Exchanges: Nasdaq reels from double blow

Nasdaq CEO Bob Greifeld’s head must be spinning. Just as the exchange was mounting its fightback from losing the iconic Twitter listing, the key architect of its move away from equities markets has upped and left the firm for a rival. Will Nasdaq stay on its diversification course?

When Euromoney visited Nasdaq in New York in early November, Eric Noll did not sound like a man with his eyes on pastures new.

Noll was expounding eloquently about a range of opportunities for the exchange in fixed income, following the $750 million acquisition of bond trading platform eSpeed that he had engineered in April from BGC Partners.

“We’d been looking at eSpeed for a while, including whether we could build something similar, as it hits our sweet spot in terms of central clearing, providing data feeds and a central limited order book – like our other transaction platforms,” Nasdaq OMX Group’s then executive vice-president of transaction services said.

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