Okay. Well, wonderful. We'll get started with our next session. It's my pleasure to welcome back Chris Concannon, CEO of MarketAxess, and Ilene Fiszel Bieler, MarketAxess CFO. MarketAxess is a leading global electronic trading platform specializing in credit markets. Over the course of 2025, the firm continued to drive automation across the fixed-income trading ecosystem through new protocols, enhanced use of data, and customer expansion. Chris, Ilene, thank you both for being here as always. Chris is gonna kick us off with a couple of slides, and then we'll jump into the Q&A, so thank you. Great. Well, thank you, Alex. And thank you for inviting us to this wonderful conference. Every year, it's a great deal of excitement and just a great audience to have here as well. And sorry for the little surprise adjustment to the program. I, you know, in light of the announcement we made this morning around financial targets and a increase to our authorized share repurchase, we thought it would be helpful to give a quick update, a few slides, and then jump into this was originally designed to be a fireside chat. We'll get back to the fireside chat. So I promise you I will try to be brief. First, what I wanted to do is just quickly what I'm gonna talk about is what we call our MarketAxess advantages. These are our core competitive advantages. Then I'm gonna cover the next topic I'm gonna cover. It's just four topics: how we, the journey we were on to get to the announcements that we made this morning, why we felt comfortable about making an announcement about financial targets, and why we were comfortable about making increasing our return to shareholders, and then I'm gonna talk a little bit about the building blocks to get to those financial targets, both in terms of our non-U.S. credit businesses, which are growing healthy, quite healthy, and then the return of growth to our U.S. credit business and the roadmap and the plans that we have established, for that return to growth, and then finally, a little bit of, a refresher on our recently announced, Closing Auction, protocol. I thought I'd give you a little bit of explanation of what, how that works and why it fits into the current market. So let me first start with what we're calling our MarketAxess advantage. Obviously, these are our core competitive advantages that we see in the market. We see it day in and day out. We hear about it from clients. This is the moat that surrounds our business, key, key ingredients to our success as well. First, an obvious one, which is, as you can see, our global network is quite sizable and continues to grow. This is a global network of not only institutional investors but also dealers and liquidity providers. Each one of these core ingredients to our competitive advantage are interlinked with each other, and I'll explain how that works. Over 2,000-2,100 institutional investors and dealers, 13,000 active traders. Just to give you a sense of the growth rate, we've just added another 250 active traders to our network. So these, each of these are continuing to grow, 1,000 active international firms as well. You'll see more of that as we get to our EM story. The next key pillar to our competitive advantage is our differentiated liquidity. This is made up of over 1,000 unique liquidity providers. That's more than there are dealers on the planet, to be clear. These are ETF market makers, proprietary trading firms, hedge funds, systematic hedge funds. And now, more importantly, a growing area is large institutional investors, which has historically provided liquidity at a trader-by-trader, per-position. These are now converted for the first time in 2025 to systematic plans around the large institutional investors. We haven't seen this before. They are now using our automated tools and also their own built tools. All of that liquidity is highly dependent on the next competitive advantage, which is our data competitive advantage. This is not only market data, but it's data, pre-trade analytics, and trading data that helps, powered by AI. It's not just our CP+ data, which covers the globe. It's obviously the leading benchmark in U.S. credit for real-time trading. But it also involves a growing pie of liquidity data. Just to give you a sense of how it works, for every inquiry that comes into our platform, it creates a dealer response or some liquidity response. In 2025, we saw $8.9 trillion of inquiry come into our platform. That's a 14% increase over 2024. The response that that created was $400 million prices on our platform. That is the core ingredient to our data products and the core ingredient to the investment we have made to unlock those data products. That includes CP+ globally in things like EM local markets where people don't have price discovery quite easily. That's liquidity data like tradability and our recently launched depth of book. You can actually look into the fixed income market and see its depth with that recent launch. And finally, data around dealer selection. It used to be that you would select your dealer based on dinner last night. Now you can actually have data that truly sees the performance of that dealer, and how they're performing. So very important component to our growth rates going forward. This is not data that just unlocks hard dollars. The key ingredient here is this data helps drive the trading solutions that we offer. It powers our automation. It helps traders make trade decisions, not only selecting dealers but selecting protocols. Do I put up a portfolio trade or do I go direct to a