So, over time, we’re excited about the opportunity. But, right now, the focus of these data products is growing our market share across all our products.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Daniel Fannon with Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Daniel Fannon: Thanks. Good morning. Chris, first, I just wanted to clarify your comments around July. I think you said market share consistent with July comments, which I think you said were consistent with mid-June. Just curious if that’s different than how the end of June ended up. And then as you think about the current environment, maybe it’d be helpful to think about just given how many macro factors have been impacting both market activity as well as client behavior. What is maybe kind of the ideal backdrop for your products, your platforms and protocols to perform?
Chris Concannon: Sure. So to be accurate, my comment around June levels were running consistent with mid-June levels, obviously, we can’t predict the next eight days. And I will remind you that there is a potential Fed rate hike next week, which as you can imagine can impact volatility quite dramatically. And more and more of volumes are moving into the month end close. We’ve seen that trend building over the last couple of years and certainly it’s reflective of the indexation of the fixed income market, so again, mid-June levels is what I mentioned. And then just a macro market, we’re certainly excited about a potential end to rate hikes, because what we’ve seen over the last quarter is really a lack of investment conviction among our clients.
And we heard that directly from our clients as we’ve gone out to talk to all our clients globally. Remember, we had a March banking crisis that left investors with a great deal of caution, particularly around bonds. A sizable portion of the bond market is from the banking sector. So there is quite a great deal of concern around that crisis post the March crisis. And then, now our clients have really turned to watching Fed moves and the continuation of rate hikes. But, as we mentioned earlier, any halt to the Fed rate hikes will leave investors much more attractive towards their potential fixed income investing. So we’re bullish about the market over the coming quarters and years. The other piece of information and we’ve spent the last 6 months going out talking to our clients, as you probably saw in many of their own earnings release releases, they’ve been cutting costs as a result of the revenue challenges that they’ve had as a result of last year.
And those cost cuts come in two important pieces: it comes in technology budgets have been cut and headcounts have been cut. So if you can imagine the environment where rate hikes are halted and there’s a surge in investing in fixed income assets, those clients are going to need to outsource their trading solutions and outsource their tech needs to deal with the workflow challenges that they’re going to have, particularly the reduction of their traders that we’ve seen. So we feel exceptionally well positioned around the current market environment, particularly if you see rate hikes halted and the need by all of our clients for technology solutions and better workflow solutions things like our new trading platform offers very seamless workflow solutions as well as our whole automation suite, which by the way continues to grow quarter-over-quarter across high grade, high yield, EM and Eurobonds.
So we’re quite excited about the position we’ve put ourselves in, given the potential for the inflows that could come into the fixed income environment.
Richard Schiffman: I’m just going to add to that, Chris. Daniel, it’s also worth looking at the refunding calendar and I don’t have the exact number offhand, but I thought I heard something like next year. It’s over $1 trillion of paper that needs to be refunded and that’s going to create a lot of activity in the market, which is definitely favorable for our platform.
