MIAX put up 35% revenue growth and a 55% EBITDA margin last quarter. Read the analyst models and you'll find something strange sitting right next to that: a forecast for revenue to fall roughly 25% a year over the next three years.

Same company. Same quarter. Two completely different stories.

If you screen for growth stocks on revenue alone, MIAX passes with the best numbers on this list. If you screen for cheap stocks on the multiple alone, it passes that too. It can't be both. One of those screens is about to be wrong, and figuring out which one is the entire article.

The business, in one sentence

MIAX runs options, equities, and futures exchanges, and it collects a small fee every time a contract trades on them.

That's the whole model. Options carry 88% of net revenue. Every contract that trades on a MIAX venue pays a fee, MIAX pays part of that fee back out to market makers as a rebate to keep liquidity flowing, and keeps the rest. Net revenue is what's left after the rebate. It hit $141.1 million last quarter, up 35% year over year, and the EBITDA margin on that expanded from 46% to 55% in twelve months.

That kind of operating leverage is real. A toll booth doesn't need more staff to process more cars. There's nothing stale about numbers like that, but stale is exactly the risk one paragraph down.

Why the growth looks this good right now

US options average daily volume has gone from roughly 20 million contracts to 60 million over the past six years. Retail traders showed up. Same-day options (0DTE) became a mainstream product. Volatility stayed elevated across most of that stretch. MIAX rode all three trends, grew share, and its revenue-per-contract even ticked up 6% last quarter on top of the volume growth.

Here's the problem. That six-year run has never been tested by a real volatility drought.

Why analysts are modeling a 25% revenue decline

This is the part worth sitting with. One analyst breakdown puts it in a single sentence: if average daily options volume holds above 40 million contracts during months when the VIX sits below 15, the structural growth story holds up. If volume falls back toward 30 to 35 million, MIAX's revenue could contract 20 to 25%.

That's not a hypothetical. That's the actual 3-year consensus sitting in analyst models right now: revenue declining roughly 25% a year, even while EPS is still projected to grow, because margins are modeled to keep expanding as the company runs a leaner cost base. The market is pricing in a scenario where the volume boom of the last few years partially reverses.

Picture the tollbooth on a highway during a storm. More cars swerve, more people hedge their drive, more tolls get paid. Calm weather returns, traffic thins to its normal flow, the tollbooth's revenue drops even though nothing about the road itself changed. The mechanism is simple. Options volume isn't just a function of how many people are trading. A meaningful share of it is hedging and speculative activity that scales with volatility itself. When the VIX is elevated, more contracts trade, MIAX makes more money, and the growth rate looks structural. When volatility normalizes, some of that volume goes with it. Nobody knows yet how much of MIAX's last six years is a permanent new floor and how much is a cyclical peak dressed up as a growth trend.

This is also why the stock trades cheap for the numbers it just posted. At roughly 15 times EV/EBITDA, MIAX is priced well below CBOE, ICE, and Nasdaq, which typically trade 20 to 30 times. The market already suspects the current growth rate won't hold.

The moat, and its limit

There's a real moat here. Exchanges have network effects. Liquidity concentrates where the order flow already is, which makes an established venue hard to dislodge once it has scale. MIAX has built real scale in fifteen months since its August 2025 IPO.

But MIAX is the newer, smaller venue next to CBOE, Cboe, ICE, and Nasdaq's options business. It hasn't been tested by a full cycle. A moat that has only operated during a volume boom is a real moat with an unproven floor, not a proven one.

Five scenarios

Super Bull. Retail and 0DTE participation keep expanding, average daily volume holds structurally above 50 million even as volatility normalizes, MIAX keeps taking share from incumbents. Net revenue compounds 25%/yr for five years, margin expands past 60%, the market re-rates the stock toward 25x EBITDA as a structural compounder, not a cyclical exchange. Five-year annualized return: roughly 35%.

Bull. Volume holds roughly at current elevated levels (soft landing, no true volatility drought), net revenue grows 12-15%/yr, margins keep expanding toward the high 50s, multiple re-rates modestly to 18-19x as the growth story gets more credibility with each clean quarter. Annualized return: roughly 15%.

Base case. Some real mean reversion happens over the next one to two years, consistent with what analyst models already show, before growth resumes at a more modest pace as market-share gains partially offset the cyclical volume pullback. Net revenue compounds closer to 5-8%/yr over the full five years rather than the 35% currently being posted. Margin expansion slows without volume growth doing the heavy lifting, multiple holds roughly flat near 15-16x. Annualized return: roughly 6%.

Bear. The 20-25% revenue contraction analysts are already modeling actually plays out over the next two years and doesn't meaningfully recover, as a genuine low-volatility stretch removes the marginal retail and 0DTE volume that drove the last six years. Multiple compresses toward 10-12x as the market repriced this from growth story to cyclical exchange. Five years out, revenue and earnings are both lower than today. Annualized return: roughly -8%.

Super bear. A structural volatility drought combines with real share loss to CBOE or Nasdaq's options business, and MIAX's post-IPO growth turns out to have been almost entirely a volume-cycle peak. Revenue keeps contracting past year two, margin gains reverse as fixed costs stay fixed against a shrinking base, multiple falls toward 8x. Price target: roughly 55% below today. This is the case that would prove the "tollbooth dressed up as a growth stock" framing right.

What breaks the thesis

One thing to watch, and it's the same thing driving the whole five-scenario spread: does average daily options volume hold above roughly 40 million contracts through a stretch where the VIX sits below 15. That single data point is closer to a real answer than anything in MIAX's own earnings release, because it's the first genuine test of whether the last six years built a permanent new floor in options trading or just rode a volatility wave that hasn't broken yet.

The takeaway

MIAX is a real, profitable, fast-growing exchange with genuine operating leverage and a moat that's earned, not assumed. It also hasn't been tested by a single quarter of low volatility since retail options trading went mainstream. The stock's cheap multiple and the analyst models' 25% revenue-decline forecast are both pricing in the same open question. Nobody on this list has answered it yet, including MIAX's own management. Seven analysts still rate it a Buy with a $51 average target against a $45 stock, so the Street isn't betting on the bear case either. It's genuinely split.

The skill in this one wasn't finding MIAX. It was reading past the headline growth number to the volume mechanism underneath it, which is the same skill worth building for every position on this list.

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Simon & The Sprinters 🐬⚡️🐆