MarketAxess - Earnings Call - Q3 2025

Transcript

Speaker 1

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the MarketAxess Third Quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference call is recorded for March 7, 2025. I would now like to turn the call over to Steve Davidson, Head of Investor Relations at MarketAxess. Please go ahead, sir.

Speaker 0

Good morning and welcome to the MarketAxess Third Quarter 2025 earnings conference call. For the call, Chris Concannon, Chief Executive Officer, will provide you with an update on our strategy and our trading businesses, and Ilene Fiszel Bieler, Chief Financial Officer, will review the financial results. Before I turn the call over to Chris, let me remind you that today's call may include forward-looking statements. These statements represent the company's belief regarding future events that by their nature are uncertain. The company's actual results and financial condition may differ materially from what is indicated in those forward-looking statements. For a discussion of some of the risks and factors that could affect the company's future results, please see the description of risk factors in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2024.

I would also direct you to read the forward-looking statement disclaimer in our quarterly earnings release, which was issued earlier this morning and is now available on our website. Now, let me turn the call over to Chris.

Speaker 2

Good morning, and thank you for joining us to review our third quarter financial results. As highlighted on slides three and four, our third quarter results reflect a return to more challenging market conditions and historic levels of new issue in September, as well as continued revenue growth challenges in U.S. credit. Revenue was $209 million in the quarter, up slightly from the prior year. Our revenue growth outside of U.S. credit was strong at 10%. With regard to the operating environment, we are focused on providing our clients with a platform that has the right mix of protocols and workflow tools to meet their needs in all market conditions. We intend to deliver a platform that will be protocol agnostic, that uses data and analytics to help clients decide the appropriate protocol for each trading situation.

Our current model does exceptionally well in higher volatility when spreads are widened out and liquidity is in higher demand. Unfortunately, we have only seen limited periods of volatility over the last several years, and we continue to see fairly tight spreads. Revenue growth in U.S. credit has also been impacted by the growth of new protocols like portfolio trading, the growth of the dealer-to-dealer market, and smaller-sized trades moving from RFQ to portfolio trades at lower capture rates. The good news is that we are modernizing our technology platform while at the same time delivering new protocols and workflow tools to help our clients be more efficient. Most importantly, we continue to gain significant traction with our new initiatives. In the client-initiated channel, we generated 10% growth in block trading ADV across U.S. credit, emerging markets, and Eurobonds.

This strong growth continued in October with a 21% increase in block trading ADV. In the portfolio trading channel, we generated a 20% increase in total portfolio trading ADV with record U.S. high-yield ADV. In October, total portfolio trading ADV was up 25%, and market share in U.S. credit portfolio trading increased 300 basis points. Last, in the dealer-initiated channel, we generated an 18% increase in dealer-initiated ADV. This strong growth continued into October with a 22% increase in dealer-initiated ADV, supported by strong growth in MIDEX for Eurobonds and the addition of MIDEX for U.S. credit. As announced earlier this week, we will also be launching a new protocol introducing the concept of closing auctions to the fixed income market. Many of you are familiar with the auction protocol used in the global equity markets. Now we are bringing it to the fixed income market.

We believe a closing auction in the most liquid bonds will provide the market with an end-of-day liquidity solution while delivering a more organized market closing process. Protocol innovation, market data, and automated solutions will continue to evolve as this market becomes more and more electronic. Before moving to the next slide, I wanted to provide some context for our October volumes. As you will recall, the prior year period is a tough comparison for U.S. credit given the heightened level of activity in advance of the U.S. presidential election. Despite this, our U.S. high-yield ADV growth in October was strong, up 9%, reflecting a strong performance of our platform with only a slight increase in volatility during the month. While we know we need to drive higher levels of share growth, we were pleased to see the improvement of market share month over month in both U.S.

High-grade and high-yield and across all of our key initiatives. Slide five highlights the underlying strength of our global credit franchise. As you can see from this slide, our credit business is a global business and increasingly diversified. While U.S. credit trading volume is growing at a 4% CAGR in North America, our other credit products are growing double digits in North America and throughout the rest of the world. Furthermore, 36% of our global credit trading volume is now driven by clients outside of North America, up from 29% in 2020, and we continue to add international clients. This trend is supported by the over 6,000 international dealer and investor traders that are now on the platform.

Slide six and seven provide you with a year-to-date view of how well we are executing with our new initiatives in the three strategic channels, as well as the strong growth we are continuing to see with automation. On slide seven in the client-initiated channel, we continue to make strong progress with block trading globally. Our targeted block solution continues to grow in emerging markets and Eurobonds, while we see consistent growth in block trading in our U.S. credit business as well. Block trading represents the next step function to the growth of electronic trading and is an opportunity for real transformation in the fixed income markets. We are attacking the block market in two ways. First, we are leveraging automation by providing clients with unique tools that execute blocks in a more automated way.

