Miami International Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
February 25, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Strong financial results: Q4 net revenue rose 52% y/y to $125M and full-year 2025 net revenue was $431M with adjusted EBITDA of $199M and margins expanding to ~46%, driving adjusted diluted EPS of $1.82 for the year.
  • Positive Sentiment: Meaningful options market share and volume gains: MIAX reported a record multi-listed options share of 18.2% in Q4, with ADV of 11.1M contracts (up 46% y/y), outpacing industry ADV growth.
  • Positive Sentiment: New product expansion aimed at retail: MIAX is launching Bloomberg B100 and B500 futures in 2Q‑2026 (retail-sized "teeny" contracts) and rolling out short-dated Monday/Wednesday options in nine stocks to capture retail growth and hedging demand.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Strategic portfolio shifts: The company completed a secondary share offering (no proceeds to MIAX), acquired TISE to expand internationally, and sold 90% of MIAXdx to Robinhood/Susquehanna while retaining a 10% stake — a move that creates partner alignment but reduces direct ownership and future standalone upside.
  • Negative Sentiment: Higher 2026 operating spend and investments: MIAX expects adjusted operating expenses of $265–275M (13%–18% growth), CapEx of $40–45M, and increased headcount/tech spend to support launches, though it notes a $434M cash balance, minimal debt, and plans to release a deferred tax valuation allowance (targeting a 27%–29% effective tax rate).
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Earnings Conference Call
Miami International Q4 2025
00:00 / 00:00

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John Williams
John Williams
SVP and Head of Investor Relations at Miami International Holdings

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Miami International Holdings, or MIAX's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. I'm John T. Williams, Head of Investor Relations. With us today are Thomas P. Gallagher, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Lance Emmons, Chief Financial Officer. We will also have Douglas Schafer Jr., Chief Information Officer, and Shelly Brown, Chief Executive Officer of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer, joining us for the Q&A session.

Operator

My apologies. You did not hear my introduction. I will begin again. Thank you for standing by. My name is Debbie. I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Miami International Holdings, Inc. fourth quarter and year-end 2025 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to John T. Williams, Senior Vice President and Head of Investor Relations. You may begin your conference.

John Williams
John Williams
SVP and Head of Investor Relations at Miami International Holdings

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for Miami International Holdings, or MIAX's fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. I'm John T. Williams, head of Investor Relations. With us today are Thomas P. Gallagher, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Lance Emmons, Chief Financial Officer. We will also have Douglas M. Schafer Jr., Chief Information Officer, and Shelly Brown, Chief Executive Officer of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer, joining us for the Q&A session following our prepared remarks. Our earnings announcement was released prior to this call. We have published an accompanying slide presentation on our investor relations website, ir.miaxglobal.com. In addition, this call is being webcast, and an archived version will be available there shortly after the conclusion of the call.

John Williams
John Williams
SVP and Head of Investor Relations at Miami International Holdings

Our discussion today includes forward-looking statements that are based on the expectations, estimates, and projections regarding the company's future performance, anticipated events or trends, and other matters that are not historical facts. The forward-looking statements in our discussion are subject to various assumptions, risks, uncertainties, and other factors that are difficult to predict and which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore you should not place undue reliance on them. We refer you to our earnings press release and filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could impact the future operating results and financial condition of MIAX.

John Williams
John Williams
SVP and Head of Investor Relations at Miami International Holdings

We do not intend to update any forward-looking statements made on this conference call to reflect events or circumstances after today or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. During today's call, we will refer to non-GAAP measures as defined and reconciled in our earnings materials. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Tom.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Thanks, John. Welcome to MIAX. We're excited to have you on board as our new Head of Investor Relations, taking over for Andy Nybo, who will turn his focus back to corporate communications. Thank you all for your interest in MIAX. What an extraordinary year 2025 has been, as we've achieved significant strategic milestones while delivering outstanding financial performance across our business. Today, I will provide high-level fourth quarter and full-year results, update you on our business segments, and discuss key strategic developments. Lance will walk through our financial highlights and our 2026 guidance. For the fourth quarter, total net revenue grew 52% YoY to $125 million. Adjusted EBITDA more than doubled YoY to $62 million, and Adjusted EBITDA margin improved by 1,400 basis points to 50%. Q4 Adjusted diluted EPS was $0.52.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

