|  | | 2005 News and Press Releases | | |
HEADLINE NEWS:
Big Board Is Going Public, And Nasdaq Says Bring It On
Jenny Anderson
The New York Times. December 2, 2005
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EXCERPT: On Tuesday, the 1,366 owners of the New York Stock Exchange are likely to end an era and begin a new one by voting to convert the 213-year-old nonprofit public utility into a for-profit publicly traded company. The deal will give the Big Board a verve it has lacked: it will have the currency to acquire other exchanges, the freedom to make swift decisions without waiting for a consensus among its members and the ability to act like an entrepreneur and pursue sources of faster-growing revenue. Oddly enough, Nasdaq could not be more pleased. The all-electronic exchange, the Big Board's traditional rival, has gone through its own makeover. It has substantially improved its financial condition and acquired Instinet, one of its top rivals. Soon Nasdaq is expected to win the right to call itself an exchange, allowing it to separate from its regulator by year-end. Combined with the Big Board's project to further automate its trading, the competition -- which has always made the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry look polite -- is set to explode. ''We have the superior market model,'' said Robert Greifeld, president and chief executive of Nasdaq. ''They have to imitate what we have been doing for 30 years.''
The chief executive of the Big Board, John A. Thain, counters: ''It's not an all-electronic world. Today we traded 1.8 billion shares. It is, in fact, more of a hybrid world and the way stocks trade depend on how liquid the stock is and what the dollar price is.'' While each exchange professes to be the better positioned for the competition, the two are employing vastly different strategies. |
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