The second way we are attacking blocks is through our targeted RFQ workflow, which allows clients to target a short list of dealers for liquidity while increasing execution likelihood and reducing information leakage. Our total block trading ADV is approximately $5 billion year-to-date, up 23% across U.S. credit, emerging markets, and Eurobonds. Our cumulative block trading volume since the launch of our targeted block trading solution in U.S. credit, emerging markets, and Eurobonds was approximately $12 billion through October 2025. Next, in the portfolio trading channel, total portfolio trading ADV year-to-date is running 50% above the prior year. U.S. credit portfolio trading market share was over 18%, up 210 basis points over the prior year, including a 360 basis point increase in U.S. high-yield. In the dealer-initiated channel, we are continuing to see progress. Dealer-initiated ADV was $1.7 billion year-to-date, representing an increase of 34%.

Our new MIDEX solution for U.S. credit was launched in September, and while it is early days as we expand the number of sessions and bring on new dealers, over the last 10 days, we have executed over $1.3 billion in matching volume. We are pleased with the recent momentum. The evolution underway in the U.S. high-grade market is highlighted on slide eight. The average size of non-block trades is decreasing, while at the other end of the spectrum, the average block size trades are increasing. Blocks greater or equal to $5 million in trade size represent approximately 45% of trade volume in U.S. high-grade, and they are largely executed over chat or the phone. This is the segment of the market that we are attacking with our targeted RFQ solution.

Trades less than $5 million in size make up the other 55% of the market in terms of volume, but approximately 98% of the ticket count. This is the segment of the market that we are attacking with our suite of low-touch automation tools, as well as our portfolio trading tool. In the third quarter, two-thirds of trades executed by our largest clients were done through automation. The good news is that this business comes in at a more attractive price point and becomes sticky as clients convert. Part of this evolution has been the explosion in ticket count, as shown on slide nine, driving client demand for automation underpinned by our differentiated liquidity. Trades in U.S. high-grade, less than $5 million in size, have almost tripled since 2021. This significant increase in tickets has been driven by a couple of factors, including the growth of ETFs and SMA accounts.

Assets under management in SMA accounts, by some estimates, are expected to top $5 trillion. Other factors driving the explosion in tickets are the growth of portfolio trading and the increased usage of automation tools in fixed income. The increase in automation is becoming more important to handle the increase in tickets in smaller-sized trades, but increasingly also for larger-sized trades. We recently profiled a very large investment manager on our platform who has invested in automation by targeting block-sized trades for automated execution. In just two years, for trades $2 million and higher, they have gone from doing 14% of their volume and 54% of their tickets to 35% of their volume and 82% of their tickets today. On our platform, automation trade count and trade volumes are growing at a three-year CAGR of 29% and 28%, respectively.

On the dealer side, with the growth of dealer algos, execution quality and dealer responsiveness have improved, with tighter bid-ask spreads and higher RFQ response rates, even for block trades. Dealer algos now contribute 88% of the responses and win up to 87% of trades in U.S. high-grade, including 28% of the block trades. In summary, this year has been a tale of two very different market environments, and we believe that the protocols and workflow tools we are developing will help us grow through all market conditions. While we are pleased with the continued strong contribution from our new initiatives, we know that we have to deliver technology enhancements faster to drive revenue growth.

While the time it is taking to return to higher levels of growth has frustrated many of you, I assure you we are investing in the fixed income market of tomorrow while also addressing the competitive landscape of today. This is why we feel good about our positioning and our ability to return to higher levels of revenue growth in the coming quarters. Now let me turn the call over to Ilene to review our financial performance. Thank you, Chris. Turning to our results, on slide 11, we provide a summary of our third quarter financials. We delivered 1% revenue growth to $209 million, which included a $1 million benefit from foreign currency fluctuations and diluted earnings per share of $1.84. Looking at our revenue lines in turn, total commission revenue was flat compared to the prior year. Services revenue increased 9% to a record $29 million.

Information services revenue of $14 million increased 6%, or 5% excluding the impact of currency fluctuations. Post-trade services revenue of $11 million increased 9% versus the prior year, or 4% excluding the impact of currency fluctuations. Technology services revenue of $4 million increased 20%, driven by higher license fees, as well as connectivity fees from RFQ hubs. Total other income increased approximately $2 million, driven by a tax credit and lower FX losses in the current quarter of approximately $4 million. This was partially offset by lower interest income and a $1 million negative swing in unrealized gains and losses on investments. The effective tax rate was 27.1%, up from 23% in the prior year, reflecting the increased accrual for the uncertain tax position reserve we established in the first quarter of this year. Slide 12 provides you with a quick summary of our KPIs.

We continue to deliver strong growth across most of our KPIs, which reflects the progress we are making in our new initiatives. On slide 13, we provide more detail on our commission revenue and our fee capture. Lower total credit commissions and lower total rates commissions revenue was mostly offset by higher other commission revenue, which included the impact of RFQ hubs. Total credit commission revenue of $165 million was down 2% compared to the prior year. The strong 11% growth in emerging markets and 9% growth in Eurobonds total commission revenue was more than offset by a 9% decline in U.S. high-grade and flat growth in U.S. high-yield. The reduction in total credit fee capture year-over-year was principally due to protocol mix. On a sequential quarter basis, fee capture was slightly up, due largely to duration in U.S. high-grade.