For the full year 2025, total net revenue grew 56% YoY to $431 million, and Adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $199 million. Full-year Adjusted EBITDA margin was 46%, reflecting 1,600 basis points of YoY improvement, while Adjusted diluted EPS was $1.82. These impressive results reflect our ability to capitalize on elevated market volatility and drive continued volume and market share gains across our core business lines. Our market share in multi-listed options grew to a record 18.2% in the fourth quarter, up from 15.9% in the prior year period. This represents average daily volume of 11.1 million contracts, a 46% YoY increase that far outpaced industry ADV growth of approximately 28.4%.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

We have significantly increased our market share over the past few years and see additional opportunities for further expansion, and we'll continue to balance market share growth with healthy RPC levels. 2025 also brought several transformational developments for MIAX. Following on our successful IPO, we completed a secondary public offering in December with the closing of a public offering of 7.8 million shares of common stock, which consisted entirely of secondary shares. While MIAX did not sell shares or receive proceeds from this offering, it represents another milestone in our evolution as a public company and enhances our liquidity. In late 2025, we announced the strategic sale of 90% of MIAX Derivatives Exchange, or MIAXdx to Robinhood Markets in partnership with Susquehanna International Group, while retaining a 10% equity stake.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

This transaction, which closed in January of 2026, provides MIAX with expedited access to the growing prediction markets through our retained equity position, while also enabling us to maintain focus on our core product offerings. The strategic alignment with Robinhood and Susquehanna closely aligns with our approach of partnering with industry leaders to offer innovative trading products, and we're excited about the long-term value potential that our equity stake creates for MIAX's shareholders. Our MIAX Sapphire options trading floor in Miami, that we launched in the third quarter, continues to perform in line with our expectations and demonstrates the continued value of floor-based trading in today's hybrid market structure. We continue to build out new and innovative functionality to support the needs of our floor broker community and their customers, and we intend to roll out a number of additional enhancements in the first half of 2026.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Miami's emergence as Wall Street South continues to accelerate. We're proud to be at the center of this transformation as we look to scale our market share over time. Reflecting back on other notable accomplishments in 2025, the acquisition of TISE enables us to expand our international footprint. The launch of MIAX Futures Onyx, and the completion of the new MIAX Futures clearing infrastructure, allow us to provide the industry with a high-performance, proprietary trading and clearing platform with state-of-the-art risk management capabilities. We remain very excited about our Bloomberg Indices futures products and plan to launch B 100 and B 500 futures in the second quarter of 2026. While we previously communicated a February launch date, we recently made the decision to reschedule it to ensure we have the same reliability and performance profile on our futures platform that we pioneered in options markets.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Importantly, we want to ensure the full ecosystem of participants are, in fact, connected to the new exchange on day one. We will be introducing retail-sized contracts first to meet retail broker demand for access to products with low trading fees. We are also focused on offering products to meet emerging retail investor demand that allow them to hedge and efficiently manage exposure to equity markets. We maintain strong conviction in the strategic importance of these products to MIAX's long-term growth trajectory. Taking a broader look at several of our business segments, the options market environment in 2025 was exceptionally favorable for MIAX. Industry volatility remained elevated throughout the year, driven by a complex web of factors. While many businesses are volatility adverse, for MIAX, volatility creates increased demand for risk management tools, and our technology infrastructure has proven its resilience during these high-volume periods.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

We expect elevated volatility throughout 2026, driven by geopolitics, domestic policy and political dynamics, tariff impacts, and the evolving AI investment cycle. We're particularly excited about the rapid growth in new Monday and Wednesday short-term expirations in single stocks. This market segment has become increasingly important to retail and institutional participants alike, and our technology advantage, with industry-leading throughput, low latency, and deterministic performance, positions us exceptionally well to capture this growing opportunity. We listed new Monday and Wednesday short-term options in nine actively traded options classes, which we expect will contribute to both industry and our volume growth in 2026. Furthermore, we are positioned to benefit from an improving IPO pipeline and continued growth in structured products that use options as part of their strategies. Together, these should create additional trading opportunities and volume growth across our platforms.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

