Conferencia de resultados del 3T de 2026 de Virtu Financial (VIRT): el NTI alcanza los 704 millones de dólares

Puntos clave

• Virtu Financial generó en el tercer trimestre de 2026 unos ingresos netos por negociación (NTI) ajustados de 704 millones de dólares, o 11 millones de dólares al día, a pesar de una menor actividad de mercado que en el primer semestre de 2026.
• El EBITDA ajustado fue de 438 millones de dólares, con un margen del 62%, mientras que el BPA ajustado se situó en 1,77 dólares.
• Market Making aportó 9 millones de dólares de NTI ajustado al día, respaldado por oportunidades fuera de la renta variable de Estados Unidos, incluidos los contratos perpetuos sobre acciones offshore, eventos vinculados a las criptomonedas y valores de IA y semiconductores en múltiples mercados.
• Execution Services generó 2 millones de dólares de NTI ajustado al día. La dirección calificó la unidad de estratégica, destacando sus 1.400 clientes blue-chip y unos márgenes que se han más que duplicado frente al nivel de ITG previo a su adquisición.
• El capital invertido alcanzó los 3.400 millones de dólares después de que Virtu captara 500 millones de dólares en deuda en julio. La ratio deuda/EBITDA de los últimos doce meses se situó en 1,4x.
• El NTI ajustado de los últimos doce meses de 11,3 millones de dólares al día, el EBITDA ajustado de 1.800 millones de dólares y el BPA ajustado de 7,69 dólares marcaron récords históricos para la empresa en términos de doce meses acumulados.

Datos financieros clave

Desempeño comercial y operativo

Los volúmenes de mercado y la volatilidad disminuyeron respecto al primer semestre de 2026, pero se mantuvieron por encima de los promedios históricos. Virtu afirmó que sus estrategias de negociación diversificadas ayudaron a compensar el entorno de menor actividad.

Market Making se benefició de la actividad más allá de la renta variable tradicional de Estados Unidos. La dirección destacó los contratos perpetuos sobre acciones offshore, los eventos en el mercado de criptomonedas y la operativa en torno a valores de IA y semiconductores en múltiples países. La compañía prevé que sus resultados estén menos correlacionados que en el pasado con los volúmenes y la volatilidad de la renta variable de Estados Unidos a medida que avance la diversificación.

Execution Services sigue siendo un negocio estratégico, según la dirección. La unidad presta servicio a 1.400 clientes blue-chip a escala mundial, y Virtu afirmó que su tecnología subyacente diferencia sus productos. La dirección declinó hacer comentarios sobre las informaciones en los medios de comunicación acerca de una posible venta.

Virtu desplegó la mayor parte de los 500 millones de dólares captados en julio con relativa rapidez, manteniendo al mismo tiempo colchones internos de negociación, liquidez y regulatorios. La compañía señaló que la financiación adicional redujo su necesidad de recurrir a líneas de liquidez contingente.

La inversión en tecnología continúa en capacidad de cómputo, energía, almacenamiento e infraestructura física. La dirección describió el gasto como un incremento gradual coherente con los planes comunicados previamente, más que como una aceleración imprevista.

Perspectivas de la dirección

Virtu reiteró un objetivo de capital de negociación a corto plazo de aproximadamente más de 4.000 millones de dólares. La dirección subrayó que se trata de una meta a corto plazo y no de un techo permanente, y afirmó que la compañía puede alcanzar su objetivo de capital a medio plazo sin ventas de activos.

La compañía planea continuar aumentando su base de capital de forma orgánica y podría incorporar deuda de manera oportunista a medida que aumenten los ingresos netos por negociación y la rentabilidad.

Se prevé que las contrataciones se mantengan en niveles elevados de cara a 2027, especialmente en trading, investigación y desarrollo. Virtu contaba con algo menos de 1.100 empleados en el momento de la conferencia y esperaba superar ese nivel a corto plazo. La dirección afirmó que las tendencias actuales de gastos y remuneración pueden tomarse como una base razonable para las expectativas a corto plazo.

Riesgos y aspectos a vigilar

• La actividad del mercado se moderó respecto al trimestre anterior, lo que suele reducir el uso de capital y puede repercutir en las oportunidades de negociación.
• La distribución diaria de pérdidas y ganancias de Virtu es más amplia que en el momento de su IPO debido a que el negocio incluye ahora intermediación mayorista para minoristas, negociación de bloques de ETF y otras estrategias. La dirección señaló que las jornadas con pérdidas siguen siendo poco comunes, pero ya no son inexistentes.
• Los nuevos productos presentan diferentes requisitos de liquidación y márgenes de garantía, lo que puede influir en la eficiencia y el uso del capital.
• El gasto en infraestructura vinculada a la IA se produce en un contexto de restricciones en la cadena de suministro y mayores costes, aunque la dirección indicó que los planes de inversión actuales siguen siendo asumibles.
• Virtu todavía tiene necesidades de contratación sin cubrir y aplica un filtro de calidad exigente, lo que genera incertidumbre sobre los plazos para alcanzar los objetivos de contratación.