dealer? The other two areas of data investment that's quite exciting is we are now looking at market signal data. So how are the markets performing at sector level, at issuer level? And we're also looking at portfolio construction data. And the key ingredient of all three of these are interlinked and continue to grow. What I wanted to do on slide three was really explain our journey and how we got here and got comfortable with announcing not only our financial targets but the increase in capital return. First, now the next two slides I'll cover the building blocks for those financial targets. But first, I wanted to talk a little bit about our challenges over the last few years, that 2020-2024 challenge that you see. While parts of our business were growing, certainly in U.S. credit was where we were seeing challenges. The three key challenges that we are going to highlight that we experienced in U.S. credit, one was macro-driven, and two were self-inflicted. First, the macro-driven was obviously the rate moves that we saw and the change in client behavior. And that had an impact on our fee per million, a negative impact on our fee per million. The two other challenges were we underinvested in portfolio trading and we underinvested in the dealer-to-dealer business. Those key businesses within the broader market in U.S. credit grew dramatically over those years, obviously leading us to challenges in both growth of market share and growth of revenue. While we had a chance to invest heavily in just U.S. portfolio trading and just U.S. dealer-to-dealer, we made a strategic decision to invest more broadly and focus on global portfolio trading and global dealer-to-dealer solutions. We also focused on broader market opportunities like block trading solutions and the recently launched innovative protocol, our Closing Auction, which I'll speak about quickly later in the presentation. In 2023, we also built and launched our X-Pro, which is our new UI. This is the new technology that powers the delivery of our global portfolio trading, and it also powers the delivery of proprietary data and analytics. So a key ingredient to our tech transformation that was taking place. Now, those investments, all these investments I've been talking about, while we didn't focus all of our technology bandwidth on U.S. PT and U.S. credit dealer-to-dealer, all the investments that we're now seeing come to market are playing out in 2026 and beyond and what really got us comfortable with establishing these financial targets. To be very clear, there's a lot more to do in tech transformation at MarketAxess. So we'll continue to invest in future alternatives. But what all these investments leading up to this point in time got both the management team and the board very comfortable with announcing the targets that we put out this morning. We are committing to deliver an average annual revenue growth rate of 8%-9%, as you can see here. Then we are also just I want you to focus on average 8%-9%. What we're saying is we expect to exit 2028 with a double-digit growth rate. So those are averages, not hard and fast perfect numbers. Lastly, we are also committing 'cause we wanna continue our diligence around expense growth. We are also committing to an average annual margin expansion of 75-125 basis points through 2026 to 2028. Now, these targets, just to be clear, do not forecast any increases in volatility. As you have seen, like the second quarter of this year, increases in volatility are very favorable to us and our model, but we did not assume them in our growth rates. These financial targets and our strong balance sheet made our board and our management team quite comfortable with the increase in capital return, both increasing our broader shareholder repurchase plan to $500 million, $505 million to be specific, and, with that, executing $300 million in an accelerated share repurchase. Now, let me just quickly go through the financial building blocks for the financial targets and how we got comfortable. This is a really exciting slide because 50% of our top-line revenue is growing at 15% CAGR. We thought that was very important to point out because of all that broad investment that we've been making over the last few years, still funding our international investment, still funding global portfolio trading. We are seeing those returns play out, and we're still not done investing in those products. As you can see here, the largest part of that 50% is our emerging markets business and our Eurobonds business, which is growing at a 10% and a 14%, revenue growth rate respectively. That decision to invest in global PT and global dealer-to-dealer is also yielding results. We're showing, our EM and Eurobonds combined portfolio trading business is growing at 48%, and our dealer business combined is growing at 38%. The EM, the EM business, just generally speaking, is about the size of U.S. credit. So when you think about the comparisons, it's quite a large business, somewhere around $24 trillion in size. It also has very low electronic penetration, so part of our growth expectations in EM is further penetration of electronic trading, further protocol expansion, and obviously block solutions that we've shown some growth rates in as well. Now, the key ingredient to hitting our financial targets is really accelerating growth in our U.S. credit business, and slide 5 is really to present the roadmap that we're, both the management team, the tech team, and the board is comfortable with to expand our global business, our business in U.S. credit. We