These trends, combined with our technology advantages, position us well to capitalize on the evolving options landscape. Turning to equities. Our equities business continues to evolve as our U.S. equity market presence creates strategic positioning to capture opportunities across market data and related asset classes. We have implemented an improved rate structure and reached break-even Adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter, demonstrating our commitment to operational efficiency. Our international operations continue to demonstrate their strategic value, with the annuity value of this business becoming increasingly evident throughout 2025. We are actively working to maximize operational and revenue synergies across our TISE and BSX businesses, reflecting our ongoing commitment to optimizing our international footprint.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

We look ahead, we remain focused on our four key competitive pillars: our differentiated technology, our broad range of regulatory licenses across multiple jurisdictions, our diverse and expanding product range, and most importantly, our deep relationships with customers that allow us to develop the technology, services, and products that support their evolving strategies. We are particularly optimistic about the current regulatory landscape, which creates exciting opportunities for us to expand into new products and services. On the operational front, we see opportunity to expand our market share on the MIAX Sapphire trading floor as we continue to enhance functionality to support demands from floor participants. We're experiencing strong growth in options products across our exchanges. driven by increased activity in short-term weekly options, the improving IPO pipeline, and structured products and ETFs, all of which we expect to support sustained volume growth across the industry and on our exchanges.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Perhaps most importantly, our collaboration and relationships with our members and industry participants remain strong and continue to be drivers of volume growth. These strategic relationships position us well to capitalize on market opportunities and continue delivering value to our customers as we execute on our strategic vision. I'll turn the call over to Lance to provide details on our fourth quarter financial performance and 2026 guidance.

Lance Emmons
Lance Emmons
CFO at Miami International Holdings

Thanks, Tom. Good afternoon. We had an exceptional fourth quarter and full year 2025 across our business. I will briefly remind you of MIAX's revenue model before I jump into the financial details. We generate revenue from transaction and non-transaction fees. Our key performance drivers for transaction fees include industry trading volumes, market share, and revenue per contract or share, which measures the average revenue we earn per contracts or shares traded. As a reminder, we provide RPC and capture rates on a three month rolling average basis on our investor relations website. In terms of non-transaction fees, we generate revenue from access fees, which we charge customers to connect to our exchanges, from market data, which we earn through direct subscriptions and through our participation in the U.S. tape plans, and from listings fees, primarily in our international segment.

Lance Emmons
Lance Emmons
CFO at Miami International Holdings

Full year 2025, total net revenue was $431 million, representing 56% YoY growth. Adjusted EBITDA more than doubled YoY to $199 million, and Adjusted EBITDA margin was 46%, a significant increase from 30% in the prior year period. This performance demonstrates our ability to scale efficiently while also continuing to invest in our growth initiatives. Q4 total net revenue grew 52% YoY to $125 million, while Adjusted EBITDA more than doubled YoY to $62 million. Q4 Adjusted EBITDA margin was 50%, up 14 percentage points YoY. Adjusted earnings nearly tripled YoY to $57 million in Q4 versus $20 million in the prior year period. Adjusted Q4 operating expenses were $62 million, compared to $53 million in the prior year period.

Lance Emmons
Lance Emmons
CFO at Miami International Holdings

This increase was primarily due to higher compensation and benefits costs, driven by planned expansion of headcount to support our growth initiatives. Also contributing to the increase were higher investments in IT and communications costs due to the build-out of the MIAX Sapphire Exchange and new technology platforms we rolled out for MIAX Futures and BSX. Moving to Q4 segment performance. Our options segment delivered strong results with net revenue of $107 million, up 46% YoY. Market share was 18.2%, up from 15.9% in the prior year period. This, along with elevated options industry volume, led to MIAX's average daily volume of 11.1 million contracts for the fourth quarter, representing a 46% increase YoY.

