million and giving them data to say, should this go to All-to-all, or should this go direct to a dealer? And by the way, if you do decide to go to three dealers, we can even tell you which dealers to go to. Mm-hmm. We're using AI on our dealer activity. We know who's responding, who's axed, and who's responding to the ax. Yeah. 'Cause there's, I don't know, there's fake axes out there. Right I've heard. Right. So, there's really, we're kind of testing those axes, testing that pre-trade analytics, and helping traders make decisions on which protocol. We've been pretty much focused on one protocol, RFQ all-to-all. Yep. We now have PT. Mm-hmm Which is a dealer-only protocol. Mm-hmm. A more complicated protocol, but we're moving into that bigger part of the market, which is too big for all-to-all. Yep Not in a portfolio trade. How do I really electronify that piece of the market? Got it. We're using a lot of proprietary data to help the trader decide what protocol to go to. I got you. That makes sense. So I get a sense that you want to talk about X-Pro, just from your comments so far and the automation theme. So why don't we go there? Yeah. So as I think about. What I didn't talk about was the algo, which I also love to talk about. There we go. But, sorry to cut you off. Let's talk about. Yeah Some of the new things you guys have rolled out. Yeah. So X-Pro, Adaptive Auto-X, is things you, you've obviously talked about in the past. Help us maybe with the roadmap of how you're planning to roll these out, what's already rolled out, what are clients using today, versus really, what, what is the catalyst to maybe, see the uptick of these products that could reinvigorate the, the market share story? Okay. I'll start with automation. Yeah Because in November, we saw a 35% increase in automation volume relative to last year. That's a big jump. We continue to see, you know, automation adoption at a very high rate. And now, let me explain automation. Automation is just taking a basic RFQ and having a computer do it. Mm. So it's one RFQ, one line item, go to dealers, get prices back, automatically execute. Yeah. We have two flavors. One is a trader can take a, you know, bunch of line items and automate that off a screen, or some of our clients will just API in and send it right to automation. Mm. Pre-selected controls, anything that doesn't satisfy those controls, comes out and sits on the trader's desk. Yep. That is, about 24% of the trades in MarketAxess are automated, no human intervention. And then, it's about 10% of volume, our overall notional volume, so it's a. Mm-hmm A big part. It's also the fastest growing piece of market access. Mm-hmm. And it's now spreading into things like munis, which is ripe for change. It's in EM, it's in Eurobonds, it's highly penetrated inside U.S. credit. The interesting bit about automation, when I look at the client penetration, our number one automation user is double the size, just automation volume. Yeah To the next automated user. Mm. One interesting note, they are 1/3 the asset under management. Mm To the number two automation user. So if you really use this stuff. Yeah You're going to grow, and more importantly, you're going to be really sticky to MarketAxess. Yeah. These are embedded users. But you can see that they've really spent years, perfecting their automation solution because they looked around, and they said, if there are high levels of inflows, smaller tickets, for, like, separately managed accounts, things like that, we need to be fully automated. We need to consume it, execute it, and have no human engagement. Yeah. And so they made substantial investment. When I look at the larger asset managers, I just look at the opportunity that we have. The fact that someone's a third the size and double in volume automated. Mm Is telling about the penetration opportunity. That's just basic automation, automated RFQ. The next suite of products, which we just rolled out this year in pilot, now out of pilot, is Adaptive Auto-X. Right. It basically says, you want to automate. Mm-hmm But you want to actually not cross spread or have an opportunity to not cross spread. It's funny, like, the fixed income market, rates and credit globally, is the largest market on the planet, and it's the only market where clients, even the most sophisticated, cross the spread all day long. Pay full spread. Right. In FX, these same clients have determined that, oh, I could be passive and. Mm-hmm Not cross spread. In futures, in equities, every other asset class, derivatives, they try not to cross spread. In fixed income, they haven't developed the skill set to not cross spread. The reason why is, there's huge human intervention. Traders are not good at pricing bonds on the fly. The places where that passive trading has really taken hold has been automated solutions. Right. We have an Auto RFQ, which is crossing spread. We have an auto responder, which is not crossing spread, it's pricing other people's inquiries. Adaptive Auto-X tries to put them both together. Mm-hmm. And they say, j ust give us a larger size order. We'll wait patiently. We'll post that order in our live order book, so that order's working, and then if an inquiry comes in, we'll automatically price it and price it better than anyone else in the stack. Mm. We'll have statistics on what we'll win, and so you save spread. If it doesn't complete your full size, we'll go into the market and start RFQing through Auto-X RFQ. We complete a larger size order, we maximize your opportunity not to cross spread, and we do it all through a complicated algorithm. Right. And, And then X-Pro. Yeah The last piece. Right Is basically taking it all and putting it together, and giving a trader a view of the market, that they can take in any size order. If it's smaller size, we give you pre-trade data that says, this is good for all to all. Automate that, send that to your automation suite. It's all RFQ line items. We manage much more line items. If you want to do something that is larger size, greater than all to all, we'll