On slide 14, we provide a summary of our operating expenses. Total expenses increased only 3%, which includes a $1 million negative impact from foreign currency fluctuations. The increase was driven principally by higher employee compensation and technology and communication costs, as we continue to strike the right balance between investing to drive future growth and continuing to drive increased efficiency. Headcount was 896, up only 2% from 881 in both the prior year period and at the end of 2025. We are reconfirming our full year 2025 expense guidance and expect to be at the low end of the previously stated expense range of $501 million-$521 million on an ex-notable non-GAAP basis, or on a GAAP basis, $505 million-$525 million. On slide 15, we provide an update on our capital management and cash flow.

Our balance sheet continues to be strong, with cash, cash equivalents, and corporate bonds and U.S. Treasury investments totaling $631 million as of September 30. We generated $385 million in free cash flow over the trailing 12 months. We repurchased 595,000 shares year-to-date through October 2025 for a total of $120 million, including 239,000 shares repurchased during the third quarter at a cost of $45 million. As of October 31, 2025, $105 million remains on the board's share repurchase authorization. Now, let me turn the call back to Chris for his closing comments. Thanks, Ilene. In summary, on slide 16, we are continuing to innovate and execute with our technology modernization, and we are focused on the delivery of new product enhancements and new protocols for the remainder of 2025.

Our new strategic hires are already making a difference in our execution, and we continue to show performance across our new initiatives for block trading, portfolio trading, and the dealer-to-dealer business. Our revenue growth profile outside of U.S. credit is strong, and we are addressing our challenges in U.S. credit. While we are pleased with the growth we are generating with our new initiatives, we are confident that we can execute faster to generate higher levels of growth. Now, we would be happy to open the line for your questions. At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from Chris Allen with Citi. Yeah, good morning, everyone. Thanks for the question. Nice to see you.

Solid Spence Controls this quarter. I have a bit of a two-parter. One, on the MIDEX U.S. launch, obviously, you see nice volumes to start. Can you talk about the pipeline to add additional dealers there, how it's interacting with PT, whether you're seeing benefits there? The second part, you're seeing good uptake in new offerings like MIDEX. As you noted, your overall share gains have been elusive, which is leading to investor frustration. Can you elaborate on your comments in terms of taking action to deliver faster technology enhancements, how you're addressing competition, particularly for your legacy areas of strength, which some are questioning, whether there's been a degradation there, just as you're seeing uptake in new solutions, but overall share is moderated? Great. Okay. Thanks, Chris. Yeah, I'll try and get to all those parts of the two-part question.

First, on the recent launch of MIDEX, which is our mid-market matching solution, really finally addressing that dealer-to-dealer market that has been growing over the last few years, now about 30% of the TRACE market is the dealer-to-dealer market. We obviously have been engaged in dealer-initiated business, particularly using our dealer RFQ, which, as you can see in the numbers and certainly in October, continues to grow. The dealer-initiated business in October was up 22%. That is really without the full rollout of MIDEX, which only rolled out in late September and still early days. We are excited about those early days, though. As I mentioned in the opening comments, we are now seeing MIDEX run on a daily basis. When it launched, it was running several times a week. We have plans to increase the number of MIDEX sessions. We only run one a day today.

Right now, we're on track to deliver around $2.7 billion in the month. That's the kind of run rate we're on. We're pretty excited about that, just given it's one session a day and off to a good start. The other important piece of that MIDEX solution is really our relationship with the dealer community, who are a key ingredient to our ecosystem. As you mentioned, it has a relationship to portfolio trading. Really, as dealers enter into portfolio positions, they obviously want to exit those positions in an efficient way. Certainly, the mid-market sessions that are out in the market have been very helpful to the dealer community for exiting that inventory. Unfortunately, some of them were priced at quite a higher level.

Part of our MIDEX offering is really to cater to the dealer's needs to get out of positions in an efficient way. I think we've struck that balance. It will lead to that lower fee per million for that MIDEX solution. We do want to make sure people understand the connection to that volume being helpful for dealers as part of our broader partnership with the dealer community. On your second question, and a very fair question around just our overall growth, the two areas, obviously, top-line revenue in U.S. credit and our just overall growth of market share in U.S. credit really have been largely slower growth than we would like.

I think the way to think about what we've been doing in this area is we really made a decision, I should say, I made a decision to invest in our technology using what I call a portfolio approach. As opposed to investing in a few areas, one or two critical areas, we invested in several critical areas that needed to be addressed. First, there is the overall tech transformation that is underway here at MarketAxess. We've been investing heavily into that tech transformation. At the same time, we had to address the competitive landscape that we sat in in U.S. credit in particular. We chose to make several investments, not just our tech transformation, but you see us investing in portfolio trading, what we just talked about, the dealer-to-dealer business, where we made sizable investments.