Lance Emmons
Lance Emmons
CFO at Miami International Holdings

Our equity segment net revenue reached $6 million, up from $2 million in the prior year period, primarily due to higher net transaction fees from improved pricing. Equity's capture was net neutral for the quarter as compared to historically inverted. Our futures segment net revenue was $5 million, compared to $6 million in the prior year period, due to lower listings revenues and decreased transaction fees. The decrease in transaction fees was caused by timing of participant migrations to MIAX Futures Onyx and lower commodity market volatility, partially offset by the elimination of expenses related to CME Globex. In the international segment, net revenue was $6 million, compared to $1 million in the prior year period, with the increase primarily due to the acquisition of TISE in June 2025. Turning to our balance sheet.

Lance Emmons
Lance Emmons
CFO at Miami International Holdings

Our cash balance at year-end was $434 million, and we had less than $2 million in outstanding debt. As of December 31st, 2025, we have classified the assets and liabilities of MIAXdx as held for sale. On to our 2026 guidance. We expect full-year 2026 adjusted operating expenses in a range between $265 million and $275 million, representing a 13%-18% increase over full-year 2025, or a 6%-10% increase from our annualized Q4 2025. This accounts for increased headcount and technology costs to support our new product launches, higher public company expenses, as well as increased company branding and advertising. We expect full-year share-based compensation expense in a range between $27 million and $30 million.

Lance Emmons
Lance Emmons
CFO at Miami International Holdings

The YoY decrease is due to IPO-related accelerations, partially offset by new 2026 grants. We expect full-year CapEx, which includes capitalization of internally developed software, in a range between $40 million and $45 million, and depreciation and amortization in a range between $33 million and $38 million. On our tax rate, we expect to release our deferred tax valuation allowance during 2026, reflecting our ability to realize the benefit of our NOLs. Following that release, we expect our effective tax rate on Adjusted earnings to be in a range between 27% and 29%. In summary, we delivered outstanding financial results in 2025, while making strategic investments in our technology platforms and expanding our product offerings. That, along with our strong balance sheet, positions us well for continued growth in 2026. I will now turn it back over to Tom.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Thanks, Lance. As you can see, we are very excited about our recent progress and look forward to another productive year in 2026. We'll keep doing the things we said we'd do. We'll continue to leverage the strategic pillars you've heard me talk about before. Our technology, our regulatory licenses, broad product range, and relationships with our customers. These are real competitive advantages that will help us drive long-term shareholder value over time. Thank you again for joining us on today's call. We're now ready to begin Q&A. As a reminder, Doug and Shelly are here with Lance and me. Let's begin. Operator?

Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touch-tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Patrick Moley with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Patrick Moley
Patrick Moley
Director and Senior Research Analyst at Piper Sandler

Yes, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. Thomas, maybe just starting off high level, you talked a little bit about in your prepared remarks, but if you could just maybe give an update on your outlook for option volumes this year, and how MIAX is positioned. On the market share side of things, you know, you've reported record market share in the fourth quarter. That's come down a little bit in Q1. Just also wondering if you could talk through some of the dynamics there and how you expect market share to play out throughout the rest of the year. Thanks.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Thanks, Patrick. Really appreciate the question. I think that the market dynamics, as we are in Q1 year 2026, are gonna continue to provide volatility. Issues surrounding the tariff, issues surrounding the midterms coming up, and issues surrounding some of the tension in global politics, particularly the Middle East, I think are going to lead to continued volatility. I also think that the presence of the short-dated expirations, which just came on the market in January, are going to continue to fuel strong growth in our US options marketplace.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

I think, you're not going to see, I believe, the kind of growth we had, almost 30% growth in volumes in 2025, but I think you're going to see continued growth throughout the balance of 2026. Shelly, any comment on that from your perspective, real quickly?

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

Yes, Tom, thank you. Patrick, thank you for the question. I agree that the growth in the industry will continue. The short-dated options in those 9 stocks, we're only a few weeks into that program. It's been successful so far, and there's certainly a chance that could expand going forward. With regards to our market share, October was an outlier in volume.

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

While we were 18.2% for the quarter, if you look at the last three calendar months, November, December, January, it's been very consistent. We look at market share relative to capture. Our fees evolve according to needs within the market, but we're comfortable with the market share as it is.

