NASDAQ Stock Market

NASDAQ began operating on February 8, 1971, as the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations — not an exchange at first, but an electronic quotation system that displayed prices for over-the-counter stocks that were too small or too new for the NYSE. It was the first market of its kind anywhere in the world: no floor, no trading posts, just screens. Over the following decades it added actual electronic execution, and by the 1990s it had become the natural home of the American technology industry — Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and Cisco all listed there rather than on the traditional Big Board.

That association defined NASDAQ's public identity through the dot-com boom and bust of 1999–2002, when its composite index famously rose above 5,000, collapsed by nearly 80%, and took fifteen years to reclaim its peak. Today NASDAQ (the company) is a global exchange operator in its own right, running markets in the Nordic and Baltic countries and selling trading technology to dozens of other exchanges worldwide.

Unlike the NYSE's hybrid model, NASDAQ has no floor and no designated market makers with a formal franchise in each stock. Instead it operates a pure electronic limit order book in which multiple competing market makers — often dozens per stock — post bids and offers alongside orders from institutions and the public. Price-time priority decides execution: the best price wins, and among equal prices, the earliest order. This dealer-competition heritage descends directly from its origins as a network of over-the-counter dealers connected by screens.

NASDAQ's opening and closing crosses perform the same price-discovery role as the NYSE's auctions, concentrating enormous volume at 9:30 AM and 4:00 PM Eastern. Its regular session, pre-market, and after-hours schedule mirror the NYSE exactly, which is why the two exchanges are effectively a single trading day from a global-hours perspective — though each stock belongs to one venue's official auctions.

NASDAQ lists more companies than any other US exchange — over 3,000 — spanning three listing tiers with progressively stricter requirements: the Global Select Market, Global Market, and Capital Market. Its flagship benchmark, the NASDAQ Composite, covers essentially everything listed on the exchange, while the NASDAQ-100 tracks the hundred largest non-financial companies and has become one of the most-traded indices in the world through the QQQ exchange-traded fund and its futures.

The exchange's technology concentration is both its signature and its risk profile: a handful of mega-capitalisation technology companies dominate its indices, so NASDAQ benchmarks tend to rise faster than broad market averages in growth-led rallies and fall harder when interest rates climb or technology sentiment sours. For traders around the world, 'how NASDAQ futures are trading' is shorthand for the market's appetite for growth and risk on any given morning.