We made investments in our Algo Suite or our automation suite. We also made investments in block trading across all of our products. Finally, with the recent news this week, we were also investing in our recent announcement around closing auctions. We made a decision to make a multitude of investments, all tech-heavy investments, to address each of those areas that needed either a competitive dynamic or it was part of our broader tech transformation that's underway. As for the tech transformation, Expro has been a key ingredient to that tech transformation. Those are investments that are replacing existing UI technology with new modern technology. We've also leveraged our Pragma acquisition, and we're using that Pragma acquisition technology, acquired technology for our automation suite, where our legacy automation suite is now migrating to the Pragma technology stack.

You are seeing the first elements of the Pragma matching technology being delivered into the closing auctions. Where those investments are working, obviously, our portfolio trading numbers reflect a return on investment. Our dealer-initiated numbers also reflect a return on investment. Automation continues to grow somewhere in 17% in Q3. Those are all up. However, both portfolio trading and dealer-initiated comes in at that lower fee per million. That revenue challenge does not overcome the other areas of our core business and the growth in that core business. The core RFQ business, obviously, has been impacted by what we call the market environment. If you look at the low volatility, very tight spreads, and that we have been seeing over the last few quarters, it presents challenges to the growth of that traditional all-to-all RFQ platform.

We have seen that where we are competing with the phone and with chat, and we are seeing block market behavior going direct to dealers. That is some of the overall environmental challenges. Obviously, while we have had block growth, it has not been big enough or fast enough as we would desire. We continue to make those investments in that block strategy. We are seeing success in our Eurobond and EM products where the block growth is growing. Where we sit today, I would say we feel good about the momentum we are seeing in all those initiatives, but we would expect to deliver higher market share growth in the quarters ahead, just given all the investments that we are making and where they are and just being rolled out to the market.

We feel pretty good that the investments we are making are yielding results in terms of volume, but we obviously want to have them yield results in terms of revenue. Look, we're not stopping that investment. We have releases going out this weekend that are targeting all of the areas I just talked about. We have the closing auction that we just announced, which is going live this month as well. A lot of areas investment, some that were required for tech transformation, but most of them were required for the competitive landscape we sit in. Thank you. Your next question comes from Patrick Moley with Piper Sandler. Yes, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Wanted to ask about the closing auctions and the announcement that you made recently.

Can you help us get a sense for just the size of that opportunity, what it could mean for data, what it could mean for your market share, and then how large a piece of the overall credit market do you think that that sort of volume could become over time? Thanks. Thanks, Patrick. Obviously, a great question, just given how much time we've worked on the closing auction. We were very excited to finally get that news out because it's been a sizable investment for us. It's been really an ongoing strategy over the last four years. We have some really great partners advising us on the project. BlackRock, State Street, and DWS have just been great partners. There's actually more large investment managers beyond that list that we didn't disclose in the release.

We've been working closely with the large investment banks and ETF market makers. They are very key ingredients to, obviously, the liquidity in a closing auction like the one we're designing. We also have worked with the SEC. Our closing auction requires filing with the SEC because it's part of our ATS. Lots of years of work and effort is finally coming to market. We're super excited about that. First, let me tell you what it is not. The closing auction is not a mid-market matching session. The fixed income market has lots of mid-market matching sessions where you match buy and sell interests and just use a price at mid of the market. That's not what we've built. We've built a true auction where buy and sell interests find a clearing price, and that clearing price ends up being where all the trades that are matched execute.

It's a very important difference to what is quite popular in the fixed income market. The other key ingredient to an auction is an all-to-all network that is sizable. Just given our position with our all-to-all network, we are able to allow any participant match with any other participant. That's really a key ingredient in any auction and why we felt it was a unique position for us to be in to launch an auction of this size and this magnitude. The most important part of the strategy around this auction and where we spent the most time talking to our client partners is really it's really designed to support the growing indexation of the fixed income market. If you look at our overall global market, it's a $150 trillion market. It's the largest asset class on the planet.

20% of that market is benchmarked to an index or held within an ETF benchmarked to an index. It is a very large portion, and that 20% continues to grow each year. Just within the fixed income ETF market globally, that is now hit $2.7 trillion, and it continues to grow and is expected to grow over the next five years to somewhere close to $5 trillion. It is designed to cater to that growing part of the fixed income market. Every index fund needs a closing price, and every ETF needs a NAV to close its fund. What is interesting about the indexes that those ETFs and index-based funds are benchmarked against, they tend to have higher turnover than traditional equity indices. We see that on every month-end.

The month-end, really, there's really more new issue in the bond market than there are IPOs in the equity markets globally. You tend to have higher turnover of the index that all this money is benchmarked towards. That's a really key ingredient. Just to give you some stats, in U.S. investment-grade volumes, the last hour of the last day of the month, 25% of that day's volume is done in that last hour. We're seeing aggregation of activity moving closer to the close. On a normal trading day, we're now seeing almost 15% of total volume now within the last hour of the close as well. There's been a trend line where much of the bond market is moving further and further closer to the closing time of the day. The other key ingredient, other than all-to-all and all-to-all network, is price.

