Virtu Financial Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Record Trading Income Driven by Capital Expansion and Execution Services Momentum

Conference Call Moderator, Moderator, Virtu Financial: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to the Virtu Financial First Quarter 2026 earnings call. After today’s prepared remarks, we’ll host a question and answer session. I will now hand the conference over to Andrew Smith, Head of IR and FP&A. Matthew, please go ahead.

Andrew Smith, Head of Investor Relations and Financial Planning & Analysis, Virtu Financial: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Our first quarter 2026 results were released this morning and are available on our website. With us today on this morning’s call, we have Aaron Simons, our Chief Executive Officer, Cindy Lee, our Chief Financial Officer, and Joseph Molluso, our Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer. We will begin with brief prepared remarks and then take your questions. First, a few reminders. Today’s call may include forward-looking statements which represent Virtu’s current beliefs regarding future events and are therefore subject to risks, assumptions, and uncertainties which may be outside the company’s control. Please note that our actual results and financial conditions may differ materially from what is indicated in these forward-looking statements.

It is important to note that any forward-looking statements made on this call are based on information presently available to the company, and we do not undertake to update or revise any forward-looking statements as new information becomes available. We refer you to disclaimers in our press release and encourage you to review the description of risk factors contained in our annual report, Form 10-K, and other public filings. During today’s call, in addition to GAAP measures, we may refer to certain non-GAAP measures, including Adjusted Net Trading Income, Adjusted Net Income, Adjusted EBITDA, and Adjusted EBITDA Margin. These non-GAAP measures should be considered as supplemental to and not as superior to financial measures as reported in accordance with GAAP.

We direct listeners to consult the investor portion of our website, where you’ll find additional supplemental information referred to on this call, as well as a reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the equivalent GAAP term in the earnings materials with an explanation of why we deem this information to be meaningful, as well as how management uses these measures. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Aaron Simons.

Aaron Simons, Chief Executive Officer, Virtu Financial: Thanks, Matt. Good morning, everyone. Again, just like very brief remarks before Cindy goes over the detailed results and we move to Q&A. Just wanted to highlight that our first quarter results show that we’re executing on our plan to grow through investing in our infrastructure, acquiring top talent, and expanding our capital base. Following that plan, in the last 7 months, we have added over $500 million in new trading capital and maintained a return on our total capital in excess of 100%. Our results for the first quarter were among the best in Virtu’s history, aided by an operating environment which was even more favorable than the fourth quarter of last year. Within the context of that environment, all of our businesses performed well, customer and non-customer market making, as well as execution services.

We’ve provided additional perspective on the quarter in our detailed financial supplement, and we’ll be answering your questions shortly. First, though, Cindy Lee, our Chief Financial Officer, will review the financial results for the quarter.

Cindy Lee, Chief Financial Officer, Virtu Financial: Thanks, Aaron. Good morning, everyone. For the first quarter of 2026, we generated Adjusted Net Trading Income, or NT, of $12.9 million per day, or a total of $787 million. This was the highest quarter total ever for Virtu. Turning to our segment performance, market making reported NT of $10.4 million per day for Q1. Execution services reached $2.5 million per day for the quarter and $2.1 million on a trailing twelve-month basis. This is the eighth consecutive quarter of increased total NT for VES, an indication of the substantial progress we have been noting within the VES business. This performance reflects the investment we have made in technology, our focus on client acquisition, and the expansion of our product offering.

Both of our operating segments benefited from generally favorable market conditions and strong execution by our team. Our profitability this quarter was robust. We generated $521 million in Adjusted EBITDA, representing a 66% margin. Adjusted EPS was $2.24. For the last 12 months, we recorded $1.6 billion in Adjusted EBITDA, a 666% margin, and $6.66 in adjusted EPS. These numbers all represent highs since early 2021 and an all-time quarterly high in case of adjusted EPS, underscoring the operating leverage inherent in our business. On slide 7 of our supplemental materials, we provide a summary of our operating expenses. Our first quarter 2026 cash compensation ratio was at 22%, which was within the historical range.

The increase in compensation expense reflects our continued focus on retaining and acquiring top talent across the organization, particularly in trading and technology. Turning to capital, our invested capital stands at $2.6 billion as of March 31st, while generating an average return of 107% on the capital over the past year. We will continue to expand our capital base, strengthen our infrastructure, and deploy capital where we see the greatest opportunities, all while maintaining our quarterly dividend of $0.24 per share. We will now take your questions.

