The business is growing. Others don’t have the technology they don’t have the scale and we are seeing that opportunity and we’re going to continue to take advantage of those. And those would be comparatively small — generally comparatively small but you never know. And those opportunities are in front of us and if we can buy things at the right price and drive them through our ecosystem we’re going to do that. We have the technology. We have the scale. We have Fenics. We have Lucera. We have a lot of tools to make money. And as I said, the market is growing — our market share is growing compared to everybody else. We feel really good about where we are. We feel really excited about the validation that is clear from our from our partners joining us in FMX that is the defining characterization of the transaction is that these partners appreciate our technology they appreciate its capacity they know it could compete in the world, they are certain of it, they’ve seen it in U.S. Treasuries.
This is not something to think about in the future, right? This technology just took two points market share this quarter past. And I hope we don’t sound like we’re backing away from our view of our growth on this call. We continue to feel good. And those growth of one or two points sequentially per quarter were before we had partners. And so I think those partners will enhance the speed of our growth. And we are really excited about our opportunities both to invest our capital. We’re going to continue to buy back shares. An expectation of raising our dividend should be something. It’s going to be constrained because we like buying our shares back. But we felt — we had said it was one of the tools to use to return capital to shareholders $20 million for a company that just said we’re going to earn $125 million in the quarter coming and midpoint of our guidance.
It’s pretty constrained.
Patrick Moley: Great. And then just you’re talking about seeing success in some of these Fenics businesses. I think in the past you had said that you could potentially be open to maybe looking to sell some of the easily separable businesses within Fenics and giving that capital back to shareholders. Can you talk about — or any update there on your thoughts around potential sale of any of those assets and what you would use with the proceeds?
Howard Lutnick : Yes. Look, we are open-minded as a public company that trades oddly, with our growth rate of top line revenue of 10% growth and now bottom line profits of 18%. We remain surprised being part of the S&P 600 that we’re so — we traded at such a very attractive price as compared to the index at large, which trades at about 15 times earnings. So we have lots of assets. And I wouldn’t say they’re for sale, that would be wrong. I would say that the exchanges of the world know who we are. And sometimes they really like some of our products. And if they come and talk to us and multiples are like we’ve said in the past, 12 times revenues, kind of things like that. We’re open-minded. And so I wouldn’t put your money on for certain, this is what we are doing.
In the past when I was — when I said, for certain, this is what I’m doing. We’ve said it, and then we’ve done it, right? We said we were going to sell insurance. We said we would announce our partners in FMX and the way we did things like that. I mean, so nothing is for sale, okay, because it’s growing rapidly within our business. However, if the exchanges want to buy something from us and pay us a healthy price, and we can then go out and buy our own shares back at a very attractive spread for our shareholders, I think that we are absolutely open-minded. So, not for sale, though, but open-minded for sure.
Patrick Moley : Okay. Great. And then just last question. Wanted to just know, what do you expect the run rate for stock-based comp to be going forward? I think in the first quarter, it was annualizing out to about 8% dilution. So is that a run rate we should expect? Or would you expect that to kind of come down overtime? And how much noise, if at all, is still in that number from the corporate conversion?
Sean Windeatt : Patrick, I’d expect that — first, I expect it to come down. Q1 is the quarter that we pay bonuses, a significant amount of hires that we’re in that period. So I would expect it to come down from the level that it was in Q1. The exact number, probably a couple of points from there would be my view. But yes, certainly, Q1 is when we pay bonuses.
Patrick Moley: Okay. So like 5% is a good run rate going forward?
Howard Lutnick : Yes. Pretty close to that’s fine.
Patrick Moley: Okay. Great. All right, guys. Thanks so much. That’s it for me.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] There are no further questions. I would like to turn the floor over to Mr. Lutnick for closing remarks.
Howard Lutnick : Well, thank you very much for joining us. We are excited about our future. We’re excited about FMX and building — finally opening our Futures Exchange in September. The market, we’re excited that we will be able to present, and you’ll see the margin growth from Fenics across the business. BGC just feels really good, and we look forward to speaking to you next quarter as we update you on our success. Thank you, everybody.
Operator: This concludes today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and thank you for your participation.