Patrick Moley
Patrick Moley
Director and Senior Research Analyst at Piper Sandler

Okay, great. Thanks for that. As a follow-up, on the Bloomberg derivative products that you're rolling out in Q2, you said that you were planning to start with, retail-sized contracts and, putting those on a retail platforms. Could you talk about just your conversations with those platforms and maybe how many platforms you plan to launch on initially and how that will scale over time? Thanks.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

I'm going to turn that over to you, Shelly.

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

Thank you, Tom. Another great question, Patrick. I'm not going to talk so much about how many firms. There's a lot of interest in the retail firms in these smaller products. A lot of the growth in the futures markets over the last two years have come from these smaller retail-sized products. We're going to start with what we call our teeny contract size for both the Bloomberg 100 Index and the Bloomberg 500 Index, very focused in the retail market. Working closely with the liquidity providers, as well as the retail firms, to come up with a model that works for the retail. They're very excited about having competition in this space.

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

It's traditionally been a market held by one competitor, and they're looking for competition in price and bringing our technology to that marketplace.

Patrick Moley
Patrick Moley
Director and Senior Research Analyst at Piper Sandler

Okay. Thank you both.

Operator

Thanks, Patrick.

Operator

The next question is from Michael Cyprys with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Michael Cyprys
Michael Cyprys
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Great. Thank you. Good afternoon. Maybe just continuing with the B 100 and the B 500 index options that you're looking to bring to the marketplace here in the coming months. Can you just maybe elaborate a bit on how you're thinking about how you might make this model work for retail? I think maybe one of the challenges, but maybe not a challenge from a volume standpoint, but just one of the, I guess, frictions maybe has been commissions on some of these products on the index side. What's the scope for commission free? How are you thinking about economics between what you might capture versus what the brokers might capture?

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Michael, great question. A centerpiece of our strategy for launching the Bloomberg 100 Index and the Bloomberg 500 Index, particularly the minis or the teenies, is to get retail engagement. If you look at someone like a Robinhood Markets, Inc. or someone like a Webull or a NinjaTrader, they're all about cost of execution. If you can get cost of execution for them down to something similar to what they enjoy in the options marketplace, where essentially their customers trade for free, I think you have a real ability to get quick adoption of a competitor to the S&P franchise. I think we think about doing things that have not had to happen before, whether it's on CME Group or Cboe, because they had basically a monopoly franchise on the S&P.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

What we're gonna try and do is come up with some alternative pricing mechanisms that will allow for these firms, to enjoy extremely low cost of execution, and then also provide opportunities, with respect to, strategies to, engage with the market makers. Maybe 30 seconds for you, Shelly, on that side of it.

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

Yeah, it's about getting retail engagement. As Tom said, retail has gotten used to trading virtually for free in the equities and options space. Without giving away my full pricing strategy, we believe we can work with the retail firms and engage the retail customer. What I believe we'll see is growth across the industry. Just like free trading in options spurred growth from 18 million contracts a day pre-2020 to 60 million contracts plus that in the most recent year. We think the whole pie will grow, and we believe we have a very competitive product, and the fees will be very appealing for the retail firms.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Thank you, Shelly.

Michael Cyprys
Michael Cyprys
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Could you maybe elaborate on what the suite might look like initially versus over time? Would you expect to launch with a zero DTE complex initially or roll into that? What that might look like. Can you talk a little bit about the go-to-market strategy, how you're thinking about building the brand, the awareness, the investor education? What sort of resources are you putting up against that? Thank you.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

That's a great question, Michael. Please, Shelly.

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

Sure. To be clear, we're starting to launch with the futures first. Futures will launch in the second quarter. The options will follow sometime later based on the take-up in the futures. You need a solid futures market for hedging purposes to support those options. Both the futures and the options will have a similar pricing strategy. Once we do list the options, we certainly plan to list short-dated options. Those have been extremely successful in other index products. I believe it's over 60% of the volume in SPX is short-dated options. We certainly are planning to go down that path.

