CME Group Inc.

Good day, and welcome to the CME Group second quarter 2020 earnings call. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to John Pescher. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, and thank you all for joining us. I'm going to start with the safe harbor language, and I'm going to turn it over to Terry, Julie, and John for brief remarks, followed by questions. Other members of our management team will also participate in the Q&A. Statements made on this call and in the other Reference documents on our website that are not historical facts are forelooking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance. They involve risk, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Therefore, actual outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expressed or implied in any statements. More detailed information about factors that may affect our performance can be found on our website. Also, on the last page of the earnings release, you will find a reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP measures. With that, I'll turn it over to Terry.

Thanks, John, and thank you all for joining us today. My comments today will be brief so we can spend the majority of our time directly addressing your questions. We released our executive commentary this morning, which provided extensive details on the second quarter. As John mentioned, John, Sean, Derek, and Julie Winkler have joined me today. In Q2, we averaged 17.6 million contracts per day, which is down from 21 million contracts per day a year ago and down from our strong start to the year in Q1. The global exchange traded market has been challenged in many different product areas since the beginning of the pandemic, impacting us and many others in the trading industry. Clearly, the front end of the U.S. rate curve has become impacted, from a trading perspective. Also, with the recovery of the price of oil back to the $40 range, the global crude oil market has stabilized with a fairly flat forward curve, leading to a reduction in the volatility back to more normalized levels as the market balances supply and demand. While in the near term that reduces the need for some participants to manage risk with us and others, the competitive dynamic of trading volumes across different markets has not changed. However, with the global crude oil demand still depressed due to the COVID-19, which we believe is a temporary situation, we expect to see market conditions improve as global oil demand returns. We are very fortunate to have a highly diversified business. We are looking forward to the integration of broker tech coming onto Globex by year-end. We remain committed to achieving capital and operational efficiencies for our clients. Through all of this, I assure you we remain very disciplined as it relates to expenses. What I'd like to do is turn the call over to Julie Winkler to provide some context on our sales outreach, what we are hearing from our customers, and she will touch briefly upon our data business. Then I look forward to answering your questions. Julie? Julie?