What is NASDAQ?
The NASDAQ is an American stock exchange based in New York City. NASDAQ, short for National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, is the second-largest stock exchange in the United States, in terms of the value of its securities, trailing only the New York Stock Exchange. Many of the world’s largest technology companies appear on the NASDAQ, including Amazon, Apple, Cisco, eBay, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun. The NASDAQ was born in 1971, and the stock exchange now contains about 3,200 publicly traded companies. A stock exchange is a place where people can buy and sell shares of stock in a publicly owned company. The stock exchange helps the buyer and seller settle on a price, charging a fee for its service. The NASDAQ is different from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), because its stock trading is — and always has been — done completely electronically. For nearly its first two decades, stock trading on the NASDAQ occurred over a computer bulletin board system
NASDAQ (pronounced naz-dak) stands for National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations – quite a mouthful! Although it is not an index like the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P 500 Index, NASDAQ is used by many investors as a measure of how tech stocks are performing because it includes many of these stocks. NASDAQ is actually an exchange, or a system for pricing and trading stocks. Unlike the New York Stock Exchange, where stocks may be traded on an actual trading floor, NASDAQ uses only a computerized system. Our article “Watching the Stock Market” provides more information about both Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 Index.