tell you exactly how to size that order. We have something called tradability, that tells you what the market can consume in that CUSIP. Mm. Then we'll tell you what dealers to go to, and we'll give you Axess pre-trade information. Then, if you want to do a portfolio, you can wrap that line item up and trade a portfolio as well. X-Pro brings it all together. All together, I got you. And, and again, the timing on X-Pro and how you, It's out. Yeah. We're probably just over 50 users, Yeah Out of 2,000. Right. We have a long way to go globally. We've been targeting our heavy users and our portfolio trading users, 'cause it just manages bigger line items, Yeah Gives more pre-trade data. Just look for that rollout to continue through the first half of next year. Is there a tech uplift on the client side that's required? No. Or are you just rolling it out? The best part about this is if you're already logged into MarketAxess, Wow You technically can log into X-Pro. Yeah. It's a very light lift for the client. Yeah. We're being very methodical in the rollout, training traders, letting them figure out how to use the better tooling. Sure. A lot of training on the pre-trade data. This is data that no one's ever seen before. Yeah. Where we can tell you how to size your order, we can tell you, in fact, we have a new data product called CP Pricer, which actually tells you, based on the client type, s o if you're a Tier 1 client, Mm-hmm And you have a size, let's say, $10 million, we'll tell you exactly what price to expect back, Mm With high levels of accuracy. Right. 'Cause you, you have the picture. Yeah. Yeah. Right now, our CP+ tells you, average size order, here's what the price would be, whether you're on the buy side or the sell side. Yep. This new tool will tell you, if you're a seller, Mm And you're a certain tier of a client, and your order size is a certain way, this is the price you should expect. Mm. This changes how people are gonna engage the market. Right. Right. It also does wonders for TCA and all kinds of post-trade analytics. Yeah. So let's talk about data. It's actually it was one of my next questions I wanted to hit on. So, clearly, a very powerful set of data that exists in your ecosystem, and we talked about how you're really using that to power things like X-Pro and continue to drive automation. You also talked about that there might be ways to monetize that data in the future that you're currently not doing, because, again, the goal is to get more trading. So how do you think about the right time to go down that path? Is there a way to do both? And just broadly speaking, any other ways you're thinking about monetizing this data set? Yeah. First, I think by segment, client segment. Like, there's certainly new engagement, a new entry from the hedge fund, systematic users coming into the market. We typically make them pay for data. So those are typically hard dollar data users. Mm-hmm. The number one strategy, and it's part of the X-Pro strategy and the X-Pro rollout, is take our exclusive data, our proprietary data, that's unique, and embed it in X-Pro, and you only get the data if you use X-Pro. Okay. We're not reselling that data. We're not redistributing that data. It's not for consumption in someone else's trading solution. It's very exclusive to the X-Pro rollout. And it's important because it's unique data that tells people how to trade. Yeah. And that's an important part, and we spent two years kind of working on this data, and it's just finally hitting the market. It's really to collect orders into X-Pro, so we, y ou know, you can still, by the way, in X-Pro, pick up the phone and trade, Yeah And just right-click and send that trade into process trading. So it is protocol agnostic, so we want people to see the data, Mm-hmm Become addicted to the data and how to trade, and then over time, I think we can convert that into monetization. But more importantly, it's in converting into trade, likelihood of trade, which is probably more important to our share, our growth, and our revenue growth. Gotcha. Okay. Let's talk about some of the inorganic things that you guys have done over the last couple of years. A couple of deals, largely on the smaller side and, you know, not particularly demanding from a capital utilization perspective. You guys have obviously a very clean balance sheet. So how are you thinking about return on capital and some of the deals you've done recently? Any kind of targets on accretion of methodology as you're thinking about potential future deals and just broadly outlook on M&A? Yeah, I mean, there's a reason why this space has high multiples. The asset class is scarce, Yeah From an M&A perspective. There's not a lot of people doing what we do. Yeah. So we look and search the globe for anything in this space, and there's not a lot. There's technology solutions, there's, you know, kind of geographical solutions, there might be other product classes. And so when you look at our, our acquisition history, it's small. Yeah. It's really product extension, geographic extension, or it's tech enhancing. And so, the way we think about it is, certainly it needs to be accretive, and then, it needs to be strategic to the core. So is it, is it expanding our geographical position? Is it expanding our, our technology? Is it what we call tech accretive? If you look at the Pragma acquisition was the most recent acquisition. Did we want to be in ETF and FX? FX is pretty interesting, but that's truly tech accretive to us. Mm-hmm. This asset comes to us, it's got an EMS solution embedded in it, it's got algo solutions, it has an order manager embedded in it. Like, these are all things that a market like us, going through evolution, desperately needs. So that is an interesting and tech accretive acquisition. The MuniBrokers acquisition is really product expansion, but it's protocol expansion, arguably, because we're in munis, but it really... If you look at our muni volume, MuniBrokers helps with that record, Mm Muni volume growth. It also engaged us in a broader