Nasdaq, Inc.

Overview

Nasdaq, Inc. is the exchange operator that runs the market most people mean when they say “the Nasdaq” — but the company, the exchange, and the index are three different things. The company was born in 1971 when the National Association of Securities Dealers built an automated quotation system that began trading on February 8 as the world’s first electronic stock market, handling more than 2,500 securities (Library of Congress). The name was originally an acronym: National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (Investopedia).

For its first three decades Nasdaq was a subsidiary of its regulator-parent, the NASD. In 2000 the membership voted to spin it off into a shareholder-owned, for-profit company; in 2006 it became a national securities exchange fully separate from the NASD, whose regulatory arm merged with the New York Stock Exchange’s to form FINRA (Library of Congress). Today the company does far more than run its flagship market: it covers 18 trading markets across the U.S., Canada, the Nordics and the Baltics, operates a clearinghouse and four central securities depositories, and licenses its trading technology to more than 135 marketplaces in over 50 countries (Investopedia). In fiscal 2025 it reported $8.26 billion in revenue and $1.79 billion in net income (Investopedia).

Going transatlantic: the OMX merger

Nasdaq’s transformation from an American stock market into a global exchange-technology company ran through Stockholm. In May 2007 it announced a combination with OMX, the Swedish operator of Nordic and Baltic exchanges; the deal closed in 2008, creating NASDAQ OMX Group — later shortened to Nasdaq, Inc. in 2015 (Investopedia). The same year it also agreed to buy the Philadelphia Stock Exchange — founded in 1790, the oldest stock exchange in America — folding it into the group as PHLX (Library of Congress).

The merger changed what the company sells. Alongside listing fees and market data, Nasdaq now earns from “market technology” — trading and settlement platforms plus safeguards against financial crime — and from investment intelligence products sold to banks, brokers and asset managers (Investopedia). Its exchanges now span Copenhagen, Helsinki, Stockholm, Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius in addition to the three U.S. venues.

Firsts: a woman CEO and the board-diversity rule

In November 2016, chief operating officer Adena Friedman was promoted to chief executive, making her the first woman to run a major U.S. stock exchange (Investopedia). Four years later she put the exchange’s regulatory power behind a governance experiment: on December 1, 2020, Nasdaq proposed a listing rule requiring companies to disclose the diversity of their boards — at least one female director and one director from an underrepresented minority or the LGBTQ+ community, or a public explanation of why not (Investopedia). The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved the rule on August 6, 2021, making Nasdaq the first major exchange to tie listing standards to board composition (Investopedia).

What this profile does not claim

This profile is about Nasdaq, Inc., the company — not the Nasdaq Composite index or the Nasdaq-100, which are benchmarks calculated from listed stocks. It does not claim current listing counts or market capitalizations, which move daily; the “5,000+ companies” figure is as reported in the sources’ timeframes. The competing Borse Dubai bid for OMX, mentioned in some tertiary summaries of the merger battle, was not verified from a fully-read independent source and is deliberately omitted. Financial figures are for fiscal 2025 per Investopedia’s citation of the company’s 10-K.