Puntos destacados de la sesión de preguntas y respuestas con analistas

Resiliencia de Market Making: La dirección atribuyó el desempeño del segmento a una mayor diversificación geográfica y de productos, más que a la dependencia exclusiva de la actividad en la renta variable de Estados Unidos.

Estrategia de Execution Services: Virtu declinó pronunciarse sobre las especulaciones de venta, pero destacó la base global de clientes de la unidad, su tecnología, la mejora de los márgenes y su valor estratégico.

Apetito por el riesgo: La dirección afirmó que el perfil de riesgo de la compañía no ha variado sustancialmente en el último año. El cambio más significativo se produjo entre el período de la IPO de Virtu y la expansión posterior a la adquisición de KCG.

Períodos de tenencia: Virtu indicó que no existe un período de tenencia medio único, ya que las estrategias de negociación difieren de forma sustancial. El rango de los períodos de tenencia no ha experimentado cambios significativos en el último año.

Despliegue de capital: La mayor parte de los fondos de la deuda emitida en julio se desplegó con rapidez, pero la dirección subrayó que se mantienen colchones operativos, de liquidez y regulatorios adecuados.

Gasto en tecnología: Virtu considera que la competencia tecnológica es un rasgo característico histórico de la negociación electrónica. La inversión actual está aumentando con la expansión de la empresa, pero la dirección no prevé un gasto superior a los niveles señalados con anterioridad.

Transcripción completa de la conferencia de resultados

Transcripción completa de la conferencia de resultados

Comentarios de la dirección

Operator

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Virtu Financial Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the conference over to Matthew Sandberg, Head of IR. Matthew, please go ahead.

Matthew Sandberg

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Our third quarter 2026 results were released this morning and are available on our website. With us today on this call, we have Simons, our Chief Executive Officer; Cindy Lee, our Chief Financial Officer; and Joe 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 belief 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.

Aaron Simons

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Volume and volatility in the quarter were somewhat lower than the first half of the year, although they remain elevated relative to historical averages. Despite the moderation in the operating environment, our diversified set of trading strategies allowed us to perform at a high level. We are continuing our plans to grow capital in all forms. At the beginning of the quarter, we raised $500 million in the form of new debt helping to bring our overall trading capital base to $3.4 billion. On the human capital side, hiring is continuing according to plan and turnover remains our focus is on adding to our research and development teams while maintaining a high bar for quality and preserving our open collaborative culture.

Lastly, we are continuing to invest in our physical infrastructure in order to stay at the forefront of technological competition. We have provided additional perspective on the quarter and our detailed financial supplement, and we'll be answering your questions shortly.

First, Cindy Lee, our Chief Financial Officer, will review the financial results for this quarter.

Cindy Lee

Thanks, Aaron. Good morning, everyone. For the third quarter of 2026, we generated adjusted net trading income or NTI of $11 million per day or a total of $704 million. Market Making recorded a fee of $9 million per day, while Execution Services reported an ANTI of $2 million per day. As Aaron mentioned earlier, despite a notable decrease in market activity quarter-over-quarter, volumes and volatilities remain above historical averages. And in both of our operating segments continue to execute and capitalize on their respective opportunities.

Our profitability this quarter was strong. We generated $438 million per day in adjusted EBITDA, representing a 62% margin. Adjusted EPS was $1.77. Over the last 12 months, we have reported the ANT per day of $11.3 million per day, adjusted EBITDA of $1.8 billion and adjusted EPS of $7.69, all of these numbers represent all-time highs for Virtu from a trailing 12 months perspective.

On Slide 5 of our supplemental materials, we provided a summary of our operating expenses. Our third quarter 2026 cash compensation ratio was at 23%, which is consistent with our expectations. Through September 30, our year-to-date cash compensation ratio is 23% and our total compensation ratio is 28%. Again, these are levels that we have stated would be appropriate in the near term.

Turning to capital. After raising $500 million through new debt in July, our invested capital stands at $3.4 billion as of September 30. Our trailing debt-to-EBITDA ratio is 1.4x. So we remain modestly leveraged. We will continue to grow our capital base organically and deploy capital where we see the greatest opportunities, all while maintaining our quarterly dividend at $0.24 per share.