Conference Call Moderator, Moderator, Virtu Financial: We’ll now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. We ask that you pick your hand setup when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you’re muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Patrick Moley from Piper Sandler. Your line is open. Go ahead.

Alex Blostein, Analyst, Goldman Sachs0: Yes, good morning, and thanks for taking the question. Congrats on the strong quarter. You know, I think the environment across the board was very good, you guys seemed to outperform that. I was hoping maybe you could just level set with us and talk about where you saw the most opportunity in the quarter, and then maybe, you know, with ante up where it is, you know, highest level on record, how should we think about the sustainability of that in this environment? Thanks.

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: Hey, Patrick. Good morning. It’s Joe. You know, you’re right, the environment was very robust, as I think you wrote in your note. You know, I think we did outperform. You know, it’s difficult to kind of pinpoint growth since we’ve had this growth pivot. You know, it is across the board. I think, you know, for the last couple of quarters, you know, our focus has been on growing the firm. You know, that means, you know, a lot of things across the board and a lot of asset classes and a lot of geographies. You know, it naturally includes growth and investment, you know, in asset classes that maybe we were historically less focused on, but, you know, we want to accelerate growth in.

You know, it’s hard to pinpoint, right? I think in the past, we’ve talked about crypto, we’ve talked about options, right? Our growth, we wanna make sure that it’s understood the growth plan isn’t limited, you know, to a handful of narrower areas. It’s really, you know, broad-based and, you know, focused on a lot of different areas. It includes all the things that we’ve been talking about. Capital, it includes personnel, it includes investment in technology, et cetera.

Alex Blostein, Analyst, Goldman Sachs0: Okay. I mean, was there, you know, anything you can share in terms of asset classes where you maybe saw outsized growth this quarter? I can think of, you know, maybe, you know, the metals market. We saw a lot of activity, especially among retail, in the earlier part of the quarter. you know, anything there, that you can share on asset classes?

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: Hey, we made the point last quarter to remind the world that Virtu’s performance is not solely based on retail investor participation, which by the way remains strong. You know, the customer market-making business has done very well. I think we saw continued outstanding performance and growth in what we call prop market making. The headline volatility in the quarter, obviously from exogenous events contributed, you know, there’s also, you know, a lot of underlying growth in trades and investments that have been made over a long period of time.

We wanna get away from talking about, you know, specific areas, I think it’s, it’s pretty obvious in the quarter, if you look at just the volatility in the world and what’s been going on, that was a good environment that was helped by our, you know, continued investment and everything else we’ve been talking about.

Aaron Simons, Chief Executive Officer, Virtu Financial: Yeah, maybe I’ll just add one thing.

Alex Blostein, Analyst, Goldman Sachs0: Okay.

I mean, I get it’s hard, like quarter-over-quarter, the environment, as we pointed out last time, is the most important variable, but it’s not like, oh, we found some new trade or something took off. Really, what I tried to highlight in the introductory remarks was you should think of this as what would’ve happened in the counterfactual world where we didn’t add $500 million of new trading capital. Our P&L would not have been what it was in the first quarter, right? I’m not saying it’s a one for one difference, right? It definitely was a huge factor. Going forward, you know, the idea is that in any environment, we should outperform where we were before with lower capital.

Okay. Maybe just, if I could sneak one more in here, just a bigger picture question. I think it was just a few quarters ago, you said you were looking to target about $10 million a day in ante through the cycle, and that was kind of the longer term goal for the business. How should we interpret this quarter? Do you feel like we’re kind of at that point where we can, you know, we’re sort of building toward this $10 million a day through the cycle? If not, what still needs to be done to kind of get us to that place?

Aaron Simons, Chief Executive Officer, Virtu Financial: I mean, the honest answer is we don’t know. I mean, the trailing return on capital was over 100%. I don’t think we always achieve that through like a multi-year cycle. At points in the cycle where it’s less than 100%, you can back into how much capital we might need to make $10 million a day. In environments like this, then we need much less and we make more than $10 million a day.

