Electronic bond trading platform MarketAxess (NASDAQ: MKTX) beat Wall Street’s revenue expectations in Q3 CY2025, with sales up 1% year on year to $208.8 million. Its non-GAAP profit of $1.84 per share was 8.1% above analysts’ consensus estimates.

Is now the time to buy MarketAxess? Find out by accessing our full research report, it’s free for active Edge members.

Company Overview

Pioneering the shift from phone-based to electronic bond trading since 2000, MarketAxess (NASDAQ: MKTX) operates electronic trading platforms that enable institutional investors and broker-dealers to efficiently trade fixed-income securities like corporate and government bonds.

Revenue Growth

Reviewing a company’s long-term sales performance reveals insights into its quality. Any business can put up a good quarter or two, but the best consistently grow over the long haul. Unfortunately, MarketAxess’s 5.3% annualized revenue growth over the last five years was tepid. This fell short of our benchmark for the financials sector and is a rough starting point for our analysis.

Long-term growth is the most important, but within financials, a half-decade historical view may miss recent interest rate changes and market returns. MarketAxess’s annualized revenue growth of 7% over the last two years is above its five-year trend, but we were still disappointed by the results. Note: Quarters not shown were determined to be outliers, impacted by outsized investment gains/losses that are not indicative of the recurring fundamentals of the business.

This quarter, MarketAxess reported modest year-on-year revenue growth of 1% but beat Wall Street’s estimates by 0.7%.

The 1999 book Gorilla Game predicted Microsoft and Apple would dominate tech before it happened. Its thesis? Identify the platform winners early. Today, enterprise software companies embedding generative AI are becoming the new gorillas. a profitable, fast-growing enterprise software stock that is already riding the automation wave and looking to catch the generative AI next.

Key Takeaways from MarketAxess’s Q3 Results

It was good to see MarketAxess beat analysts’ EPS expectations this quarter on revenue that was slightly ahead of estimates. Overall, this print had some key positives. The stock traded up 2.5% to $169.92 immediately following the results.

Indeed, MarketAxess had a rock-solid quarterly earnings result, but is this stock a good investment here? We think that the latest quarter is only one piece of the longer-term business quality puzzle. Quality, when combined with valuation, can help determine if the stock is a buy. We cover that in our actionable full research report which you can read here, it’s free for active Edge members.