We will now take your questions.

Operator

We will now be entering the question-and-answer portion of the event. [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Patrick Molly with Piper Sandler.

Preguntas y respuestas

Patrick Moley

Yes. So maybe start on marketing. You did about $9 million a day, down only about 4% sequentially, and it came in a quarter where USD volumes are down mid-teens realized vol was down more than 20%. So you clearly outperformed the backdrop. Could you maybe just help us understand what drove that? Any color there would be great.

Joseph Molluso

Patrick, thanks. Sure. So as you noted, U.S. equity volumes were down, but that's not the only place where we're trading, obviously. So there was definitely some heightened activity, other places like there's been a lot of the offshore equity perpetuals that have come online. There have been some interesting events in the crypto space. Obviously, there are episodic things going on with AI and chip stocks in multiple countries around the world, not just U.S. equities, so I think it's, again, just another kind of piece of evidence that we're really diversifying the firm and trying to grow trading, not just concentrated in U.S. equities and especially not just concentrated and wholesaling of U.S. equities. .

And so I think you can expect that going forward, that it's not going to be as correlated with those metrics as it used to be.

Patrick Moley

Sure. Great color. And then just as a follow-up, I also wanted to ask about execution services. There's been some media reports that you could be exploring a sale of that business. I understand that you might be limited in what you can say, but maybe just at a high level, do you feel like the market gives you credit for VS inside of Virtu? And maybe just how do you think about the strategic fit between that and the Market Making business going forward? .

Joseph Molluso

Well, I'll answer the question in the abstract, Patrick. This is Joe because we don't -- when that in response to the new story, we said we don't comment on rumors. And your question, do we get credit for ES inside of Virtu -- the public market may not give us credit for Virtu inside of Virtu. But I'll tell you that Virtu Execution Services is a strategic business for us. It's done exceptionally well. You can see the growth in net trading income on a quarterly basis. This is a business that has 1,400 blue-chip clients truly a global business. And we don't break it out, but if you went back and looked at ITG's margins prior to us buying them, we have more than double those margins. And so we think it's operated in a best-in-class way among its peers.

Clients will tell you that the technology is differentiating the technology that underlies the products that are spread across these 1,400 clients. So we like the business. There's a lot of questions we've gotten around this in terms of capital and incremental capital deployment. And I saw your math when the new story came out. And look, what I'd say in the past, we've articulated a near-term capital goal of around $4 billion plus, we called it. That's not a forever goal. It's a near-term goal.

But as Aaron mentioned, when you look at where we are today, we're well on our way to achieving that goal. We've accumulated, I think, $900 million-ish of trading capital this year, around half of it organically, half of it from supplementing our debt stack. So I think we feel very good about how we've grown the capital base and deployed it. And to get to our long-term goal -- medium-term goal, we don't need to do anything in terms of asset [indiscernible] And all that being said, we're always focused on shareholder value, as you know, Patrick. So that would be sort of how we answer that question.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ei Abboud with Bank of America.

Eli Abboud

When you IPO-ed in 2013, you said at the time that you only had 1 money-losing day in the past 4 years. We're often asked by investors whether Virtu's appetite for risk has changed since the CEO change. So to that end, when you look at the past year, how many months closing days has there been.

Aaron Simons

I'll take that question. So we don't break out in granularity like especially the level of a number of days of any certain level of P&L. But I will say that if you look at when we IPO-ed, the statistical distribution of our P&L was such that a losing day represents an operational error rather than any result of the trading strategies themselves.

But since we've grown a lot since then, the business has changed a lot, beginning with our acquisition of KCG, I would say that materially, the distribution of that P&L changed quite a lot. The retail wholesaling business, the ETF block trading businesses, those are just kind of different animals than the sort of very traditional on-screen market making that we were doing back in those days, which was a long time ago at this point.

So Definitely, the width of the distribution of our P&L has increased meaningfully from our IPO days. But fortunately, we've also increased the mean of the distribution quite a bit, such that bouncing off of 0 is still quite rare, although not 0. And so I think since I took over, I don't think the distribution has really changed meaningfully, like we are open to more trading opportunities than we perhaps were, but qualitatively, there's a bigger difference between our IPO in 2014 and even 2018, '19 than there is between 1.5 years ago and today.

Eli Abboud

Got it. That's very helpful. And then has there been any change in how long you are warehousing? I think in the past, you've described your average holding period is a few seconds. Is that something that has changed?