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: Yeah. The through the cycle point, Patrick, is the key point in that discussion. It is what makes it difficult to say where we are. I think, as Aaron pointed out, and I think as I pointed out in earlier calls, you know, when we talk about goals and trading capital of $4 billion, that factors into that goal. It’s more than that. There have been a number of investments in personnel and people. The recruiting environment, you know, for Virtu I think is very good. The investments in technology being stepped up. You know, all contribute to that, right? You need all of those things together, you know, to execute on that.

I think in the past, we’ve used terms like the medium term, like, you know, a three-year time horizon kind of being, you know, something that, you know, when forced to give a view is something we’d feel comfortable giving to you.

Alex Blostein, Analyst, Goldman Sachs0: Okay. Thanks for the color, guys. That’s it for me.

Conference Call Moderator, Moderator, Virtu Financial: Your next question comes from Daniel Fannon at Jefferies.

Daniel Fannon, Analyst, Jefferies: Thanks. Good morning. Thanks. Good morning. Wanted to just talk about what you’ve been doing. Obviously, you talked about $500 million of incremental capital. Can you also talk about the hiring, if there’s where you’ve been focused, where you are, do you think in terms of the goal of what you’re looking to expand and invest in internally?

Aaron Simons, Chief Executive Officer, Virtu Financial: You know, there’s definitely a number of areas where we’re trying to hire people. Definitely people that are in the sort of like, you know, continuum of trader to quant to researcher type role. We’re trying to hire a lot of engineers, software developers. That takes time because, you know, we have a very high bar for quality. You know, we’re trying to kind of do that as quickly as possible. We have made a few key senior hires in the last 6-7 months that have started, and they’re gonna have an impact on the business, hopefully in short timeframe. It is a longer term expansion as well. I think this year we hope to get our head count close to 1,100.

we don’t have like an exact number. It’s more about just having sufficient number of people to do a certain level of quality work that we need done. Definitely for the foreseeable future, we’re gonna be pretty aggressively hiring.

Daniel Fannon, Analyst, Jefferies: Great. That’s helpful. Just in the context of that, and obviously the revenue environment that you’re operating in, how to think about expense growth would be helpful in the context of what you’re thinking about either cash compensation versus previously and/or growth in the kind of more fixed cost base to support new asset classes, new personnel, all the things you’re investing in.

Aaron Simons, Chief Executive Officer, Virtu Financial: Sure. I think, you know, we have given some guidance on the compensation ratios and, you know, the first quarter accrual sort of reflects where we want to be. Obviously when you have a great quarter, it’s much easier and the % looks lower. You know, as we’ve highlighted last few quarters, like, we have been adjusting that up slightly because we are trying to attract the best talent in the business. You know, part of retention is competitive compensation. But I think we are, you know, at that level, and you can see that it doesn’t really affect the ratios or the EBITDA margin all that much, especially when you have a great quarter.

As far as like the infrastructure investment, I mean, yes, we are going to do incrementally more of that, but already our business has a very heavy, you know, capital expenditure profile. I’m not sure it’s going to be like so immediately obvious in the, in the expense tables. I don’t know, Joe, if you want to add anything.

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: No, I think that’s exactly, you know, where we are. We, you know, you saw the comp accrual this quarter, as a nominal number. Certainly looks outsized compared to the past. As Aaron said, we wanna, you know, hire the best people and pay them best in class. That is, that reflects it. You know, Dan, if we have a comp accrual or if we have a comp ratio that creeps up in the future, even in a really robust environment or even in a median environment, that’ll be deliberate and intentional, and in our view will be a good thing, right? If you see that.

It’ll mean that the growth plan is being executed on and we’re creating value for shareholders. We’re just paying people market comp or better than market comp.

Daniel Fannon, Analyst, Jefferies: Understood. Thank you.

Conference Call Moderator, Moderator, Virtu Financial: Your next question comes from Alex Blostein at Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Just a reminder to unmute locally.

Alex Blostein, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: You guys hear me?

Aaron Simons, Chief Executive Officer, Virtu Financial: Yep. Now we do.

Alex Blostein, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Yep, there we go. Sorry about that. A bit of a nuanced question, but when we look at the trends in cost of trading, like kind of BC and E and payment for order flow and things like that, in the quarter, it seems to show a pretty meaningful divergence in the market making business. Those are down, obviously the trading results are up. Maybe just a little bit more granularity on what drove that. What I’m trying to get to, I guess, is are we starting to see some incremental benefits of internalization or things like that that could make sort of the flow more profitable for you guys? Or there’s something else went on this quarter that sort of boosted the net trading numbers within from that perspective specifically?

