Nasdaq, Inc. is a US exchange and financial technology group headquartered at One Liberty Plaza in New York. It traces its name to 1971, when the National Association of Securities Dealers launched it as the world's first electronic stock market; the modern holding company itself went public in 2000. It owns and operates the Nasdaq Stock Market together with the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and Boston Stock Exchange in the US, plus seven European exchanges in the Nordic and Baltic region, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Iceland, Riga, Stockholm, Tallinn and Vilnius, acquired through the 2008 purchase of OMX. As of mid 2026 the Nasdaq Stock Market lists close to 4,000 companies, heavily weighted toward technology, including Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon among its largest constituents, and the Nasdaq-100 index tracks the 100 largest non-financial names on the exchange. Nasdaq organizes its business into three reporting segments: Market Services (trading, clearing and market data across its exchanges), Capital Access Platforms (listings, index licensing and investor relations tools), and Financial Technology, which licenses trading, surveillance, risk and regulatory reporting software to other exchanges, banks and regulators rather than only running its own venues. That third segment is Nasdaq's main point of differentiation from peer exchange groups, built through two large software acquisitions: Verafin in 2020 for 2.75 billion dollars, a St. John's, Newfoundland based anti money laundering and fraud detection platform used by more than 2,000 North American financial institutions, and Adenza in 2023 for 10.5 billion dollars, the group's largest deal to date, which brought the Calypso trading and risk management platform and the AxiomSL regulatory reporting platform used by large global banks including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. Nasdaq is led by chief executive and board chair Adena Friedman, CEO since January 2017 and chair since 2023. For fiscal year 2024 the company reported revenue of 7.40 billion dollars, operating income of 1.80 billion dollars, net income of 1.12 billion dollars and roughly 9,162 employees; in its third quarter of 2025 the Financial Technology and other software business, reported as Solutions revenue, passed 1 billion dollars in a single quarter and 3 billion dollars in annual recurring revenue for the first time. Nasdaq's own listing (ticker NDAQ) trades on the exchange it operates. In 2026 Nasdaq won two significant SEC approvals that extend its core exchange business. On March 18, 2026, the SEC approved a Nasdaq proposal, run as a DTC pilot, to let certain highly liquid securities, initially Russell 1000 constituents, US Treasuries and ETFs tracking indices such as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100, trade in tokenized form on the same order book, ticker and CUSIP as their conventional shares, with trades still clearing and settling through existing NSCC and DTC rails on a T+1 basis and tokenization applied as a post trade step. On April 10, 2026, the SEC separately approved Nasdaq's proposal to extend trading hours for NMS stocks and exchange traded products to 23 hours a day, five days a week.