identify our four market opportunities. You can see sizing in the current market ADV on the right side. This really covers our key initiatives that we've been focused on: client-initiated, our high-touch or block solution, our global PT solution, and our dealer-initiated channels. Part of the growth in client-initiated, I'll just go through some of the quick ones that we're doing. Enhancements to our X-Pro platform are rolling out in the first half of 2026. We expect this to not only help our RFQ business in U.S. credit but also make it a little bit stickier. The other area of great growth rates is our automation suite of products. We're making enhancements to that automation suite as well in 2026. For block trading or a high-touch channel, we've launched a Targeted RFQ, which is certainly yielding some returns, and that's attacking what I call the largest market opportunity for us, the $19 billion in ADV. We've also recently launched our Targeted axes solution. This is a new solution that allows dealers to send axes over our platform directly to a trader at a client firm, a very powerful solution and really focused on eliminating IB Chat in our world of block trading. And finally, in our dealer solution, we've recently launched our Mid-X solution. This is just a few months old, and we're yielding results, and you could see that in our November release. The good news across all of U.S. credit, things like automation are growing at double digits. Our block trading volume in U.S. credit is up 34% this year. PT market share is also growing. It increased 410 basis points. Our dealer-initiated market is up 40 basis points, and that's further supported by our recent launch in Mid-X. And we also have some exciting new initiatives that we're not sharing with you all, in the coming years. We try not to share them with our competitors publicly. Again, these are, all of these slides really gave us comfort around not only the share repurchase and the accelerated share repurchase but being comfortable announcing those financial targets that we laid out for you. Now, the last slide, and I'm sorry, Alex, I probably took more time than I was supposed to. The last slide is the fun part. This is really where we are trying to drive innovation within the fixed-income market. We're kind of catering to the broader evolution of that market. This is our launch of our Closing Auction. This caters to growing indexation of the fixed-income market. If you look at the ETF market, somewhere around $2.3 trillion, is now benchmarking to an ETF. That's expected to grow to $5 trillion. And then there's also a broader move to indexation across just managed fund complexes. The key ingredient for indexation is you typically start to see dependency on closing prices. Think about the NAV for ETFs. It's a very powerful price that everyone gets struck at every day at the close. So closing prices and closing liquidity is a natural evolution that you see in an evolving indexation of a market. We've seen this play out in U.S. equities. We see it in futures and derivatives, and obviously, it's going to be playing out in fixed income as well. This is not a matching solution where you match at mid. This is where you find a true auction, a true clearing price, and you can actually trade sizable liquidity at a price somewhere near the market and set that closing price. So it's a very important point that it's a differentiated solution. It leverages our liquidity, the buy side, the sell side. ETF market makers all worked with us on this innovative auction solution. I'll stop there, 'cause I did wanna return back to the fireside chat. Look, you gave me a moment to breathe, so thank you for that, actually. We were joking around. This is just a page out of State Street's playbook from Ilene's prior day, so we're totally ready for that. So, you know, I'm gonna go a little bit off script here, just again, given the bunch of information you guys have provided, and maybe we can start with guidance and the new targets that you unveiled just a few minutes ago. Sir, so first, when you think about the 8%-9%, you made a really important distinction there. Half the business is non-U.S., growing, I think, historically, you said 15%. Is the assumption embedded within the 8%-9% that that non-U.S. piece will continue at around 15%? So that's part A. And then part B, that really implies that the U.S. piece is still growing only in kinda like low single digits. So may help me understand both of those. Totally. You're. Taking into account that, hey, you got all these initiatives on the U.S. credit side of things that should yield some faster revenue growth. So you're in the right zip code. So think about it this way. You saw on the slide that for the four-year CAGR 2020 to 2024, U.S. credit was actually down 2%, right? So that was a CAGR of negative 2% growth. Yep. So we've definitely gotta reignite that growth. Having said that, we know that we've seen really good performance in our non-U.S. credit business, and we would expect to continue to see really good performance in our non-U.S. credit business. So if you sort of unpack the incremental growth in the 8% to 9%, I would say, you know, and Chris made a good point in that this is not a straight line 8% to 9%. You gotta keep that in mind. But I would say sort of year one, we would look to see the incremental growth in U.S. credit be about 20% of that incremental number. And then I would say by the end of the three-year plan, we're looking at about 35% being coming of the incremental growth coming from