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: Thanks, Alex. The answer is all the above. When you know, the flow characteristics were attractive this quarter. In addition, you know, again, I go back to the answer on, you know, it’s not just a retail machine. Although, you know, that business had a great quarter, and again, the flow was very attractive, I think leading to some of the things you’re talking about. Also a reminder that, you know, the business is not wholly dependent on retail and is pretty diversified, you know, both globally and by asset class on the market-making side. Depending on, you know, the sources of that, you know, non-customer market-making P&L, you could get, you know, divergence in, you know, brokerage, clearing, and exchange as a percentage of the gross number.

I’m not sure I’d read anything, you know, permanent or long-term into it. I think, you know, over time, we’re always looking to lower execution costs. We’re always looking to internalize more to the extent we can and optimize. You know, some of that is environment dependent as opposed to just, you know, us getting better and better.

Alex Blostein, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Understood. It’s just the absolute divergence, not so much the percentage was very notable. One was up a lot.

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: Yeah

Alex Blostein, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: ... the other one was down a lot, but that’s why I thought. Okay. Obviously we don’t wanna get into a habit of, you know, calling every month, but there’s been quite significant change in the backdrop, you know, this April versus last year’s April and obviously over the last couple of months. Any color you guys have on how the environment is unfolding so far in the second quarter, both on the retail side and just broadly would be super helpful.

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: You started your question with the correct answer, which is we really don’t do this month-to-month. My only comment to you. Well, I’d say 2 things. 1 is, keep perspective, right? We had an all-time high here, and that, as Aaron said, is helped by the robust environment. Just because it’s more muted, I think you said in your note, doesn’t mean it isn’t a very good environment. And, you know, we’re only a third of the way through it. But you can see, you know, the headline numbers, you know, while not, you know, in terms of some of the numbers in the first quarter, you know, are still very good from any perspective. That’s point 1.

Point two is we haven’t talked about execution services. If you look at the momentum in that business over the past two years, it has grown through the cycle. Truly grown through the cycle in a number of different environments. There’s a tremendous amount of momentum there. There’s client wins, there’s multiple products kind of being tied together across clients. You know, we’re looking at that as a, you know, as a continued growth engine as well, and that business has a tremendous amount of momentum.

Alex Blostein, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Got it. Great. Thank you guys very much.

Conference Call Moderator, Moderator, Virtu Financial: Your next question comes from Kenneth Worthington at JP Morgan. Your line is open. Please feel free to speak.

Kenneth Worthington, Analyst, JP Morgan: Hi. Good morning. I wanted to go back to sort of Patrick’s question to get a better sense of how the investments that you’ve made, contribute to the capacity to profit over a cycle. Aaron, you mentioned, you know, invested capital’s up 20%. You’ve added headcount, you’ve invested in technology. You sort of implied that there’s a multiplier on the 20% growth in invested capital. How do we think about that multiplier? Is it something like 1.1? Is it 1.3? It doesn’t seem like it’s something like a 0.9. How do we think about that multiplier over a cycle?

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: Hey, Ken, I think what Aaron Simons was stating was that The adjustment of trading income we achieved in this quarter would not have been achieved, you know, had we not increased our capital base. I’m not sure there was any implication of a multiplier around around capital. You know, if anything, there’ll be a multiplier in a, in a good environment, It all comes out in the, in the return. That’s it. The original purpose of that return slide was to demonstrate that we’re a services business and not a, you know, a, you know, kind of a risk business. I’m not sure I’d read anything into any statement about a multiplier. What I’d say, I’d just repeat, capital is fungible, right?

We’re not, you know, we can’t parse or bifurcate the, you know, new capital and the old capital. I think what Aaron was stating is that we are able to earn more, you know, because we had a bigger capital base, because there were greater opportunities. You know, it’s important to remember that our capital is nimble, right? That we remain flexible and agile with it and, you know, it goes where the opportunities are.

Kenneth Worthington, Analyst, JP Morgan: Okay. Okay, fair enough. Maybe as we think about new asset classes like prediction markets and tokenized markets. What do you see as holding, you know, more promise for Virtu, and where are you thinking about focusing investments there?

