James Marischen: Most of the increase we saw on the sequential basis was driven by equities activity and mutual fund trails, those are built up nicely. I think you saw people engaging in the market as we saw some pretty attractive returns in the market, and I think that spurred a lot of client behavior.
Ronald Kruszewski: Yes. I mean I – look, it’s correlated to market levels and both trails and activity. So that’s good markets generally will result in that line item transactional improving, and this was no different.
Christopher Allen: Thanks guys.
Operator: We will take our next question from Bill Katz with TD Cowen.
William Katz: Hi. Thanks for squeezing the follow-up. So Ron, you have me to a [indiscernible] around my calculate here a little bit on your revenue number that you laid out, and I appreciate that’s rather aspirational. So just a couple of questions underneath that all into related. What kind of timeframe? Does the model compound a little more quickly today just given the commentary just about having a stronger platform versus the last couple of years, number one. And then underneath that, relatedly, what kind of aspirational margin target should we be applying against that sort of thing through the earnings power of the company?
Ronald Kruszewski: Yes. Look, I appreciate the question, Bill, and I hope you’ll appreciate that I’m not really going to answer it. But the – I mean, that’s forward looking – first of all, I don’t know how aspirational I’m going to say that, that is. I’ve had these aspirational comments back when we had $200 million of revenue that went to $400 million in 2009, we were at $900 million. I said we doubled the firm and we got to $1.8 billion. And then I said it we doubled the firm and people said, “Oh my gosh, by win?” and we’d say, “Well, we wouldn’t” and we’ve done that, and we’ve continued to do that because our ability to gain market share across all of our businesses is still a lot of open runway. And so when I look at our historical growth rate, to put not an aspirational goal, but a milestone in the ground, which, in this case, is $10 billion of revenue and $1 trillion of assets.
They are correlated as to – if you take that calculator, you’re talking about and go back and look at our wealth management, our assets under management and our institutional business and you plot those, you’ll see that $10 billion and $1 trillion are correlated. So I just want to underscore the fact that we believe that we’re a growth company and we have been a growth company, and we’re not we’re not at the end of this journey. So I’m confident that at $10 billion and $1 trillion of assets are in proper capital management, our margins will be higher just from scale. Our returns will be higher. And our shareholders will be happy. Much more than that, I’m really not going to get into.
William Katz: That gave a shot. Thank you very much. Appreciate the commentary.
Ronald Kruszewski: Look, I appreciate it, okay. Send me your calculator. I’ll look at it.
Operator: We will take our next question from Steven Chubak with Wolfe Research.
Ronald Kruszewski: Hey, Steven.
Michael Anagnostakis: Hey, guys. It’s Michael again. Just one more question here on capital. It was nice to see improved repurchase activity during the quarter. Is this like $150 million to $160 million zone more reasonable in the near term? Your capital ratios are still very healthy free cash flow gens still quite strong. But at the same time, you guys are planning to grow the balance sheet a decent amount more this year. So I just wanted to understand whether or not we should expect it to return maybe to the 2023 run rate? Thank you.
James Marischen: So obviously, the buyback activity is all price dependent. And we’ve obviously talked about allocating more capital to balance sheet growth. So you may see that slow some in the near term. That very one would be the case. We do have a senior debt offering that comes due in July. At this point, we may fully just pay that off. So some of that may play into this as well. But I think as we look at the back half of the year, I would anticipate that, that buyback activity probably returns to those more normalized levels.
Michael Anagnostakis: Great. Thanks for taking the follow-up.
Operator: We currently do not have any questions. [Operator Instructions] We do not have any questions in the queue. I would like to turn the call back over to our speaker today for closing remarks.
Ronald Kruszewski: Well, I would, again, as always, thank everyone for taking the time to look at our first quarter results. I’m optimistic about the markets in general and look forward to reporting our second quarter results this summer. So with that, everyone, have a great day. Thank you very much.
Operator: This concludes today’s call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
