NYSE President Lynn Martin: January 2026 will be a busy IPO quarter, ETFs are the greatest financial innovation of our lifetimes

no idea what Hog does.

Good to see you.

Great to see you.

Good to see you.

I have your green situation. A green sandwich. But it is I mean yesterday uh we were greeted by a number of folks into your team. Everyone was dressed to the nines when festive and fantastic. It was the tree lighting right.

So this is every year. Walk us through exactly what happened. There were mascots. There's celebrities. Everything

they were singing.

Oh seen the tree outside. It's CFOs, celebrities, mascots, charitable organizations. Um

all celebrating the holiday season. We had about 10,000 people.

10,000 we heard. No, it was crazy because we walked in. We walked in yesterday. It felt like there was an IPO going. It

felt like an IPO.

It feel like Sienna was IPOing and then and then today uh we were like, "Oh, okay." Actually, this is a huge event.

You know, Hankeria actually made a joke that he was IPOing yesterday celebrities. He did a spot.

But I mean, it's a great opportunity for our list of companies to get some visibility, particularly the consumer focused brands. There were about 30 different tents outlining Wall Street. celebrates the downtown community. It's a great opportunity to generate business and give it give a bit back.

What other big events like treelighting that are kind of off of like like things that you can count on happening every year? What's on the calendar regularly at the New York Stock Exchange?

You know, we do a lot around the

is it like Fourth of July?

We do a lot Fourth of July, Memorial Day, like those types of holidays to celebrate Veterans Day, to celebrate our military. anytime there's something to celebrate our military and people who have served this great country. It's all about giving back and highlighting

what makes this country great. Obviously, one of the things that makes this company, this country great is our phenomenal uh capital markets.

Yes. Yes.

Um and it's really a unique differentiator.

There you go. Love that. But then also like our military, the people who selflessly protect us every single day. And then the not for-profit, the charitable organizations who so many of our listed companies support. As part of the treelighting, we

we highlight um the charitable organizations that our listed companies support. And this year we have 400 of our listed companies

that have contributed to that program. So all throughout the season, we like to to highlight that people who have done good things but also are paying it forward.

Yeah. And and we we heard that uh in in 10 years there has never been an IPO that landed exactly on the tree lighting. uh that some of some of is close some of

have come what's the latest what's the latest in December that that uh that that you remember an an actual like IPO happening

the week before Christmas I think I think New Bank

yeah New Bank in 2021 was a pretty late IPO I don't remember if it was

uh the 19th or the 20th of December that's That's basically a ton of that.

Well, that's that's that's basically the last day that I think the e-commerce brands can like you can place an order and still get the product. That's kind of like the last day of business basically.

Exactly. The rush, right? Right.

Yeah. When when is the holiday season? When is the stock exchange dark? How much time?

You know, we're not really ever dark. Um, if I look at the calendar for the next couple of weeks, for example, we have a ton of ETFs going out, which is actually not

received as much coverage as the IPOs of operating companies.

What is that? What does the pro what does that process look like from from even like road show stage all the way to like uh listing?

I mean, that one's a little bit different because you can just launch the ETF and then accumulate aum.

I know, but is there any like I mean, but I'm assuming like building. Well, I'm assuming you're trying to build like attention going into

uh going into the process.

A lot of times you're also spending the time looking at the index you're benchmarking against and back testing the results and then going out to the people who are going to contribute the AUM and show them the performance of the ETF and how it would have performed under stress periods and

um different macroeconomic events. What what trends are you seeing in some of these net new ETFs?

Uh you know crypto ETFs have been a big uh a big unlock for that industry. Uh you're seeing just a continuation of various types of ETFs. Equities fixed income.

Oh interesting.

As well fixed income. It's also been a big unlock. ETFs have been probably one of the greatest financial innovations of our lifetimes. where it allows someone to invest in an incredibly liquid vehicle

that has incredibly illquid constituent basket. So I think of like the fixed income markets which where I came from like the MUN ETFs

they've been able to accumulate a good amount of assets. crypto. It's been another

some folks have been on our show talking about the future of uh you know putting graphics cards in an ETF or getting AI compute or data centers and giving folks more access to that. I know uh some of the private credit funds we had John Zto on the show yesterday uh from Apollo, but some of the other funds have like taken different funds and IPOed them separately so that they get more direct access. Uh and I I would expect to see more of that, but I don't know. I mean, there's been a fair amount of folks who have talked about private private instruments and putting them in in an ETF rapper. I know Vlad's talked about that from Robin quite a bit

that he's looking at at that as an opportunity.

Yeah. I mean, there's been insatiable demand for uh for private company stock all in Silicon Valley, but it's usually done through angel investing. uh never really through uh an ETF, but it seems

structure and how you disclose information and whatnot. Make sure that you're the basket of assets

and how and do you actually have a voting share in the ass in the underlying basket? There's a lot more logistics to work out in that. But in general, ETFs are going to add a layer of transparency that a lot of these illlquid assets don't have because they're marked to market every day. they have NAV. At the end of the day, the fund the fund has.