The price that we are providing as the closing price has to be relevant to the index funds and the ETF. How do we make that relevant? You'll recall that we entered into a partnership with S&P where we provide our CP Plus data feed to S&P to help them input that into their value-added pricing tool. That has been a great partnership with S&P from just a pure data perspective. The key ingredient is S&P also owns some very key indices which are powered by that end-of-day price. One of those key indices is the IBOX Index, which is what the HYG and LQD is based on, the two iShares ETFs, the two largest ETFs on the planet.

That's an important ingredient where our CP Plus price is now being delivered to the S&P eval product to help support an evaluated closing price for some very key index funds, but certainly key ETFs as well. As the closing auction rolls out, we will be targeting the more liquid end of both the IG and high-yield market and looking to form a closing price that powers our CP Plus end-of-day price in those bonds. The data piece, as you asked in your question, is a very critical ingredient to the success of the auction itself. We're excited that we've been working on this for several years, and we are excited about all the partnerships that we've established. Certainly, the S&P partnership is a key ingredient. Excellent. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Chris. Your next question comes from Alex Cram with UBS. Yes, hey.

Good morning, everyone. Just on the kind of laundry list of new initiatives and some of them that are running a little bit slower, maybe unpack U.S. block trading a little bit more. I know success outside of the U.S. so far, things like U.S. block, still very early, but anything you can help us with in terms of timing of more dealer liquidity on those and, yeah, anything else where we could expect to see some uptake here. Sure. Thanks, Alex. Certainly, we see the block market as the biggest opportunity in front of this company. It is really, when you think about the overall global fixed income markets, right now, the non-electronic portion of that market globally is far greater than what is already electronic.

We see it's rare that you have a company that has a market opportunity that is bigger than the market it sits in today. We're pretty excited about the block opportunity globally, but particularly here in the U.S. Overall, as you saw in some of our numbers, our block growth rates in Q3 across all the products was about 10%. In October, we saw that jump to 21%. We are seeing the block initiatives yield some results. I'd say in the U.S., as you point out, it's not at the levels that we would want. Just to give you some stats, in U.S. IG, in October, we did see it jump to 30% growth. Our block activity in October is up. As you can see in our share, it's up slightly. We'd like it to be up much further.

I think the key ingredients are really still content. We have made huge inroads in the content that we share with our clients, both in U.S. credit, but certainly in EM and Eurobonds, where we have pretty robust content. We are also constantly delivering new features. We are excited about new offerings rolling out just in another week that will help address some of the key ingredients to block solutions and block trading, where we want our bank partners, our large investment bank partners, to be able to share their Axx content directly with our clients. That is a key ingredient for the block market to take hold. Where we have content, we are seeing success. We are delivering with the rollout of Expro in Europe. We are now delivering just a better workflow for that block trading content in Europe.

Certainly, in the U.S., we're making regular changes to our block solution. So we're excited about the coming months and some of the changes that we're delivering. Fair enough. Thank you. Your next question comes from Benjamin Butters with Barclays. Good morning. This is Christopher Bryan on for Ben. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask a broader question about the environment. We're seeing continued lower credit spreads, lower volatility. Just curious how you're thinking about growing through this kind of environment if it were to persist and if there's anything that you could see that would maybe make a meaningful shift in the environment that we've been seeing over the last several months. Thanks. Sure. Great question. Certainly, over the last several years, we've seen generally lower volatility, tightening of spreads, and certainly, that has had an impact on some of our core offerings.

We did see return to volatility in the second quarter. So we were happy and pleased with that second quarter spike of activity. But much of that was short-lived, and we can see how quickly volatility comes and goes in the marketplace. I'd say in the current month, we are seeing higher levels of volatility. Obviously, you're seeing VIX above 20, and we're seeing spreads widen in the current environment. Certainly, in November, the market is reflecting higher levels of volatility. TRACE is up 46% in investment grade, and it's up about 25% in high yield. So we're seeing in the current month activities that would suggest a little bit of unlocking to that lower spread and lower volatility. But as you point out, it's been if you look at the summer months in the third quarter, there was very little spikes of volatility or volatility activity.

Challenging environment, but certainly, both in October and now in November, we're seeing higher levels of volatility and a little bit of spread widening, which makes our all-to-all liquidity that much more attractive. I would also just add, if you think about market expectations for Fed rate cuts this year, they've remained sort of at the two to three with a possibility of a third cut in December, having declined a bit as we heard post-Powell's remarks last week. There's still a more likely than not probability of a December cut, but perhaps with less conviction. Having said that, the curve is still trending towards a gentle steepening, with the front end staying fairly anchored, the belly largely holding, and the long end remaining sort of sticky.

In other words, if you think about short-term yields could fall when the Fed cuts and long-term yields not falling maybe as much, if such a scenario plays out, this should be positive for liquidity, secondary turnover, things like that. You could see more willingness to buy longer duration bonds. I think, as you might have imagined, right, we saw just, for instance, on our platform during the quarter, we saw that the weighted average years to maturity moved up to about 9.1 years from the 8.5 year level we saw the prior quarter. All of that said, as Chris just said, we are seeing some interesting movement in November. Even just in the first few days, we've seen weighted average years to maturity. Now, it's only the first few days, so you have to keep that in mind.