U.S. credit. So take it the other way. You're saying 80% of the incremental growth is in international, or outside U.S. credit. We also have our services businesses, not to forget, right? And this. And the 8%-9% is a full company guidance. Yep. And so, or, and then obviously to 65% once U.S. credit starts to kind of that momentum that we're building through all of those initiatives come through by year three. Okay. So that's how I think about it. And then how do you think about the data revenue side of it, right? ‘Cause to your point, this is an all-in number. ‘Cause you talked obviously about the importance of data, and we’ve talked about it for a while. Like CP+, super important, really valuable, really unique. How much do you guys have the non-transactional, more of that data piece growing over those next several years? And again, any building blocks in terms of, you know, number of users or really pricing, any like it’s volume times price, right? So like what kind of the units growth versus what pricing dynamics you can embed within that to support that kind of revenue growth? Sure. First off, on the data front, it’s we have to be very strategic about how we do it ‘cause we do want broad distribution, so we’ve priced that product under market relative to its value. Mm-hmm. And the dependency that we see from our client base. The dealer community uses our data. The institutional investor community uses our data. It's now flowing to back office, but most important part about our data is how it powers the underlying trading solutions that we are now putting out in the market. We're putting in front of traders. So I do think we have to realize that the part of the value of the data is actually making the product that much more sticky. Right. If you look at the growth rates in our portfolio trading in U.S. credit, it's driven off of the pre-trade data and analytics that we were putting in front of anyone can put together a package of bonds and trade it at a single price. But in order to put pre-trade analytics in front of the client to help them construct that portfolio, help them perfect price, that's a unique offering and why we view it as a competitive advantage. Back to answer your question, we see the ability to sell data, hard dollar data as a very important part of our growth rate that we just announced, but we also see some of the new products. So there are embedded price increases in our current contracts. But we see the excitement is really around some of the new products that we're rolling out that really give you the true view of the market, the market imbalance in terms of depth and price, and also things like block trading prices. We can actually predict based on your side, your direction, and your size, what price you should expect at. That is, could be for sale, but I'd much rather embed it in our block offering. Right. To just enhance the franchise. Yeah. That makes sense. So I would say our market data revenue is going to be constrained by our desire to use it as a sticky solution on our platform. Right. Right. Okay. Great. Another numbers question, and then I pivot back to, you know, some of the things we were gonna talk about at a little bit more micro level. But Ilene, this was probably for you. When you think about the operating leverage that is also embedded in your guidance. Yep. 75-125 basis points of annual margin expansion. Can you talk about the ability to deliver on that if the revenue falls short of the low end of kinda 80ish percent? So if you're below that eight for whatever reason, can you still kinda deliver the same type of margin expansion embedded in your targets? Yep, and again, I'm gonna reemphasize, these are average annual. So it's not, you know, I'm just gonna keep saying that. Average annual on all of it. It's not a straight line, so I think that's an important point. Yeah. Look, we, I think you've seen from us from an expense perspective, particularly in the last two years, we've made incredible strides in terms of productivity and efficiency. I mean, even year to date this year, we're up about 5% through 3Q in terms of expenses, and if you go back to those CAGRs, that would look like 11% because we were investing in a lot of the things that Chris talked about. We've been building, but we've been able to really now take a look and say, okay, what kind of guardrails can we put around our expenses and our productivity? And so think about things like how can we? We're looking to streamline our workflows. We're looking to make, you know, codes more efficient. We've already seen early days some benefits coming from, you know, using AI in coding and in testing. There's just a number of things that we're looking at and that we're gonna continue on this path in terms of driving to the margin expansion in addition to the top line. But I understand what your question was. So I just, there's lots of plans. This was a very, very, very detailed planning process that got us to the place where we are now where we could put these targets out. So you can imagine there's a lot that we have on the docket in terms of how we hope to continue to drive margin expansion. Yep. I'll be honest. I'd expect nothing less. Yeah. There's gonna be some discipline. Yeah. The other way to think about it is, and I mentioned this in the presentation, we made a strategic decision to invest in global protocols. Yeah. That's the technology building one protocol built for all products. That was an important strategic decision rather than, hey, we're just gonna invest in this U.S. credit