Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman Talks Earnings Season | Bloomberg Talks

It's great to be here. So, so many highlights in this from IPOs coming back to your other fintech businesses, which are fascinating. But for me, the switching to the NASDAQ for certain companies like Walmart coming over, your numbers, a record $1.2 trillion in listing transfers. With everybody wanting to become a tech company, how many inbounds are you getting for more companies to make a Walmart move and become listed on the NASDAQ?

Well, first of all, thank you so much. It's great to be here and we are really proud of the results that we delivered for the quarter and for the year with 12% growth overall and 11% growth in our solutions businesses with every part of our business contributing including our listings business. And when it comes to transfers from the New York Stock Exchange to NASDAQ, we really focus on several different key differentiators for us. First is we are the home to great innovative tech companies, but innovators across every sector. And I think that's what's really come to everyone's attention is that everyone is becoming much more tech-enabled. Technology is becoming an integral part of their innovation story. But you can innovate across industries and these innovative growth companies gravitate to NASDAQ, including Walmart, which we're so excited. It's such an amazing company with amazing leadership. But we also have the index business. So we closed the year with $882 billion in our index business, $99 billion of inflows in just the year. And what that does is it allows us through our partners to become investors in these great companies through the NASDAQ 100 index franchise. And in the case of some companies, we could be as much as a 4% owner of their shares, which creates a really nice long-term passive ownership. In addition to the fact we also have market quality, we've invested so much in our technology to drive market modernization. It's showing up in the quality of our markets and the level of participation we have, which has actually become a real differentiator for us and particularly with these mega cap companies. And then of course lastly, we have all these great marketing assets that we do to help promote their brand as an innovative growth company. And so all of those things combined has really created a great opportunity for us to talk to Shopify and to Kimberly Clark and to Thomson Reuters in addition to Walmart and bring them to NASDAQ in 2025.

Well, I think the first thing is what we have actually seen is returns start to be more broad-based. With interest rates coming down, small cap companies over the last couple of years, they've had as much as 40% of their net income have to be spent on interest expense. So, as the interest rates are coming down, the cost of capital is coming down, it is allowing them to invest more in their business and deliver more for their shareholders. And you are seeing a broader based return profile with large cap and small cap companies as we go into 2026 which we're encouraged by. But we also do have these great mega cap companies that are delivering the future of technology to every industry. And I think that as a result, the investment that they've been making is critically important, very large. Still though, if you look at all of the hyperscalers and the semiconductor companies that have really been investing heavily here, it represents about less than 70% of their annual cash flows in aggregate. So imagine how cash generative these companies are. So there's a huge balance of cash capabilities in addition to having very large scale investors like Blackstone be an underwriter of these types of investments and I do think the public capital markets are going to play a bigger role. This investment is a change in the infrastructure of our economy and more and more of the industry experts are going to be coming in and delivering against that opportunity. So we see the capital markets playing a bigger and bigger role going forward.

So first I would say I was at NASDAQ back then. So I've actually lived through that experience. And what a big difference here is that the companies that are underwriting the risk and the opportunity are very large scale well capitalized companies. Number two, when you look at certainly the NASDAQ 100 today, the minimum market cap on the NASDAQ 100 today is about 30 to 40 billion dollars, whereas back then it was like 5 billion dollars. And also, as you said, the revenue generation, if you look at companies that are coming public, these are revenue generating very strong companies that have strong business momentum, KPIs, all of those things. And so as much as I do think that there's going to be a lot of investment here, I also think that they're going to be winners and losers of course as these trends come through, I believe that the underpinning of this investment cycle has much more capital and much more ballast that underpins it as we move forward. And it's a long-term trend. It's the future of our economy that we are underwriting right now.

Well, I think first of all we are very clear that we view regulation as an important balance and an important underpinning of markets that really just for the purpose of investor protection and all the things that it comes with it. The guard rails that are really necessary to make sure that investors have a sustainable lasting experience. When you are putting your savings to work and you are a true investor the equities markets are an amazing opportunity to find returns. When you are looking at this more as a way to spend your afternoon, that's a different investor type, it's a different use of capital but also even then the rules have to be clear and I think that's where we've been engaging with regulators to understand how are they thinking about shaping the rules. The CFTC and the SEC are working together better than we've ever seen before because a lot of these prediction markets sit kind of in between and so it's really a matter of how do we make sure that the rules of the road are clear so that investors are protected.