We did see weighted average years to maturity up to about 10 years, let's call it. There are some other factors to keep in mind as well when you think about the macro environment. Great. Thank you so much. Your next question comes from Michael with Morgan. Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe just continuing with the last question, macro backdrop, clearly moving your way in November, as you just answered with the last question. If that proves short-lived and macro backdrop returns to a bit more challenging backdrop like we've seen for some time, I guess, what's the scope to be turning to higher levels of growth? Which parts of the business do you see as perhaps the most meaningful contributor to that? I know you mentioned some tangible progress on new initiatives, some of which are lower fees.

Just curious how you're thinking about that as you look out over the next 12-18 months. Sure. Great question. As we mentioned in our opening remarks, a key ingredient to our strategy going forward is being what we call protocol agnostic. We need to deliver protocols that our clients choose at times of high volatility or at times of low volatility. When I think about low-vol environments, the things that tend to stand out in the market are portfolio trading, the dealer-to-dealer mid-market sessions, things like MIDEX, which we've just rolled out. You see higher levels of block activity move into the market where spreads are stable and tight. Our investor clients tend to move back to going direct to dealers. They do not leverage that unique liquidity in the all-to-all marketplace that we run.

Really, the key ingredient is providing those protocols seamlessly to our clients, but then using our unique proprietary market data to help them decide which protocol to choose from. It gets complicated to decide whether to do a portfolio trade or to do a list and just go out to all via RFQ. A lot of our data can help traders decide which protocol to use for any given environment. That is kind of the key ingredient of the strategy going forward, that protocol agnostic approach where we can provide things like block trading tools directly to the client where that client can trade directly with a dealer that has an Axx or has content. More importantly, we can help that client select a dealer based on their activity in the market that we see.

All of the key initiatives, the block portfolio trading and the dealer-to-dealer initiative, are really designed for lower-vol environments, whereas our key liquidity solution, the all-to-all network, is certainly robust in the volatility that we are seeing in today's week and the last couple of days. Great. Thank you. Your next question comes from Simon Clinch with Rothschild. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Again, sort of thinking about the market environment, I was wondering, Chris, if you could give us some thoughts around the mix of volumes in credit and just the real reasons why and sustainability for the surge in the size of trades at the block end side and then the sort of shrinking of the size of trades at the other end. And really what we are seeing month in, month out seems to be a squeezing of the dealer-to-client portion of the market.

I just wanted to get a sense of, is that just a trend that's going to keep going for you, or do you think that there's a cyclical element here versus any thoughts on that would be useful? Thank you. Sure. It's a great question because certainly the stats that we shared in our slides are unique where you see the smaller trades get smaller and the larger trades get larger. You don't see that too often across an evolving marketplace. With regard to the smaller trades getting smaller, we are absolutely well positioned to capture the efficiencies that are required to handle all of those trades and all of those trade sizes. That is clearly driven by, one, portfolio trading. Remember, portfolio trades are big notionally, but each of the line items are quite small.

Part of the growth of those tickets in the market that we shared is the growth of portfolio trading over the years. The other key ingredient to the growth of the smaller tickets is obviously the growth of SMA in the fixed income market. That's been a real driver of asset allocation among our biggest clients and will continue to be a driver as it collects more and more assets over time. Those are certainly where we see the largest use of our automation tools are coming from clients with very large SMA. We're happy to report that some of our biggest clients are continuing to invest in SMA either through acquisition or just overall investment in their SMA investment. We're expecting the smaller tickets to grow as a percent of the overall trades market. We think we're well positioned.

The other reason why we think they'll grow is larger trade sizes are going to be broken into smaller trades. We're already seeing that in our Algo Suite where clients are taking advantage of our credit algos where they are able to trade large blocks of 20 in sizes of $1 million or $2 million at a time. That is yielding very good returns in terms of execution quality and reducing information leakage. We have every expectation that the overall TRACE will see more tickets growing. With regard to the block market going through its growth where those tickets are getting larger, I think that is really when I look up and look at the trend line and the volatility in the market, we've really been at historically low vol and historically tight spreads over the last few years relative to prior market environments.

I think that has led to block size being a little bit more of an attractive tool in exchanging risk. Dealers are certainly willing to trade that block size and take that risk. Obviously, clients are looking to move a lot of volume at any size they can that's efficient. I do think that we'll end up in a world where when vol returns to a more normal level, those larger blocks get broken up. We will continue to see, like any electronic transformation, the tickets will explode. Large blocks will get broken into smaller size tickets, and that will be the trend line going forward. For both, I think we've positioned ourselves to solve portfolio trading, solve the small ticket automation growth, and obviously, we're trying to solve the block solution as well. Hopefully, that answers your question. That's great. Thanks, Chris.

There have been a lot of growth in industry share portfolio trading through last year. It seems to have stalled out at around 11% or 12% of credit volumes. You've still been able to grow share nicely, but what do you think's driving that pause? Has that protocol matured, or do you think it can continue to grow? It's a great question because we've been watching that share portfolio trading share. Remember, it's a sizable part of the market. It's a key tool for our investors. From a market opportunity, it's quite small from an overall revenue opportunity. Because it's a critical tool for our clients, we continue to invest in it. We're seeing kind of an equilibrium, I call it, in the IG market from a portfolio trading standpoint.