thing. Mm-hmm. We're gonna grow U.S. credit and defend that U.S. credit business. We said, no, let's grow our global business and solve U.S. credit, EM, and Eurobonds on one platform. Mm-hmm. That tends to give you efficiencies when you do that. Now, was it painful to do a global PT solution as opposed to a U.S. PT only solution? Yes. But those, those now results in much better expense growth rates and more controlled expense growth rates as we start to attack the global fixed-income market with a single platform. Things like X-Pro are built for all products, not just one. Yeah. So you talked about giving yourself more operating efficiencies through this platform, which makes a lot of sense. Can you talk a little bit about the competitive moats you sort of have around your global business, right? Because when I look at the growth algo, the company, so much of that is gonna be on that 15% remaining 15% on average over multiple years. Right. I said, I said Zip Code. Don't, don't put a number on that. Zip Code. Zip Code. Zip Code. Legally aligned. Right. Legally aligned. Up or down. But when I think about the investments you guys have made outside the U.S., boots on the ground, particularly in emerging markets, what gives you sort of confidence that you can sustain those similar type of revenue growth in those markets, whereas you might have others coming in and try to compete for those pools of revenues more aggressively, just like it happened in U.S. credit? It's a great question and one we obviously thought long and hard about. I call it our flank. If you look at what happened to us in U.S. credit, we failed to invest in portfolio trading and the dealer-to-dealer space. That's really where competitors made huge inroads. Also, at a time when both were kind of exploding, both were growing in U.S. credit, obviously we've seen the portfolio traded market kinda pull back a bit. Yep. It's kinda in IG, it's running below 10% for the first time. Yep. So the key was to invest in portfolio trading, global portfolio trading, and global dealer-to-dealer, and you see that growth rate embedded in that 15% CAGR where we made structural decisions to invest in our platform, made sure we were first to market in PT and EM local markets or PT generally in EM, made sure we were investing in our portfolio trading and our dealer-to-dealer solutions and Eurobonds as well, and so those investments actually helped us grow and penetrate further those markets. If you look at Eurobonds as a microcosm, it's a sizable market, but not nearly as big as EM. We have Tradeweb and Bloomberg as our primary competitors, and we're growing market share using portfolio trading, dealer-to-dealer, traditional RFQ automation, and now block trading solutions. So we feel really good about our competitive dynamic when we're firing on all cylinders. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's pivot to the U.S. credit side of things. Two questions I wanna head on. So the first one is addressing the U.S. portfolio trading angle as you described it and maybe the dealer-to-dealer. When you and I were here last year, you kind of brought up the idea like, hey, look, we'll be aggressive on price. Like we were late and we've had the cap, we've built the capability for. I really didn't mean it. Sure. Of course, of course you didn't. But look, the ability to continue the space of share gains and really expand maybe within portfolio trading feels like price will be a big part of that. So maybe talk a little bit about how your position price-wise versus your competitors, obviously, you know, Tradeweb, but Trumid as well. Is this where price stays? Do you see that going lower? Do you see it going higher? And how do you broadly expect that part of the market, whether it's PT or dealer-to-dealer, to expand from here for you guys? So first, I'll address the PT market 'cause it's a very important market to us 'cause it's our clients trading portfolio trades. Yeah. So we wanna be engaged in that regardless of where price is, where fees are. I would say fees in portfolio trading have been quite stable. The real driver to PT success is the workflow and the solutions. We rarely hear from clients around PT pricing and fees. Normally you hear that from the dealers, but the dealers are not turning away an inbound for a portfolio trade. It's quite an attractive trade for them. So, while fees are a factor, they really haven't been a factor over the last couple of years from a competitive dynamic. I will tell you, I don't see them going up. I see them fairly stable over the last couple of years, and some are offering it free, some are charging. We're all kind of in a similar zone, and there's been very little movement in that area. Mm-hmm. On the dealer-to-dealer space, it's an interesting space because of our underinvestment in that space. We have an opportunity to grow revenue at a lower fee capture so we can actually be aggressive on price, but it's incremental to our top line. Again, why are we comfortable with the roadmap that we put out there and the financial targets? Some of our growth is new product growth in the dealer-to-dealer space. What was key about launching things like Mid-X in the U.S. was it changed our dialogue with the dealer community. It was for the first time MarketAxess was walking into a large global dealer and offering them a solution at a very reduced rate that was attractive to that dealer. Mm-hmm. It helped them not only get in. We helped them get into positions all day long with our client-to-dealer business and our portfolio business. Now