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: I mean, it’s hard to say. I think we, you know, we’re kind of ready to trade in any market, any exchange, it’s really about where the volume goes. You know, tokenization might be slightly easier, just because to the extent things are linked to an underlier that we already trade, it’s very easy for us to value and we know the trade very well. Whereas in.

Aaron Simons, Chief Executive Officer, Virtu Financial: Prediction markets, like, you know, we don’t have any expertise predicting, like, geopolitical events. You know, it really depends on volume, to be honest.

Kenneth Worthington, Analyst, JP Morgan: Okay, great. Thank you.

Conference Call Moderator, Moderator, Virtu Financial: Your last question comes from Michael Cyprys at Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Michael Cyprys, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Good morning. Great, thanks for taking the question. I was hoping to dig in on Execution Services and hoping you could elaborate and unpack some of the drivers of the momentum that you’re seeing across the Execution Services business. If you can just remind us as well the top revenue contributors under the hood there and how that’s evolved over the past couple years and how you see that mix and contributors evolving as you look out over the next couple years.

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: Sure, Michael, this is Joe. I’ll take that question. As I said, the business has a tremendous amount of momentum. The business has grown through the cycle. It has been a multi-year process, since we acquired ITG around a common technology platform, you know, emphasizing and the penetration of these products through the customer base. I think, you know, what we inherited and what we bought was a very siloed organization. I think Stephen Cavoli and the team there have done an amazing job, you know, of tying together, you know, a global client list that is as blue-chip as it gets. There is, you know, the same client list, that any, you know, that your firm will have.

You know, we service, you know, and we service them through, you know, products that we consider best in class, whether it’s the Algo Suite, or whether it is, you know, the Analytics Platform or the EMS Triton. Right. I think that it’s a business that’s evolved, that is, you know, the technology’s really paying off, and that, you know, is increasing client penetration, right. The margins have improved. The business has been rationalized. Again, we don’t, we don’t break out, you know, down to, the EBITDA line for, you know, by business. You know, when we bought, ITG, it had a mid-teens EBITDA margin.

Think of something that is best in class now that is, you know, a multiple of that, you know, in terms of, you know, in terms of how that business has performed. I think it’s just a lot of work, a lot of blocking and tackling, and a great sales effort kind of tying together, you know, a diverse product offering across geographies, you know, and across different, you know, types of products, you know, to an incredible, blue-chip client list.

Michael Cyprys, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Great. Thanks. Then just a quick follow-up question on AI, clearly very quickly advancing. I was hoping you could talk about how you see the opportunity for agentic AI, and if you could elaborate on how you’re using generative and maybe even agentic AI today across the organization, how you see that evolving, what are some of the use cases, and if you’re able to quantify any sort of the benefits that you’re seeing. Thank you.

Aaron Simons, Chief Executive Officer, Virtu Financial: Sure. I’ll answer that. I mean, I think like most other companies right now, we’re definitely, you know, taking a look, doing exploratory things. You know, we do believe that with the right sort of focus and setup, it can really be a productivity enhancement for our software developers. At the same time, you know, our company is really built on a code base, and we employ excellent engineers to maintain it, and it’s something that is really beyond the capability of current tools to sort of think about at a high level, reason about, and design. In our environment, you know, introducing a bunch of technical debt of AI-generated slop is really never gonna be in our business plan.

That being said, you know, pairing high, high-quality engineers with a tool that can, you know, just kind of execute at beyond human speed and do sort of, like, boilerplate grudge work, assist in explanations, we’re definitely trying to use that internally. You know, I’d say it’s a little early yet to determine a productivity impact, but I expect in the coming year or two, you know, it will have a material impact and maybe we’ll have a little bit more to say.

Michael Cyprys, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: If I could just sneak in a quick follow-up on that. Just curious what impact you see across the competitive landscape from these advances in AI and agentic AI.

Aaron Simons, Chief Executive Officer, Virtu Financial: Well, I mean, as we said in a previous call, I think the term AI is pretty overloaded. If you just wanna talk about statistical modeling, that’s been a big part of competitive landscape for trading businesses for 30 years on Wall Street, and this is just, like, another iteration with novel advancements in models and hardware availability. I have zero insight as to what other people are doing with, quote-unquote, "agentic AI," so I don’t really feel like I can give any color there.