I know some people predicted it would go to 20%, but it's really, as you point out, has really flatlined anywhere from 10-12% of the overall market. However, that said, where we have seen growth is in the high-yield market. That market, even in November, is up closer to 15% of the overall market, whereas just a few years ago, it was closer to 5 and 6% of the overall market. So we are seeing a number of our clients using the high-yield portfolio trading tool as a way to access liquidity. What's interesting is, as you point out, in IG, the flatness of the growth, that is not for lack of dealer liquidity. We have seen more and more dealers move into the dealer's space for providing liquidity on portfolio trades.

There is ample liquidity in that portfolio trading market to support a higher percentage of the market. I just think the market is quite comfortable at the levels that they are hitting, which is anywhere from 10-12%. The only times that we see it spike up is when we see what we call a mega portfolio, something greater than $1 billion in a single portfolio. We have seen those be anywhere from $1 billion-$11 billion in size. Those are obviously rare and just come once in a while. Yeah, I do think we have hit some level of equilibrium in IG, but we are seeing the growth in high yield. Our high-yield market share of the portfolio trading market share has grown dramatically. We have been quite proud.

We obviously talk to the dealers a lot about how we're doing in that one asset class. And we're certainly in a what we call leadership position in high-yield PT right now. So we're excited about the investment we've made there and the returns that we're seeing. Okay. Thank you. Your next question comes from Dan Fannon with Jefferies. Good morning. You have Rick Roy on for Dan today, but I'm sure you're going to be excited for a third follow-up to the macro environment. Just on that, we see duration and yield to maturity, at least measured on the bond index, creeping up month to month. Your charts show that as well. I was hoping you could provide an updated outlook on maybe where you think the curve could land from that perspective and maybe the updated impacts to fee per million based on that.

Then separately, with the expense control that you guys have demonstrated year to date and the reaffirmation of guidance today, I get to kind of an implied sequential increase in Q4 that seems a bit elevated relative to historical seasonal patterns. If you are able to quantify which line items might be driving this increase and if I am so lucky to get a little bit of insight into 2026, that would be helpful as well. Thank you. Okay. Let's unpack your questions. Let me take them in turns. If I start with the macro and the weighted average years to maturity look, I think I kind of laid out when I spoke before about what we are seeing in the environment in terms of the rate environment and how things could play out in the scenarios depending on where we end up with a rate cut.

I did talk about how we're currently—and remember, we're talking four trading days here, so we've got to understand that we've got to see where this lands. We're seeing about 10 years weighted average years to maturity on the platform. In terms of yields, we actually saw yields out a little bit, although still insignificantly from the prior year time period. I think we're going to have to wait and see how that goes. I think you guys all remember the sensitivities at this point in terms of where high-grade duration helps us when it comes to yield. If you're 100 basis points in, in terms of yield, we can see that adding, call it, $3-$5 on the fee per million in high grade.

Obviously, we have talked about this as well, but one year out on weighted average years to maturity could be worth about, let's call it, $15 more or less. Those sensitivities still hold within high grade. There are lots of puts and takes, and we have to look all in at the credit fee per million and the different protocols and what is happening. That gives you a sense for how to think about the high-grade duration piece of this. Let me take your expense question. It is a good question. I think that we obviously—you heard me continue to guide to the low end of approximately $505-$525 on a GAAP basis.

If you think about the progression of expenses, that, to your point, would imply a fourth quarter expense level of around, let's call it, $134 million with an incremental $10-$12 million flowing through the next quarter. This $10-$12 million increase in the fourth quarter expense relative to Q3 is really driven by items such as depreciation, technology, the impact from hires, as well as some timing-related expenses that have not yet come through the panel. I think we need to take a step back and really look at the expenses for the year. I would remind you that we took management actions in the beginning of the year. Those were to drive productivity, and we really wanted to do that through the expense base in a sustainable way. Those actions reduced our full-year expenses by an expected $17 million.

Those included things like vendor management, vendor consolidation, role eliminations, and really better aligning our resources to the strategic initiative that you heard Chris talk about earlier in this call. Those actions that we took allowed us to self-fund to the tune of about $16 million of those investments in our technology, our products, our key strategic hires that we've made throughout the year. That is really how I would think about overall how we continue to really manage a disciplined expense base. We're really being mindful of the environment that we're in and, at the same time, self-funding our really important investments. Your next question comes from Eli About with Bank of America. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to dig into your growth in open trading.

It looks like open trading kicked up to 39% of your credit volume in October, which is the highest level since the regional bank crisis. Usually, I know this is a protocol that does well on the volatile backdrop, but volatility was up pretty modestly in October, certainly not on par with the levels during the regional bank crisis and April's tariff disputes. What can you share to help us make sense of the stronger open trading adoption lately? Yeah, great question. Obviously, open trading certainly in lower vol environments has not had the level penetration that we would prefer. Certainly, in October, we saw open trading move up just from September from 30% up to 34 and change. While there were spikes of volatility, as you point out, in October, it was quite muted across the month.

