CME is a strong holding due to its S&P Global stake, high margins, low capital intensity, and diversified revenue from hedging activities across various asset classes.
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we own CME, we own ICE, which is Intercontinental Exchange. And then I own as well the OTC markets, which is the the small exchange.
then uh CME is slightly more expensive, but CME also owns kind of this hidden asset. Uh they own a 27% stake in the S&P uh index business uh S&P Global.
So, you essentially own a call option on the S&P 500 um you know, index, which is a pretty good royalty to own. Um I would say it's a royalty and a call option because if if the dynamic that you just talked about, Toby, continues, which is people just continue to plow their money in the S&P 500, um then, you know, that that benefits CME as well.
And that's one of those things where there's not a lot of incremental cost for them and so, it's it's a nice it's a nice business. And these businesses have remained capital light.
They have not had to spend money on AI uh even though I think that they will probably be beneficiaries of AI going forward to some extent, but it's hard to imagine their profit margins getting much higher. These are 60% profit margin businesses.
But the truth is when you snap those three businesses together and particularly the CME, the CME has a lot of exposure in non-equity, um you know, capital markets. So there's oil obviously, um there's metals, there's interest rates.
So all of the things that that move and it's hard for me to imagine that volume uh will not be strong in at least, you know, a couple of those places even if it's not strong in equities, let's say, or if it's not strong in oil or if it's not strong in gold or whatever.
There will be there will be volatility somewhere and there will be people that need to hedge risk um somewhere.
And so the other part of it is of course is that, you know, the CME and the and and ICE, they don't just benefit from people taking risk. They benefit from people hedging risk.
Yeah, I think that's right. And um, you know, I I do think inflation is a beneficiary to this business as well.
What this channel has said about $CME
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