Virtu Financial (VIRT) 2026年第三季度业绩电话会：NTI达7.04亿美元

核心要点

• 尽管市场活跃度低于2026年上半年，Virtu Financial在2026年第三季度仍实现调整后净交易收入（NTI）7.04亿美元，即每日1100万美元。
• 调整后EBITDA为4.38亿美元，利润率达62%；调整后每股收益（EPS）达1.77美元。
• 做市业务贡献了每日900万美元的调整后净交易收入，这得益于美股以外的交易机会，包括离岸股票永续合约、加密货币相关事件，以及跨多个市场的AI与半导体股票。
• 执行服务业务贡献了每日200万美元的调整后净交易收入。管理层称该业务具有战略意义，并提到其拥有1400家蓝筹客户，且利润率较收购前的ITG水平增长了一倍以上。
• 投资资本达到34亿美元，此前Virtu于7月筹集了5亿美元债务。过去12个月债务/EBITDA倍数为1.4倍。
• 过去12个月调整后净交易收入达每日1130万美元，调整后EBITDA达18亿美元，调整后每股收益达7.69美元，按过去12个月维度计算均创公司历史新高。

关键财务数据

业务与运营表现

市场交易量与波动率较2026年上半年有所回落，但仍高于历史平均水平。Virtu表示，其多元化交易策略有助于对冲交投活跃度下降的影响。

做市业务受益于传统美股以外的交投活动。管理层重点提及了离岸股票永续合约、加密货币市场行情，以及多个国家围绕AI和半导体股票的交易。公司预计，随着多元化布局的持续推进，其业绩与美股交易量及波动率的相关性将较以往进一步降低。

管理层表示，执行服务仍是一项战略性业务。该部门服务于全球1400家蓝筹客户，Virtu称其底层技术使产品具备差异化优势。管理层拒绝就媒体关于潜在出售的报道置评。

Virtu相对迅速地配置了7月募集的5亿美元中的大部分资金，同时保留了内部交易、流动性及监管缓冲。公司表示，追加资金减少了其动用应急流动性工具的需求。

技术投资在算力、电力、存储和物理基础设施方面持续推进。管理层将相关支出描述为符合此前公布计划的渐进式增加，而非意外加速扩张。

管理层展望

Virtu重申了约40亿美元以上的近期交易资本目标。管理层强调，这是近期目标而非固定上限，并表示公司无需通过资产出售即可实现中期资本目标。

公司计划继续以有机方式扩大资本基础，并可能随着净交易收入和盈利能力的提升，择机增加债务融资。

预计招聘活动至2027年仍将维持在较高水平，特别是在交易和研发领域。在电话会议召开时，Virtu的员工人数略低于1100人，预计短期内将突破该水平。管理层表示，当前的支出和薪酬趋势可作为近期预期的合理基准。

风险与关注点

• 市场活跃度环比降温，这通常会降低资金使用率，并可能对交易机会产生影响。
• 由于当前业务涵盖了零售批发做市、ETF大宗交易等多元策略，Virtu的单日盈亏分布范围相较IPO时期更为宽泛。管理层表示，亏损交易日依然罕见，但已不再是绝对为零。
• 新产品具有不同的结算和保证金要求，这可能会影响资本效率和资金使用。
• AI相关基础设施支出正面临供应链限制和成本上升的挑战，不过管理层表示目前的投资计划依然处于可控范围内。
• Virtu仍有未完成的招聘需求且维持较高的选拔门槛，这使得达成招聘目标的时间节点存在不确定性。

分析师问答亮点

做市业务韧性：管理层将该板块的业绩表现归功于更广泛的地域与产品多元化布局，而非仅仅依赖美股交易活动。

执行服务业务战略：Virtu拒绝就出售传闻置评，但强调了该业务的全球客户基础、技术实力、利润率提升及其战略价值。

风险偏好：管理层表示，过去一年中公司的风险偏好特征未发生实质性变化。更显著的转变发生在Virtu从IPO时期到收购KCG之后的扩张阶段。

持仓周期：Virtu表示，由于交易策略差异巨大，不存在单一的平均持仓周期。过去一年中，持仓周期的整体区间并未发生明显变化。

资金配置：7月债务融资所得的大部分款项已迅速投入使用，但管理层强调，公司仍保留了充足的运营、流动性及监管缓冲资金。

技术支出：Virtu将技术竞争视为电子交易领域的长期特征。当前的投资正伴随公司扩张而增加，但管理层预计支出不会超出此前提示的水平。

业绩电话会议完整实录

完整财报电话会议逐字稿

管理层陈述

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.

分析师问答

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.