I think one key ingredient that we've been adding to our Open Trading liquidity is new sources of liquidity. It's coming in two forms. One, we continue to add systematic hedge funds to the platform. They certainly enjoy the benefits of all-to-all where they can price other clients' bond requests on RFQ. We've also seen a number of very large investment managers take advantage of all-to-all as well, where they are providing responses to other investors' requests for price. That's actually a fairly new phenomenon here. Usually, we try to provide things like our Algo Suite or our Auto-Responder to traditional buy-side clients, but we've seen one or two buy-side clients make sizable investments in their own automation tools, and we're starting to see that behavior help support the liquidity, even when there's lower volatility in our OT marketplace.

We also saw where we see higher penetration is in high yield. We also saw that tick up in October, up as high as 43% of that market is our Open Trading liquidity source. Again, it's part of a longer investment of both helping large investment managers use tools to provide liquidity, and it's also the new entrants into the market that are creating unique liquidity opportunities that's increasing our overall Open Trading penetration. Thanks. Your next question comes from Patrick Asanasih with Raymond James. Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. The electronification of high-yield corporate bond trading isn't as far along as investment grade, but it's also seen share gains stall out by you as well as other platforms. What are some of the unique challenges to growing electronic market share in high yield? Great question.

Obviously, by nature of the high-yield market, one key ingredient is liquidity. Our clients come to us and talk about the challenges of liquidity in high yield. Obviously, when there is volatility, our high-yield all-to-all provides that liquidity and certainly jumps in terms of market share. Really, the key complaint that we hear from clients in the high-yield market is just the lack of liquidity, sorry, in that market. The other challenge in the high-yield market is information leakage. If you're in a position and you're looking to move that position, you want to be very careful how that information is shared to move that position. Picking the right bank or the right counterparty to seek that liquidity is a critical ingredient.

We spend a lot of time on the high-yield block trading solution and high-yield dealer content to provide our clients with that unique information so they can actually reduce information leakage by increasing the likelihood of being filled when they reach out to a dealer. We also have developed an AI tool where we help with using AI to select dealers that are more likely to respond to your request for price. Those are key ingredients that we see being deployed in that market. The other unique fact that we're seeing play out this summer and continuing into November is the growth of portfolio trading in the high-yield market. That's a new fact that we didn't see in prior years. We've also seen it play out in higher times of volatility. Normally, portfolio trading tends to move further down as a tool when there's high volatility.

Uniquely, high yield has recently been a tool that our clients are turning to even in heightened volatility as a way and a source to get liquidity. I think, obviously, the ETF market and having a very liquid high-yield ETF market is supporting the liquidity that we are seeing in the portfolio market as well. I would say that we are seeing growth in the E part of the high-yield market. It is coming in the form of that portfolio trading tools. Thank you. Your final question comes from the line of Simon Clinch with Rothschild. Hi, everyone. Thanks for the follow-up. Chris, I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about the competitive environment as well. You were just talking about portfolio trading, and we know that there has been more competition in that space, and that has kind of reduced the revenue pool in PT.

Are we seeing any other sort of incremental changes elsewhere that would ultimately affect the overall revenue pools in other protocols or other parts of the market? Obviously, if you look at our fee per million, it's largely been a result of the mix. The two areas where we run lower fee per million is, obviously, as you mentioned, the portfolio trading area. And that's an area of growth for us. We actually came from behind and certainly are growing against a pretty fierce competition. And then certainly the dealer-to-dealer space, which, as I mentioned earlier, is a very large part of the market. 30% of the market is dealer-to-dealer. And it's an area that we really under-invested in that one area and made a decision to support the dealer community with better tools for exiting inventory.

Our growth in the dealer-to-dealer segment of the market certainly comes at a lower fee per million, but it is all incremental revenue. The launch of our MIDEX matching solution is brand new. It is certainly early days, but that is at a lower fee per million, but it is all new revenue to the MarketAxess top line. We are excited to see the early days of growth and a way to address the market as we proceed. When we look internationally, obviously, the EM market is quite exciting for us. We have seen sizable growth across LATAM and APAC, and we continue to see that growth. We have launched India just recently, so we are excited about adding additional product to that overall market. We feel very good from a competitive standpoint in that market.

We have certainly years of investment and many, many sales visits to grow that market and add clients to that market. Obviously, our all-to-all network is a sizable portion of that market, close to 40% of the liquidity in that market. We are seeing consistent quarter-over-quarter growth in the EM market. We are quite pleased with the competitive landscape there. I am also happy that we have a portfolio trading tool that is being adopted by clients in EM, and we have launched a MIDEX for EM as well. We have tried to address all the areas where we have seen competition move into the market, and we will continue to do that as we invest in that EM business because it is a sizable business for us. If you look at the overall EM market, it is about the same size as U.S. credit.

It is a very exciting market to be certainly positioned where we are in that market. There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Chris for any closing remarks. Thanks, everybody. We look forward to talking to you in the new year about our fourth quarter. Thanks. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.