it helps them exit those positions at a fair rate. That has really changed our dialogue with our dealer community and certainly leads to that dealer community providing support for things like auctions. Yeah. Where we have the dealer community working with us on the design and the build and actually participating in the auctions that we have launched. Yeah. And I would just add two quick points on that. One is what Chris was just talking about in terms of dealer. I think you saw in November, Mid-X hasn't even been out very long, and we saw a 32% increase in volumes in dealer-initiated. That's great. I mean, that's what we want to see. Was that mostly Mid-X driven or? No, it was a combination of dealer RFQ. But the point is that we are there now in a different way. And so you're seeing, you know, the combination is starting to come through. But I would also say with all of your questions, we contemplated all of these three questions that you could, that you're asking, understandably in the targets and through the planning process. Yeah. So that's all incorporated in that particular guidance. Great. That's helpful. All right. With a couple of minutes left on the clock, I did wanna spend a couple of minutes here on Market- on-C lose. The protocol you announced, you know, a little while back, obviously a big part of the story. You dedicated slide to it, so we'll have to talk about it. So interesting solution. Help me understand, I guess, what feedback you've been getting from the buy side as they sort of think about utilizing that. But also, more importantly, what gives you confidence that you won't just pull sort of volumes away from other points of the day in your ecosystem where you might actually end up with roughly the same outcome? Like, why is this additive to your revenue base, but also maybe even the ecosystem broadly? Sure. Well, one, we've worked with the buy side over the years. This is a. This has been a three to five-year journey, starting from just the idea and then the building blocks that went into it. Some of the largest buy side investors helped us design the auction. It's unique for fixed income. We didn't copy the equity market auctions, although I might know something about those. Yep. But we did work with both buy side and the sell side to help us build the specifics of the auction, the timing of the auction. It's near end of day, not at end of day, and all the different dynamics around what goes into the auction, what shouldn't be in the auction. So the excitement was really most telling to us when we had a client forum where we talked to both dealers and institutional investors last week about the auction 'cause we did kind of surprise the market with this announcement and the initial rollout of the auction quickly behind the announcement. We had over 400 buy side and sell side traders join that virtual forum and listen in. That was a record for us. No other product we've ever launched, you know, got that much interest from the buy side and sell side. I was just recently in Europe where they're asking, when are we launching it in the European markets, which was not part of the roadmap, but now we'll consider it. Look, it really is gonna take a multi-year effort. This isn't. I wouldn't say our revenue from our Closing Auction should be thought about in 2026. Those are investment years for that product. We're still in pilot. We're planning in Q1 to really roll it out more broadly to all clients and all dealers. But it's an exciting new tool. As you think about it, the majority of liquidity historically in the fixed income market has been in the first half of the day. Mm-hmm. You see all the inquiry activity. You saw, see all the dealer activity play out over the course of, call it till 1:00 P.M. Mm-hmm. It's not a normal U-curve like you see in futures markets or equity markets where a lot of activity at the open and a lot of activity at the close. Fixed income markets historically have been very, very different. What we've started to notice is the increase in not only behavior at the close, but the liquidity at the close. If you think about it, the majority of dealers now price bonds using a computer, an algo-driven systematic pricing solution. Those don't turn off at 3:00 P.M. Right. They continue to price all the way past 4:00 P.M. And so you have this natural liquidity coming into the market to power the Closing Auction, which allows clients to slowly get comfortable. Many clients will tell you, "I don't wanna wait till 3:00 P.M. to get done. This provides clients with the certainty that there's going to be liquidity at a moment in time where they can get size done near the close. That's a very powerful alternative to, "I have to get it done by 1:00 P.M." Yeah. And that's the feedback that we've been getting from the buy side. They wanna see liquidity. They're talking to their dealer partners on making sure that they're providing that liquidity. And look, that liquidity for a dealer can be priced off market favorable to that dealer. So they find it attractive to participate. It's not just trade at mid. It's literally trade in and around current markets based on the size and the clearing price. So, an exciting new innovative solution both for the dealer community and for the buy side. Got it. Great. Well, I think we'll end it there. Thank you for this. Thank you for using, by the way, this as a forum to get your targets out. So we actually do really appreciate it. And thank you for your flexibility. No. Anytime. All right. Maybe not anytime. Every once in a while.