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

You will see a very similar product suite across all products both the Bloomberg 100 and the Bloomberg 500, compared to what's out there today, with one of the key differentiators being all of our products will clear at the Options Clearing Corporation.

Michael Cyprys
Michael Cyprys
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Just on the investor education?

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

In the investor education, we're going to work extremely closely with Bloomberg and also with the retail firms who are known for their great educational, tools that they use, whether it's a NinjaTrader, whether it's a Schwab, or whether it's a Robinhood. We're going to work closely with the retail firms and then also with Bloomberg, who is very much aligned with us in this regard.

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

Yeah, it's a combination of getting investors to understand that you get very similar exposure with these products. What we believe with Bloomberg to be a better constructed product based on the deterministic algorithmic methodology for how stocks are added and deleted from the indexes, without a committee bias. Add that to the fact that, again, we're gonna be very fee friendly, but we're gonna work very closely with the retail firms to provide co-education, and then Bloomberg, of course, is involved.

Michael Cyprys
Michael Cyprys
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Great. Thanks so much.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Thank you, Michael.

Operator

The next question is from Kenneth Worthington with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Kenneth Worthington
Kenneth Worthington
Analyst at J.P. Morgan

Hi, everybody. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to dig more into the Monday and Wednesday options. Maybe what are you seeing in terms of activity initially, and you and your peers sort of launched at the same time. How is market share trending between you and the others? Are you seeing the technology advantage sort of accrue to your benefit in terms of share? Thank you.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Thank you, Ken. Great question. I'll start. Maybe I'll talk to Shelly, who runs this business, and turn to you about some of the volumes. It's early right now, Ken. It only got listed on January 22nd. We think the volumes in these names will come to us, but it's a bit early to tell. I think it really grows the pie overall for the options marketplace. I'm very comfortable that we're gonna get, you know, our normal cut of what we've been seeing in these three symbols. Shelly, do you want to comment on what you're seeing so far?

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

Sure. Thank you for the question, Ken. It's been very successful to date, of course, we've only been through a few weeks of expirations, today being one of them. We've seen very large volume in each of these nine stocks on these Monday and Wednesday expirations, similar to what we've seen on the Fridays historically. We think this is very positive for the industry. It's still too early to say, you know, how big of an impact it'll have on overall volume. I think it is worth pointing out that in these nine stocks, our market share over the last several months leading into this program has been just over 20%, compared to 17.6% recent volume overall market. We do outperform in these classes before the Mondays and Wednesdays were introduced.

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

We're seeing similar market share in those front weeklies. It goes back to the technology the Doug's team has built and the risk protections. We do outperform in those stacks, and we believe that this will help us outperform overall.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Analyst at Raymond James

Okay, great. Maybe as a follow-up, when do we start to see the Tuesday and the Thursdays come online? What do you need to see. I know, I know. It's just, it just launched, and I'm already asking that, right? What a jerk. But, you know, given, you know, once you get all five days, it's a different dynamic. What do you think you need to see in the, you know, Mondays and Wednesdays to start to realistically consider, you know, asking for the Tuesdays and the Thursdays?

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Reasonable question, Ken. There's a couple considerations here. One of the things we're doing is we're trying to avoid earnings days for these stocks, so we're going to be careful not to saturate the calendar too much. I would expect that going forward, expansion of the program would be adding additional stocks to the Monday and Wednesday program long before we add Tuesdays and Thursdays to these nine classes. I think that having Monday, Wednesday, and Friday gives us good coverage across the week. They only are listed out two weeks, so there's a limited focus here. I believe the pilot, or it's not a pilot program, but the program will expand across classes far before it adds additional days.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

If you remember back when Mondays and Wednesdays were added to the ETFs, primarily SPY, QQQ and IWM, they were Monday, Wednesday, Friday for quite a long period of time. I think investor demand would be better answered by expanding the program to additional classes rather than adding the Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Kenneth Worthington
Kenneth Worthington
Analyst at J.P. Morgan

Okay, makes total sense. Thanks for humoring me.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Certainly.

Lance Emmons
Lance Emmons
CFO at Miami International Holdings

Thanks, Ken.