There's been some other experiments with trying to bring private shares uh into the public markets that aren't uh that that end up trading like, you know, three four times NAV and then they end up being like the underlying assets can be high quality, but if you're buying them at 4x or something like that, the actual like valuation, it's like you're just lighting money on fire. 2026, uh, everybody everybody's super excited. We just talked to Keith. He's going to be a big year. It's going to be a big year. You know, the year was going really, really well and then you had various events such as Liberation Day in the beginning of the year that sort of shut the window, the IPO window, but obviously it reopened. So, how we met you guys, here we are. Um, and then the government shutdown,

temporarily closed the market as well. So, a variety of our deals have now pushed into January. But January, it's gonna be a busy January. We have really busy Q1

and now it feels like momentum because that narrative is out there and these deals are going to go early in the new year. Momentum's truly building for for the rest of 2026. But you got to remember you got midterms at the end of 26.

Oh yes.

How how have midterms historically impacted uh just like whether or not I it's kind of uh the the windows open or closed? probably for a couple weeks before the window will be shut for a bit of time because people are gonna they're going to be

they're not going to want to go when there's potential volatility in the market. And anytime you have

a large group of elections or a monumental election like the election for a president,

Yeah.

you're not going to want to go just before because you just don't know what's going to happen around that election period.

Yep. That makes a ton of sense.

Well, we just want to say thank you for welcome.

I am so psyched to have you here. I mean, look at this. It's still being here. It's still surreal. Uh and thank you for letting us this be our home uh on the East Coast. It's no better. Literally could not have picked a better place.

Your interview yesterday with Kramer, it

was so much fun. Oh my gosh.

We came off pulling a jack off the he tweeted in the morning. He was like, "Uh, it could be fun. It could be wild.

Could be wild. We didn't know." We got all the all the all the above. But just we talked about the market, but we also just talked about interviewing building relationship with CEOs over decades. And uh it just laid a ground the groundwork. I remember we watched his interview with Tim Cook 15 years ago, a decade ago, and watch how he how he built that relationship. Uh really remarkable work. And a lot of it happened in this building. A lot of it happened right down there.

Right down there. Well, we're we're looking forward to eventually joining joining him on on his show. And uh we I just hope we can bring the same level of energy that he has.

You can bring your gong and your panel alongside his panel. I can't wait to see who's louder on that day.

Yeah, we got to hit the gong for the part for the partnership. Gong hit for the partnership. I will hold this. This is% the official gong hitting.

There we go. That's a good We're going to leave. We're going to leave these here for you. So if you're ever you need a boost of energy coffee.

Thank you so much.

We appreciate you.

We will be back soon.

The team behind the AI software engineer Devon. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And I'm also going to tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. state-of-the-art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal integrations. Um, what else is in the timeline? We of course have Emily Sunberg from Feed Me, uh, joining in just a second. We're very excited to have her on the show. Uh, but is there anything else in the timeline that we should run through before we bring in Emily from Feed Me?

Uh, Chrome Hearts.

Chrome Hearts

acquired acquired uh acquired one of my favorite hotels. Wait, the Surf Surf Rider.

Oh, they did.

I think it was the family, the Starks, the the owners. We've been there. Dylan Dylan will stay there sometimes when he's in LA.

Uh they acquired uh yeah, one of my favorite hotels. I used to stay there a lot and then I moved like right near it. And so now I don't have any reason to uh to stay there, unfortunately. But uh interesting pickup. It's an iconic hotel. They paid more than 1.8 million per room uh which puts it among Southern California's priciest hotel deals in years. Uh it's just 20 rooms. Uh and so uh yeah, I don't I don't uh I I was It had been owned by I know the guy who created the hotel.

It was basically an impossible task to like redevelop this like basically uh it was an old motel that was kind of crumbling. He redeveloped it, made it beautiful. Uh many people said it couldn't be done just because of the coastal commission and just how hard it is to like uh do any type of like development work in Malibu. He did it, sold it to private equity. I think this is it. trading hands again. Uh, but I'm excited to see what they do with it. They've been um they have they've just been in Malibu for so long and and have a great presence there. So,

it's a beautiful hotel. I love it.

Um,

and it's fun that it's Chrome Hearts now.

Uh, before we move on, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media app platform for developers develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and ondemand clusters.

Uh, shout out to Jim O'anosy.

This is hilarious.

He says, "When I say I love Bach, I really mean it." He listened to 64,000 minutes of Bach last year, which puts him in the 0.001% of global fan.

He's just on repeat. Repeat. It's like no Mozart. I don't even drift away. I'm loyal. I'm riding with Boach 24/7. How many minutes are in a year? Can you actually look that up?

60 * 24 * 365 * 24 * 365. He was listening. Okay. Okay. So, there's 525,000 minutes in a year, I think, if I got that right. Um, and so he was listening for 60,000 minutes.

60,000 minutes. So, more than 10% of his time.

So, that's that's more than 2 hours every day. This guy's listening to just Bach.

He's an absolute dog.

This is the craziest thing. What happened? I mean, I feel I didn't even I think I was like top 2% fan on my most played artist or something like that. I got value top 1%. He's the 01%. This is hilarious. Okay. Yeah, we're good. Let's