BGC Partners, Inc.

Thank you for your patience. The BGC Partners Inc third quarter 2022 earnings conference call will begin shortly. © transcript Emily Beynon Thank you. Welcome to the BGC Partners Inc. Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker for today, Jason Krasikas, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you and please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Today we issued BGC's third quarter 2022 financial results press release and the presentation summarizing these results prior to the market open. You can find these at ir.bgcpartners.com. Please note you can find additional details on our quarterly results in today's press release and investor presentation. Unless otherwise stated, the results provided on today's call compare only the third quarter of 2022 with the prior year period and compare revenue excluding insurance due to its sale on November 1st, 2021. We'll be referring to our results on this call only on an adjusted earnings basis, unless otherwise stated. We may also refer to adjusted EBITDA. We may refer to our liquidity, which we define as cash and cash equivalents, plus marketable securities that have not been financed, reverse repurchase agreements, and securities owned, less securities loans, and repurchase agreements. We define total capital as redeemable partnership interest, total stockholders' equity, and non-controlling interest in subsidiaries. BGC generates a significant amount of its revenue in non-US dollar-denominated currencies, particularly in the euro and pound sterling, BGC presents revenue comparisons on a constant currency basis in order to present a better comparison of the company's revenues during the period, which exhibited volatile foreign exchange movements. BGC's constant currency movements assume foreign exchange rates used to determine the company's prior period revenues apply to the current period revenues. Please see today's press release for results under generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. Please also see the relevant sections of the back of today's press release for complete and updated definitions of any non-GAAP terms, reconciliations of these items to the corresponding GAAP results, and how, when, and why management uses such terms. Additional information with respect to our GAAP and non-GAAP results mentioned on today's call is available on our website at ir.bgcpartners.com and in our investor presentation. We refer to the company's technology-driven businesses as Fenix. Fenix offerings include Fenix Markets and Fenix Growth Platforms. I also remind you that information regarding our business on today's call that are not historical are forward-looking statements. These include statements about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the company's business results, financial position, liquidity, and outlook, and any forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Except as required by law, BGC undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, any outlook and targets, discussments, calls, and no material acquisitions, buybacks, extraordinary transactions, or meaningful changes to the company's stock price. For discussion of additional risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results from those contained in the forward-looking statements, see BGC's SEC filings, including but not limited to the risk factors, and special note on forward-looking information set forth in these filings and any updates to such risk factors, and special note on forward-looking information contained in the subsequent reports on Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, or Form 8-K. With that, I'm now happy to turn the call over to Howard Luttnick, Chairman of the Board and CEO of BGC Partners.

Thank you, Jason. Good morning, and thank you for joining us for our third quarter 2022 conference call. With me today are BGC's Chief Operating Officer, Sean Windyett, and our Chief Financial Officer, Jason Hough. Our pre-tax adjusted earnings margin expanded by over 300 basis points. This represents the eighth consecutive quarter of adjusted earnings margin improvement driven by our high margin electronic FedEx business, which now represents over a quarter of our total revenue. For more than 14 years, BGC and the entire financial service industry's trading volumes have been constrained by ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing. For example, in the U.S. credit markets, issuance is up over two and a half times and trading volumes are half of what they were in 2008. Over the same period, U.S. Treasury issuance is up five times and trading volumes are flat to 2008. And you can see this on page five of our investor presentation, which you can get to at ir.bgcpartners.com. Throughout this period, we've worked to automate our business and improve our margins. We expect the return of interest rates to restore trading volumes to their historical correlation with issuance over time. This dramatic increase in trading volumes will drive our revenue growth for the foreseeable future Coupled with our improved margins, we expect BGC to produce record levels of profitability. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Jason.