Operator

The next question is from Jeff Schmitt with William Blair. Please go ahead.

Jeff Schmitt
Jeff Schmitt
Analyst at William Blair

Hi, good evening. You had guided to Adjusted operating expense growth of 13%-18% for 2026. What does that assume for top-line growth? I guess, how should we think about the sensitivity of that number to volumes?

Lance Emmons
Lance Emmons
CFO at Miami International Holdings

Hey, Jeff. How are you? Good question. Yeah, we don't.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Yeah, let me answer.

Lance Emmons
Lance Emmons
CFO at Miami International Holdings

Yeah, let's answer it, Jeff. Look, it's very hard to, you know, predict, you know, total top-line revenue, given that, you know, 60% of the revenue is transaction-based, so it's really based on market volumes. I will say there's certainly some sensitivity in those expenses. There is some discretionary investments that, you know, if volumes don't pan out the way we anticipate them to, that we could peel that back. Nevertheless, we do have some planned investments in futures as well as some additional new product launches that's baked into that number.

Jeff Schmitt
Jeff Schmitt
Analyst at William Blair

Okay, thanks. I may have missed it, but do you plan on still plan on launching crypto and event-based products later this year? Where do you stand on those plans?

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

As you know, we announced that we recently entered into a transaction with Susquehanna and Robinhood, whereby we sold our stake in MIAXdx. We now have accelerated access to the prediction markets. As it relates to the crypto markets, we're really focused on expanding our market share in the mature but robust options business, and then executing the strategy that I've laid out for our new futures products. You know, transforming MIAX Futures from a one-product agricultural exchange to a full-service financial futures exchange that not only caters to the institutional firms, but also the retail. If an opportunity comes along that we think makes sense in the crypto area, we'll look at it, but it's not our primary focus right now.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

We have been in discussions with a number of folks, but it's not something I'm focused, right now in 2026.

Jeff Schmitt
Jeff Schmitt
Analyst at William Blair

Okay. Thank you.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Thank you very much, Jeff.

Jeff Schmitt
Jeff Schmitt
Analyst at William Blair

Mm-hmm.

Operator

The next question is from Patrick O'Shaughnessy with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Analyst at Raymond James

Hey, good evening. You had some market makers participate in your secondary offering in December. Is there any evidence that they've shifted their market share at all since selling some of their shares?

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Great question. We see no evidence of that whatsoever. I think that you should look at us as similar to our exchange peers. Our equity rights program that allowed these strategic members to get their position in our company through their warrants and possibly the exercise of those warrants, helped grow the business in the early years. But what's really keeping these market participants trading every day is the technology that Doug built with the low latency, high throughput, extreme determinism, and also the risk protections that Shelly and Doug worked on together.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

To the extent that, a member firm was to sell some of their shares in that secondary offering, we've seen no impact whatsoever in our market share or their use of our four options and equities exchanges.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Analyst at Raymond James

Very helpful. Thank you. I appreciate that you're not giving a quantitative outlook for access fees and market data revenue in 2026, but can you kind of broadly speak to your expectations for how those revenue streams might trend?

Lance Emmons
Lance Emmons
CFO at Miami International Holdings

Access fees and market data, Patrick?

Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Analyst at Raymond James

Correct.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

How they would trend.

Lance Emmons
Lance Emmons
CFO at Miami International Holdings

Yeah, look, I think in terms of access fees, we did put in some fee increases in January of this year. We think that'll add a couple percentage points to some, fee increases.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

We continued to see member adoption, taking additional lines in that, in that nature. We continued growth in that area. In terms of market data, we have launched some new products, particularly in the last, actually in the First Quarter, that we think will continue to grow our market data, not just, again, the share from the tape plans, which is mostly driven by market share of trades loosely, but also from our own proprietary market data offerings. Shelly Brown, you want to talk for 10 seconds just on the new market data offering we introduced?

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

I don't know if I can only talk for 10 seconds.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

I know. I know, I know.

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

Some of the market data offerings are historical data and reports. There's several of the reports out that are high demand. There's some both historical data available and ongoing reports. It's been very good for us. We have several new reports in the pipeline. It's, again, it's high demand data that's very valuable in the industry. We're mining our data and monetizing that.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Yep.

