The LSE Directory / Index providers
Nasdaq Global Indexes is the index-administration business of Nasdaq, Inc. (ticker NDAQ), the exchange operator behind the Nasdaq Stock Market. It builds, maintains and licenses market indexes, most prominently the Nasdaq-100 (ticker NDX), a free-float, market-cap-weighted benchmark of roughly 100 (currently 102) of the largest non-financial companies listed on Nasdaq, and the Nasdaq Composite, which covers nearly all Nasdaq-listed common stocks and had a combined constituent market capitalization of about $35.3 trillion as of September 2025. Both are rules-based indexes; the Nasdaq-100 rebalances annually after the close of trading on the third Friday of December, with minimum liquidity (a three-month average daily trading value of $5 million) and free-float (10%) thresholds for inclusion. The unit's business model is licensing rather than asset management: it earns fees when asset managers, banks and exchanges build ETFs, mutual funds, options, futures and structured notes that track its benchmarks, rather than managing money itself. Beyond its flagship large-cap benchmarks, Nasdaq Global Indexes offers more than 10,000 indexes spanning core equity, thematic, quantitative and private-capital strategies, and has extended into digital assets, partnering with CME Group on cryptocurrency-linked index futures. This breadth, a household-name flagship benchmark paired with a long tail of licensable thematic and quant products, is what differentiates it from narrower, single-asset-class index providers. Nasdaq's index-building activity traces back to 1971, the year the Nasdaq Composite launched; the Nasdaq-100 followed on January 31, 1985. The best-known vehicle tracking it is Invesco's QQQ Trust, launched March 10, 1999, which held approximately $500 billion in assets as of mid-2026 and converted from a unit investment trust to a standard open-ended ETF structure in December 2025, a change that also cut its expense ratio from 0.20% to 0.18%. Across ETFs, mutual funds and derivatives, roughly $1.4 trillion in assets track the Nasdaq-100. As a segment of the publicly traded Nasdaq, Inc., the business operates under the same disclosure and exchange-regulatory framework as the rest of Nasdaq's markets and data operations. In June 2026, CME Group launched futures on the Nasdaq CME Crypto Index, a market-cap-weighted benchmark of major cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, ether, XRP, SOL, ADA, LINK and stellar lumens; the contracts, offered in standard and micro sizes and cash-settled against the Nasdaq CME Crypto Settlement Price Index, were CME Group's first market-cap-weighted crypto futures product. The launch extends Nasdaq's index-licensing model from traditional equity benchmarks into digital-asset benchmarks for a derivatives-exchange partner.
