CME Group Inc.

Welcome to the CME Group Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. At this time, I would like to inform all participants that your lines have been placed on a listen-only mode until the question and answer session of today's conference. I will now turn the call over to Adam Minick. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and I hope you're all doing well today. Earlier this morning, we released our earnings commentary, which provides extensive details on the second quarter of 2026, which we will be discussing on this call. I'll start with the safe harbor language and then I'll turn it over to Terri. Statements made on this call and in the other reference documents on our website that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance. They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Therefore, actual outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expressed or implied in a statement. Detailed information about factors that may affect our performance can be found in the filings with the SEC, which are on our website. Lastly, in the earnings release, you will see a reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP measures following the financial statements. With that, I'll turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Terry Duffy.

Thank you, Adam, and thank you all for joining us this morning. I'll make a few comments about our strong quarter, and then before I turn it over to Lynne to provide an overview of our financial results. In addition to Lynne, we have other members of our management team present to answer questions after the prepared remarks. The second quarter averaged daily volume of 29.8 million contracts, represented the second highest Q2 in our history, and was within 1% of our record second quarter a year ago, with May and June particularly strong following the tough April comparisons. Open interest ended the quarter up 8% over the past year and up 16% since the beginning of this year. Additionally, we delivered record level of capital efficiencies, saving our customers an average of over $95 billion in margin per day. Recently, this strong business performance has been overshadowed by discussions surrounding perpetual futures. While this product may be dubbed futures, they function more like leveraged spot products. They may appeal to certain retail traders seeking high leverage, but they are not appropriate for the institutional risk managers who comprise the vast majority of our business. Perpetual futures are highly engineered instruments that rely on frequent funding rate adjustments that revert the position back to the spot price. They are known for high leverage and automated liquidations. They offer limited investor protections and introduce heightened market risk, particularly for retail participants. These products do not appeal to our core customers. Through the first half of 2026, 94% of our volume originated from institutional customers. Perpetual futures are in no way substitutes for the institutional hedging tools that these customers rely on. Perpetuals do not provide price or time certainty, two necessary components for hedging exposures. When taking into account both of the transaction fee and the daily funding cost, the total cost to trade perpetual futures is typically orders of magnitude more expensive than our highly efficient futures contracts. We have the full technical and operational capabilities to launch perpetual futures. We have contract specifications and are prepared to bring these products to market should evolving demand or structural shifts make it appropriate to do so. However, we have not heard demand from our customers for these products. Crypto perpetuals are not new and existed before we even launched our crypto futures complex in 2017. We have built that business over the last nine years because our futures fill a market need that was not met by traditional crypto products, including perpetuals. Our crypto futures volume is up over seven-fold in the past three years, despite the existence of crypto perpetuals. We remain deeply committed to ensuring market integrity and we'll never sacrifice core protections in the name of innovation. Instead, we continue to launch innovative products while preserving the safety and soundness of our marketplace. In the second quarter, we successfully introduced 24-7 trading of crypto futures and this weekend we are launching 24-7 trading of our one ounce gold contract. Next week, we'll be launching single stock futures which will simplify directional trading with exceptional capital efficiency. In the fourth quarter, we plan to launch Treasury Link to link our U.S. Treasury futures and cash Treasury liquidity pools. We're also partnering with Silicon Data to launch a pioneering compute futures market later this year. We expect our innovative new offerings to further accelerate our growth as we build on our record-breaking performance in the first half of 2026. Our robust product pipeline and ongoing investments in our technology evolution position us well to drive continued value for both clients and shareholders. With that, I will turn the call over to Lynne to review our financials, and I look forward to your questions.