$24.00
$82.70
bear $24.00
base $57.20
bull $82.70
margin of safety $28.00
market price* $113.49
Tradeweb operates electronic marketplaces where large institutions, wholesale dealers and corporate clients trade bonds, derivatives and money-market products. It earns transaction fees and commissions on trading volume, plus fixed subscription fees and a market-data license fee from LSEG. In 2025 revenue was $2.05 billion, up 18.9%, and about 16% of it came from fixed subscription and market-data fees; the rest moves with trading volumes and pricing. The business needs little capital: equipment and capitalized software cost about 5% of revenue. How we measured earnings. We start from operating cash flow, remove the swings from working capital, and deduct stock compensation and the portion of capital spending needed to maintain the business, with the rest treated as growth spending. On that basis earnings per share (counting all classes of shares and exchangeable units, about 238 million) were $1.08 in 2019, $1.66 in 2020, $2.00 in 2021, $2.21 in 2022, $2.80 in 2023, $3.13 in 2024 and $3.75 in 2025. We use $3.13, the median of 2023 to 2025, as the starting level, which covers the business after the 2024 acquisitions (including ICD, August 2024) and sits below the 2025 figure. Three items need explanation. First, in 2025 Tradeweb booked $263 million of other income, almost all of it gains on its Canton Coin holdings ($270.9 million), which is not cash earnings, and we give those holdings no value because their price is highly volatile. Second, Tradeweb owes former owners a share of certain tax savings under a tax receivable agreement, with a $336.5 million liability and payments scheduled over the next several years and beyond. Those payments are not in operating cash flow, so we deduct their present value, about $1.05 per share, from every case. Third, Tradeweb pays roughly $50 million a year of payroll taxes on employee share awards outside operating cash flow; we did not deduct it. Base case, $57.2 per share. Owner earnings per share grew 19.8% in 2025; we start the base case at 8% in year 1, well below that pace, and taper the growth by about one point a year to zero by year 9. Year 10 earnings are about $4.44 per share, and we assume that level then holds through year 30 and stops there. The growth we credit rests on a record: revenue has risen every year since 2019, from $776 million to $2.05 billion, including through the 2022 rate shock, funded from the company's own cash flow; clients moving to pricing plans with minimum fees or subscriptions lifted subscription fees by $38.4 million in 2025; and first-half 2026 revenue is up 15.1%. We leave out share gains, new products, digital-asset activity and further acquisitions, because none of these is secured. The level holds afterward because the platform is a long-established dealer and client network and we can point to nothing that ends it. Bear case, $24.0 per share. About 84% of revenue depends on trading volumes and fees per trade, so we assume earnings fall back to $2.40 per share (between the 2022 and 2023 results), do not grow for ten years, and then decline steadily to zero over the following fifteen years, since we cannot name a driver that sustains the business longer. Second-quarter 2026 revenue growth slowed to 9.0% from about 21% in the first quarter, which is one reason volume-driven earnings are not guaranteed. Bull case, $82.7 per share. The business's own levers execute well: earnings grow 12% in year 1 (still below the trailing 19.8% and the 17.6% annual revenue growth since 2019), taper by one point a year to 1% in year 12, and then hold flat through year 35. What could make this wrong. Growth rests on trading volumes and clients staying on the platform; a lasting drop in bond and derivatives volumes, or fee cuts under competition, would push results toward the bear case. Tax receivable payments will also grow if more exchangeable units are converted into shares, which would lower these values slightly. Margin-of-safety price, $28. This is about 17% above our bear value and roughly half of our base value; it is set to allow for a volume-driven earnings slump, and from that price the base case implies about 20% a year.