NASDAQ OMX 100 Index

Categories: Trading, Derivatives

What do the largest 100 NASDAQ-listed companies in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and the United States have in common? That’s right—they’re all part of an exclusive club known as the Nasdaq QMX 100 Index.

This index is market capitalization-weighted, which means that each security is weighted according to its market capitalization (market capitalization = number of outstanding shares x the price of each share). Its whole purpose in life is to track those companies’ stocks and tell the rest of the world how they’re doing in terms of innovation, globalization, technological advancements, etc. (Fun fact: this index tends to outperform the market as a whole.) And, since the index is all multinational and stuff, we can see data in both dollars and euros, which is pretty fancy.

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Finance: What are the NASDAQ and NYSE?74 Views

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Finance a la Shmoop. What are the NASDAQ and the NYSE? Nasdaq, yeah it stands for

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National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation-systems. And [NASDAQ defined]

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yeah, it feels like they got cheated out of an S in there somewhere, like NASDAQ'S.

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That's what happens when life's on a budget. So NASDAQ is an electronic

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version of the original wall, as in Street, Wall Street, yah that. Where

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well-dressed folks would come with cash in hand scream out a stock and a price [stock market in 1900s]

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and then trade shares. They would trade for whatever was trending at the time. Like

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eyeball massagers, or wooden swimsuits, or motorised surfboards, all real things

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by the way. NASDAQ is the much more modern version of its predecessor NYSE.

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Is anything but nice when you lose money there. NYSE stands for New York

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Stock Exchange and it too was an outgrowth of the well-dressed folks at

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the wall. There are two key structural differences in the two trading systems,

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the NYSE is an actual physical place, has a physical location, address, etc. and this [NYSE Building]

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is what it looks like. NASDAQ is really a concept, a religion, a

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network, it's not really a place. At least not a geographic place. The other big

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difference is the manner in which shares are traded. The NYSE is an auction-based

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system, one individual is a buyer of AMZN at $983.25, he screams electronically

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that number and then buys from whoever is willing to sell at that price.

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Individuals buy from individuals. That's an auction market. But NASDAQ is a

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dealer market, that is somebody deals in the stock. They go out into the market[online stock market]

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and buy say a million shares of whatever.com that was bought in the market

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conveniently for exactly ten bucks even. That dealer now makes a market in that

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stock, ie the dealer is kind of you know, their own individual market. And she

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moves with the market to manage the spread in the trades. Like she might have

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a narrow spread, where she's a buyer of the stock at $10.02 and a seller of the

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stock at $10.07 a share. Or it's a really wild volatile stock, on a wild and [man and woman on rollercoaster]

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volatile day, she might be a buyer only at $9.90 and a seller at $10.30, making 40

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cents a share trade. Well you could do the fancy math that if she

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keeps her inventory steady at a million shares and trades a million shares that

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day. Well with that spread she makes 40 cents times a million or 400 grand for

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the day's efforts. However after staring at a screen all day she's gonna have to

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spend at least some of that money on eye care. [woman in office]

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Thank goodness for those eyeball massagers.

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