set of clients. So some of the dealers that weren't coming to MarketAxess are now fully connected. So it's a better distribution channel. And then our rates acquisition, going back to 2019, LiquidityEdge, not what I'd like it to be, but it did do a product expansion. It also solved one of the biggest challenges for us from a competitive perspective, was net hedging, treasury hedging on the back of an IG trade. Right. We solved that. We closed that gap with that acquisition. It was accreted from a strategic perspective. Yeah. Economic perspective, we did need to do more there. I got you. All right. Let's switch gears a little bit, and let's talk about operating margins and just the P&L a little bit broadly. You talked about significant amount of investments into technology and non-U.S. distribution that you've made over the years. You guys actually are including amortization of intangibles in your P&L as well, Yeah And that's been obviously weighing on some of the expense growth as well. Most of your peers don't, don't do that. Is the heavy lifting, I mean, we use GAAP and others, You use GAAP, others, Yeah You know. Need to get away from using GAAP. But if you think about the heavy lift on the expense side of things with respect to, you know, some of the bigger technology initiatives, is that largely behind you guys? And how would you think about just a multi-year expense growth trajectory for the business? Yeah, when you think about our evolution as a global company, we've certainly made heavy investment in tech. We're going through a transition of legacy tech to new tech, so there's a heavy weight of investment when you're going through those transitions. Yeah. You're still supporting legacy while you're investing in new. So think of that as another big investment in tech. Mm-hmm. Largely, the employees of Pragma are heavily weighted towards tech. The other areas of investment that we've made, it's people investment in geographic expansion. And, you know, think of Asia, which is, w e've made a substantial investment in Asia over the last two years. We're seeing the return on that investment. In November, we've seen APAC growth. So it's a quite attractive growth record volume coming out of the region. I think from a technology investment, we've hit high water marks, like, we've made substantial investment. Doesn't mean we stop investing, but I think our level of investment and our trajectory of year-over-year investment, Mm-hmm Goes down because of the, Mm-hmm Level of investment we made in the most recent two years. I think we will continue to invest geographically. It's a little bit more targeted, and it's not as fast as the growth rate that we've had more recently. So I think we start to settle into a healthier level of growth rate on the expense side. And then, arguably, those investments should start yielding returns. If you look at X-Pro, portfolio trading, algorithmic trading, and our international franchise, it's starting to yield returns. 2024 is really a test for the investment in our new platform, X-Pro, and our investment in automation. But if you look at this year and our return on the international business, Yeah That's where we're seeing growth all year long. Yeah. With high grade and U.S. corporate not growing, we really saw substantial growth in the international business, and that's all the investment we made geographically. I got you. Great. We have about a minute left, so if anybody has a question in the room, just raise your hand and we'll have a mic come around. All right, otherwise, I'll squeeze one more in. Yeah. Pricing. There's not tremendous amount of transparency in the marketplace. We see everybody's got a fee per million, but the protocols are different, the client structures are different. So as you think about this market evolving and becoming more electronic, typically, that comes with some degree of pricing compression. Are, are we there yet? Is that a likely risk, and kind of how you think about that risk for MarketAxess? So the prediction around pricing compression is a slightly flawed. It's not inaccurate. The level of compression is where I think there's kind of misunderstandings. If you look at history, and I lived it, pricing compression comes when you're delivering a product to a party that's redelivering that product, when there's a middle layer or a middle person, Mm-hmm Like a dealer, a broker, that can redistribute your product out to the client base. So think equities, where we saw a massive price compression in the face of competition. It was always because there was, y ou were delivering the same service to a broker, who is then reselling that service to a client. Mm-hmm. In our market, we go direct to clients. So where the clients interact is where the dealers price that activity. It's a profitable event for a dealer to price that activity. There's a fee associated. So it's a dealer pay model, Mm Globally, largely, and the clients are less price sensitive because they just need to get a trade done. And so it's a slightly different competitive environment. The other piece of the puzzle is, you could have 15 exchanges, Mm-hmm In some markets. Because we're on the desktop, because the client actually uses our platform, Yeah They can't have 15. Yeah. So it in terms of what the market can really consume, it's a much smaller sizing of a competitive landscape. When we look at the market globally, I'm talking globally, not just U.S., there's three players: Bloomberg, Tradeweb, and us, and that's it. And that's who we talk to clients about, that's who's on the desktop. The clients can't consume lots of different services, Mm To conduct the same outcome. Mm-hmm. There's gonna be competition, but there's gonna be competition in unique liquidity and unique outcomes. Data matters, workflow solutions matter, and ultimately, the liquidity that you have in your network matters the most, because that's gonna drive outcomes. I got you. Great. Well, that's super helpful. Chris, thank you so much. Great For being here. Great. Appreciate the time.