How much a stock's price changes over time is important for most investors, since price performance can both impact your investment portfolio and help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.

FOMO, or the fear of missing out, also plays a role in investing, particularly with tech giants and popular consumer-facing stocks.

What if you'd invested in Virtu Financial (VIRT) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to VIRT for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?

Virtu Financial's Business In-Depth

With that in mind, let's take a look at Virtu Financial's main business drivers.

Headquartered in New York, NY, Virtu Financial is a market-leading financial services firm that leverages cutting-edge technology to provide execution services and data, analytics and connectivity products to its clients and deliver liquidity to the global markets. It provides a wide array of offerings in execution, liquidity sourcing, analytics and broker-neutral, multi-dealer platforms in workflow technology. The company was founded in 2008.

Its product suite allows clients to trade on several venues in more than 50 countries and in various asset classes, such as global equities, foreign exchange, futures, fixed income and myriad other commodities.

Additionally, Virtu Financial’s integrated, multi-asset analytics platform provides a range of pre- and post-trade services, data products and compliance tools that help clients invest, trade and manage risk across global markets. The company interacts with retail brokers, Registered Investment Advisors, private client networks, sell-side brokers and buyside institutions.

The company runs its business through three segments:

Market Making Segment (contributed to 77.7% of 2025 adjusted net trading income): This segment engages in buying and selling securities and other financial instruments. It consists of market making in the cash, futures and options markets across global equities, options, fixed income, currencies and commodities. Its cutting-edge technology allows it to provide bids in more than 25000 securities and other financial instruments at above 235 venues in 36 countries across the globe. The segment earns revenue from bid-ask spreads and trading volumes.

Execution Services (22.3%): The segment provides agency execution services and trading venues, which is involved in transparent trading in global equities, ETFs and fixed income to institutions, banks and broker dealers. The segment provides proprietary technology and infrastructure, workflow technology and trading analytics services to selected third parties. Revenue comes mainly from commissions, software and workflow services.

Corporate: The segment consists of investments in strategic financial services-oriented opportunities and maintains corporate overhead expenses.

Bottom Line

While anyone can invest, building a lucrative investment portfolio takes research, patience, and a little bit of risk. If you had invested in Virtu Financial ten years ago, you're probably feeling pretty good about your investment today.

A $1000 investment made in August 2016 would be worth $4,026.67, or a gain of 302.67%, as of August 24, 2026, according to our calculations. This return excludes dividends but includes price appreciation.

The S&P 500 rose 251.49% and the price of gold increased 231.37% over the same time frame in comparison.

Looking ahead, analysts are expecting more upside for VIRT.

Virtu Financial is benefiting from an active trading backdrop that continues to support opportunity capture across equities, options and other asset classes. The company is scaling its capital base and reinforcing returns by investing in technology and talent, which has supported higher daily adjusted net trading income through the cycle. Execution Services is gaining relevance, adding further diversification through expanding product penetration across workflow technology, algorithms and capital markets activity. Balance sheet liquidity and disciplined leverage help fund reinvestment. However, earnings remain heavily tied to Market Making. Any normalization in volatility or spread compression could pressure performance. FCF softness tempers the near-term financial flexibility narrative.As such, we have a Neutral recommendation on the stock.

The stock is up 13.71% over the past four weeks, and no earnings estimate has gone lower in the past two months, compared to 4 higher, for fiscal 2026. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.

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Virtu Financial, Inc. (VIRT): Free Stock Analysis Report

This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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