What Does The NASDAQ Stand For?

What Does The NASDAQ Stand For?

This is actually a fun question for me, because people ask me, what exactly does the NASDAQ stand for? Well, if we were back in 1971 when the NASDAQ was created, I would say it stood for the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, the NASDAQ.

Back when it was first created, this is back when computers filled an entire room, if you even had a computer. Back then, they needed a more efficient way to be able to quote stock prices. Before that it was just, what was it on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange? So that’s what the NASDAQ was originally created for.

Today, the NASDAQ is seen as a leader in growth companies, it’s a stock market in and of itself here in the United States, and companies generally tend to go to the NASDAQ when they’re technology-based because that’s kind of what has been the mystique around the NASDAQ over all these years. And so where once it was just a quoting system, a way to get quotes really quickly, automated, now it has become a whole new thing, a whole new stock exchange, if you will, where companies come to be placed on the exchange.

That way other people can come to that stock exchange and be able to buy those stocks and so on and so forth. That’s why it’s known as one of the truly automated computer-based stock exchanges because that’s how it started, and that’s how it’s always been.