Aaron Simons

I haven't described it in that way. I don't know exactly where that statement came from. There's not like a 1 number that I could even point to, to be honest. There's very different segments of trading that have very different holding times. But I would say that the set of holding times of our various trading strategies has not changed meaningfully in the last year.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ken Worthington with JPMorgan.

Kenneth Worthington

You raised $500 million of debt at the end of July, did the capital raise make it to the trading desks near instantly or did it migrate at a more measured pace over the quarter? And how would you judge the returns on the incremental capital relative to the market conditions versus the entire book of trading capital.

Joseph Molluso

What I would say to you, Ken, is we -- this is Joe. We don't measure kind of incremental returns because cash is fungible, capital is fungible and it's spread across our various businesses and our various legal entities in our various jurisdictions. So what I will tell you is we maintain buffers, internal buffers, as you would expect from a trading standpoint, a usage standpoint, a regulatory standpoint in those legal entities and trading desks.

And prior to that capital raise, we were seeing opportunity where we were using some of the buffer in a business as usual way. And also from time to time, using some of our contingent liquidity in terms of revolvers, et cetera. And that has largely come to an end. So we always want to operate with belt and suspenders, trading capital belt and suspenders, excess trading capital and the environment at the time allowed us to, I'd say, deploy most of it right away.

But when we say deployed, we mean deploy with adequate buffer. So I think the environment has slowed down a little bit as was noted at the beginning of the call, and that usually causes us to use less capital, all things equal, but all things are never equal, I think Aaron mentioned some of the highlights of kind of new products and these new products have various levels of efficiency around settlement and margin that drives capital usage as well.

I would say net-net, we were able to deploy the capital. We have adequate buffers and we're going to continue to organically grow the capital base. And then as we continue to reset the bar at higher level net trading income and higher levels of profitability. We'll always look to opportunistically supplement the -- our debt capitalization as well.

Kenneth Worthington

Great. And for the follow-up, how would you characterize the investment that the industry is making in new technologies like AI and other? Is it sort of business as usual? Or do you see this as sort of a being in the midst of a technology arms race. And if so, does Virtu have to change the level of investing that it's making from current levels. .

Aaron Simons

I mean, I guess it's tough to answer. I mean, again, trading is a pretty diversified business. And so there are different types of trading with different technological requirements. I mean, on the one hand, we've been in a technological arms race since the founding in 2008. I think it's just much more visible now and the dollar amounts are higher because of the AI spend that people are doing, and there's a bit of a price difference just because of supply chain constraints and other things. So we are continuing to spend a significant fraction of dollars on technology, but that it's not really new, are representing some great acceleration.

We are incrementally investing more as we are growing into our sort of like physical capital base and compute and power and storage and everything else. So I mean, yes, it is an uptick, which we've highlighted before that we were going to do. So I don't think it's anything surprising -- but I think we feel very comfortable where we're at and don't feel a need to do anything beyond what we've sort of telegraphed.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Dan Fannon with Jefferies.

Daniel Fannon

So I was curious about where you think you are in terms of your hiring goals. You talked about investing in the business and people. Is that something that has a time period to it? Or is this something we should be thinking about that's going to be ongoing as we go into next year and beyond? .

Aaron Simons

Well, I guess, I don't know how forward-looking you want to be certainly into the next year. I don't think you're going to see any change. We still have quite a few unmet hiring goals, and we're trying hard to fill them. I mean we don't -- this business changes quite quickly. And so we do have sort of near term and what we would call medium-term goals and medium term for us is probably at most a year. So I don't think I can predict beyond that. I mean we would love to be in a state where we just keep finding new trading strategies, keep making more money, keep hiring more people, but it's hard to really play in beyond sort of the next year at most.

Daniel Fannon

Understood. And then in the context of expenses, as we think about the -- what you mentioned in terms of investing in the business plus the people, any change in philosophy about or how we should think about expense growth sequentially as we think about the end of the year, but also again into next year given what appears to be a more consistent investment period of hiring and other investments. .

Aaron Simons

No, Dan. I mean, I think you could see the numbers, right? Expenses have gone up. We don't think they've gone up any more than we expected them to. On the people front, I think just to underline what Aaron said, we've already increased our hiring meaningfully. We're at the end of the -- as we speak here, we're just below 1,100 people, and we expect to be over 1,100 in the near term. So hiring has stepped up, and it's been driven in sort of the high-value areas in terms of trading and development. And you could see the comp ratio sort of as Cindy mentioned, is where we've guided it to. So I think you can look at the trends and extrapolate pretty accurately.

Operator

[Operator Instructions]

There are no further questions at this time. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.