Nasdaq, Inc.

Nasdaq, Inc. is an American exchange operator and financial-technology company that runs the Nasdaq Stock Market, the Nasdaq Nordic and Baltic exchanges, and a portfolio of market-infrastructure, data, index and anti-financial-crime software businesses sold to banks, brokers and other market operators. It reported $8.26 billion of total revenue, $2.33 billion of operating income and $1.79 billion of net income in fiscal 2025, and listed 5,599 companies across its venues at year-end.

The interesting question about Nasdaq is not whether it is a good business — the filings make a fair case that it is — but which business it is. Transaction-based revenue from trading and listings still dominates the top line, yet the company's own framing centres on what it calls Solutions: data, index, software and workflow products, which accounted for $4.0 billion of the $5.25 billion in net revenue the company kept after passing through transaction rebates in 2025, or roughly 76%. Annualised recurring revenue ended 2025 at $3.1 billion and stood at $3.3 billion by mid-2026.

This file turns on a single question: whether that recurring-revenue engine can compound fast enough, for long enough, to make the transactional arm a rounding error before the trading cycle turns. Nasdaq's answer is that its exchange throws off proprietary data and index intellectual property that no competitor can replicate, and that its software arm sells the picks and shovels for a decade of market-structure change. The sceptic's answer is that 2026 has been an extraordinary year for volumes and IPOs, that index growth is levered to the same equity market that drives everything else, and that a decade of large acquisitions has left a balance sheet and an amortisation schedule that flatter the headline numbers.