The CBOE exchange logo at their headquarters in Chicago in April, 2024. TMX Group said Wednesday it would pay US$300-million for Cboe's Canadian and Australian assets.Jim Vondruska/Reuters
Canada’s largest stock exchange operator is acquiring one of its major rivals.
TMX Group Ltd. X-T, parent of the Toronto Stock Exchange and the TSX Venture Exchange, said Wednesday it would pay US$300-million for the Canadian and Australian assets of Cboe Global Markets Inc. CBOE-A
The purchase price for both operations is less than the US$350-million that Chicago-based Cboe paid for two acquisitions – MATCHNow in 2020 and the NEO Exchange in 2021 – to establish its Canadian trading business.
The deal would allow TMX to consolidate its already dominant position in Canadian capital markets, raising questions about the state of competition in the sector. While Cboe Canada has lost part of the 16-per-cent domestic market share it held when the NEO deal closed in early 2022, its platforms still handled roughly 12.5 per cent of Canadian equity trading volumes during the first three months of 2026, according to data from the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization.
“This would be a step in the wrong direction,” Som Seif, chief executive officer of Purpose Investments Inc., said in a LinkedIn post about the deal.
Purpose offers multiple exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that trade on both the TSX and Cboe Canada. The arrival of NEO in the mid-2010s, Mr. Seif said, led to more innovation and price competition in the industry.
“Now we risk returning to a monopoly in the very infrastructure that underpins our capital markets,” he said. “Every country that has ceded monopoly control of market infrastructure has paid a price in innovation, cost, and ambition.”
During a Wednesday morning conference call with analysts, TMX CEO John McKenzie said that “we wouldn’t have brought this to the table if we didn’t have very strong confidence that we could see this through to approval.”
In an interview, Mr. McKenzie said TMX had previewed the transaction with Canadian securities regulators and said the deal will now be submitted to the federal Competition Bureau for review. His hope is that the bureau will bless the proposal on the grounds that it will make the country’s capital markets more efficient.
“The proposal here is to take multiple platforms, run them through one ecosystem, preserve all the functionality that the industry needs, but do it at a much lower execution cost for them,” Mr. McKenzie said. “We are going to be able to reduce the connectivity costs for the industry, data centre costs, access fees that are duplicative, data costs, so we see really meaningful savings for the industry that go directly to them.”
TMX was not the only bidder for Cboe’s Canadian and Australian assets, which were first put up for sale in October, 2025, as the U.S. parent has retreated from its global corporate-listings business. Toronto-based alternative trading system (ATS) operator Tradelogiq Markets Inc. also offered to buy Cboe Canada, while the Canadian Securities Exchange, which acquired the National Stock Exchange of Australia last year, was more interested in Cboe Australia.
Tradelogiq CEO Laurence Rose said in an e-mail that the proposed TMX acquisition of Cboe Canada “does represent a concentration of the competitive landscape.” ATS providers such as Tradelogiq compete to be the venue of choice for the buying and selling of securities, but unlike stock exchanges, they do not directly list those securities.
However, Mr. Rose said TMX’s move into Australia, where Cboe is the second-largest player behind the Australian Securities Exchange, “is good for Canadian capital markets.” More global listings on Canadian marketplaces would likely translate to higher trading volumes over all.
Already, 27 Australian companies are listed on the TSX or TSX-V, and Mr. McKenzie said acquiring Cboe Australia will allow TMX to create a “North American-Asia Pacific hub” that will be of particular benefit to companies in the mining and natural-resource industries.
In Canada, Mr. McKenzie said TMX will conduct industry consultations on how best to integrate Cboe Canada’s roughly 270 ETFs, 150 Canadian Depositary Receipts and two dozen operating businesses. One option the company is considering, he said, is establishing separate trading venues for ETFs versus corporate listings.
“Right now they are all commingled,” he said. “We have a lot of clients on the ETF side that prefer to have two marketplaces to execute on, that is their corporate strategy, so there is an opportunity for another Canadian marketplace to step up and be a listing venue for ETFs other than us.”
According to Richard Carleton, CEO of the Canadian Securities Exchange, the ETF trading venue for Canada should be the CSE. Historically, the CSE has been the primary listing venue for hundreds of small public companies but has never listed funds. Mr. Carleton said recent updates to the CSE platform mean that is now possible.
“With the position that Cboe had in the marketplace as the chosen provider of competitive services, there wasn’t a tremendous amount of upside for us at the time,” he said. “But that has obviously changed fundamentally now. We are in a position and ready, willing and able to service that community.”
TMX Group analysts broadly praised the deal on Wednesday. National Bank Financial analyst Jaeme Gloyn and Raymond James analyst Stephen Boland both told clients the transaction was positive for TMX.
“This is a good deal,” Mr. Boland said via e-mail. “Lots of synergies.”