Michael Cyprys, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Okay. Thank you.

Conference Call Moderator, Moderator, Virtu Financial: Your next question comes from Craig Siegenthaler at Bank of America. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Craig Siegenthaler, Analyst, Bank of America: Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Hope you’re all doing well. First question on risk management. Can you guys hear me okay? It’s echoing a little bit.

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: No, you’ve got an echo, Craig.

Craig Siegenthaler, Analyst, Bank of America: Yeah, I’m changing to speaker. Can you hear me okay?

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: Yeah. Yes.

Craig Siegenthaler, Analyst, Bank of America: All right, good. Given the strong results, we were curious, how do you quantify the changes in risk management that Virtu has been taking in the market-making business over the last few quarters?

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: I don’t think there’s been any change in risk management. Like, I don’t.

Craig Siegenthaler, Analyst, Bank of America: Got it.

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: If you’re asking if that elevated P&L was the result of us taking on more risk and things we weren’t doing before, the answer is no.

Craig Siegenthaler, Analyst, Bank of America: Okay. Aaron, any way to quantify that?

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: In terms of?

Craig Siegenthaler, Analyst, Bank of America: Well, in terms of how you guys look at risk. Yeah.

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: Yeah, no. I think that’s the answer, is that based on how we look at risk, no. The answer is, you know, the risk profile of the firm has not changed materially.

Craig Siegenthaler, Analyst, Bank of America: Got it. I think that was Joe. Thank you, Joe.

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: It is Joe, yeah.

Craig Siegenthaler, Analyst, Bank of America: One follow-up here. Some of your market-making peers operate a hedge fund in parallel to the core business. I’m curious why Virtu doesn’t look at doing that. That could provide a whole new revenue source for the company. Just wondering how you think about that potential strategic initiative.

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: That is a tough one, Craig. I’m not sure which competitors you’re referring to. We’re a public company obviously, and we pay, maintain a dividend. You know, I think you might be referring to some competitors that have been around a long time, are bigger and maybe have retained personal capital in the firm that they use to make investments or, you know, or have a side pocket hedge fund. We haven’t contemplated Virtu asset management lately, but, you know, we’ll talk a few years from now and see. Okay. I don’t wanna be misinterpreted. We’re not currently contemplating anything around beginning a hedge fund.

Aaron Simons, Chief Executive Officer, Virtu Financial: I guess, like, another way to think about it, this is again, something we’ve highlighted on previous calls, at the moment, you know, our business is very high Sharpe, but capacity constrained. Acquiring a bunch of assets, we wouldn’t really have a productive use for them. In order to deploy them, we’d probably have to put them in far lower Sharpe strategies, and we already have difficulty explaining the variance in our earnings quarter to quarter. I think it would just make the problem much worse.

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: Yeah. You asked about risk management, and we don’t have an infrastructure in place to really manage, you know, a Sharpe 1, you know, type, or a Sharpe 2 hedge fund setup.

Craig Siegenthaler, Analyst, Bank of America: Got it. Listen, I think some of your peers, Citadel, Susquehanna, their hedge fund strategies are different than the market-making strategy. I don’t know if capacity is really an issue for them.

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: Citadel is a great firm, but they began as a hedge fund. That’s a different evolution of the firm.

Aaron Simons, Chief Executive Officer, Virtu Financial: Well, I think you’re right? That’s not our expertise. We don’t hire a bunch of long short guys and give them a risk allocation and say, "Good luck to you.

Joseph Molluso, Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Virtu Financial: Yeah.

Aaron Simons, Chief Executive Officer, Virtu Financial: Like, we run highly automated electronic market-making strategies backed by statistical research. That is capacity limited at the scale we are talking about.

Craig Siegenthaler, Analyst, Bank of America: Got it. Guys, thank you for taking my questions.

Conference Call Moderator, Moderator, Virtu Financial: This concludes our Q&A session. I will now turn the call back to Aaron Simons CEO for closing remarks.

Aaron Simons, Chief Executive Officer, Virtu Financial: Nothing really, thanks everyone for joining, and thanks for the questions, and we’ll talk to you next quarter.

Conference Call Moderator, Moderator, Virtu Financial: This concludes today’s call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.