Patrick Moley
Patrick Moley
Director and Senior Research Analyst at Piper Sandler

Terrific. Thank you.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Thank you, Patrick.

Operator

The next question is from Chris Brendler with Rosenblatt Securities. Please go ahead.

Chris Brendler
Chris Brendler
Senior Research Analyst at Rosenblatt Securities

Hi. Thanks. Good evening and great job. I wanted to ask a follow-up, actually, on the fee increases that were proposed last week. Just some of the strategy and the thought process around the different categories here, and whether or not you would have any impact on market share within your larger constituents versus your smaller customers. You know, what's sort of the goal here, and how much elasticity do you think there is with some of these fee changes? Thanks.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Thanks, Chris. Shelly, you want to take that?

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

Sure. The primary fee change that you've seen going into March, we didn't change transaction fees. We had a small transaction fee change in January. The primary change you're seeing for March is we waived non-transaction fees for members on the Sapphire trading floor. Those members that have gone out have memorialized the fact that the waiver period ends the end of this month, this Friday, and fees will start to be charged on March first. That's the primary change for March.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Yeah. Our practice, Chris, has historically been that when we launch a new venue, we have no non-transaction fees for a period of time or much lower, to try and accommodate firms as they connect and volumes grow. That was really just an expiration of what I thought was a quite a generous moratorium on fees that started in September and is going all the way through to.

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

To the end of February.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Yeah, the end of this month.

Chris Brendler
Chris Brendler
Senior Research Analyst at Rosenblatt Securities

That's fantastic, Galla. Thank you. Follow-up question is in a different area, and not sure if this is relevant or not yet, but just thinking about how fast markets are developing and this push towards tokenized equities, does tokenization have any implications for MIAX today and possibly in the future?

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Yeah, great question, Chris. We currently have no plans with respect to tokenization, but we are evaluating potential opportunities from partners. As you know, obviously, we operate several markets across securities and futures products and internationally. When the right opportunity comes by, I think we're well-positioned to take advantage of this. I want to be very clear, it's not our primary focus right now, but, you know, as a market disruptor from the day we launched our first exchange in 2012, you know, I fully support market innovation. For right now, it's not part of our current plan. I also want to see what shakes out in some of the filings that have been made by our competition with respect to some types of tokenized equity securities. Shelly, any last comment in a minute or two?

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

Yeah. Also understand that up to this point, the tokenization is focused on clearing of equities. Equities is a very small piece of our business right now. The majority of our business is options. There hasn't been talk about tokenization and options. Again, the talk of tokenization is primarily focused on post-trade clearing, not of actual trading. I'm not sure the technology is near ready for trading tokenized securities in a on the chain.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Our reliance is on OCC in this regard.

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

Yeah.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

That's kind of our view on tokenization right now, Chris.

Chris Brendler
Chris Brendler
Senior Research Analyst at Rosenblatt Securities

That's fantastic, Galla, and certainly enough growth in the core business. You don't need to worry about it right now. Thanks a lot, guys.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Yep.

Shelly Brown
Shelly Brown
CEO of MIAX Futures and Chief Strategy Officer at Miami International Holdings

Thank you.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Thanks very much. Thanks for the support.

Operator

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Tom Gallagher for closing remarks.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

Thank you very much, Debbie. I just want to thank those of you that listened in today to our presentation. I can't tell you how excited we are to bring to the marketplace our new financial futures products. From day 1, in working with Doug and our team, we never bring a product to market until prime time and everybody's connected. We're really excited about the opportunity to demonstrate our capabilities as we move from options to cash equities into a full suite of financial futures products, and primarily also taking advantage of the risk protections and the pricing strategies that Shelly, Doug, and myself have developed. Really appreciate the support. It's been an exciting 6 months since the IPO.

Thomas Gallagher
Thomas Gallagher
Chairman and CEO at Miami International Holdings

It's hard to believe it's been 6 months, but, stay tuned for an exciting year in 2026 as we bring our futures, products to market. Thank you very much and have a great evening.

Operator

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

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