The LSE Directory / Data providers
Nasdaq, Inc. is the exchange operator behind the Nasdaq Stock Market, and its data business sells the real-time and historical market data generated by its own markets to outside firms. Its three flagship equity data products are Nasdaq TotalView, a full depth-of-book feed showing every displayed quote and order at every price level for Nasdaq-, NYSE-, NYSE American- and regional-listed securities, plus Net Order Imbalance Indicator data for the Nasdaq opening and closing crosses; Nasdaq Basic, a lower-cost real-time top-of-book and last-sale alternative to Level 1 covering the same listed universe; and Nasdaq Data Link, Nasdaq's API and web platform for pulling both of the above, along with hundreds of other financial, economic and alternative datasets, programmatically. What differentiates Nasdaq's data business from independent vendors is that the data is exchange-native: TotalView and Basic are generated directly by Nasdaq's own matching engines rather than aggregated or resold from a third party. Nasdaq markets TotalView as providing roughly three times the liquidity of Level 2 style alternatives within 0.05% of the top of book, and prices Basic explicitly against Level 1, quoting average savings of about 65% for firms that switch. Distribution is deliberately multi-channel: a firm can take TotalView or Basic as a direct data feed, through the Nasdaq Data Link API, through a web application, or through third-party vendors and brokers that resell it, including Bloomberg, FactSet, Polygon and Xignite among others. This spread of access points targets a wide range of customers, from retail brokerages and portfolio-tracking apps that only need Basic's top-of-book feed, up to quant funds and institutions that need TotalView's full order book or programmatic access to Data Link's broader dataset catalogue. Nasdaq, Inc. traces to February 8, 1971, when the National Association of Securities Dealers launched the Nasdaq Stock Market as the world's first electronic stock exchange; the company demutualized, separated fully from FINRA by 2006, and now trades on its own exchange under the ticker NDAQ. It is led by chair and CEO Adena Friedman and headquartered at One Liberty Plaza in New York; for fiscal 2024 it reported revenue of about 7.4 billion dollars and net income of about 1.12 billion dollars across roughly 9,162 employees, with market data sitting alongside listings, trading, index licensing and, following its 2023 acquisition of Adenza and 2020 acquisition of Verafin, regulatory and compliance software as separate business lines. The Data Link platform itself began as Quandl, an independent data aggregator founded by Tammer Kamel in 2012, which Nasdaq acquired in December 2018 and rebuilt into Nasdaq Data Link in September 2021, retaining Quandl's underlying API and URL structure for backward compatibility.
