Nasdaq CEO Reveals the Next Era Of The Stock Market - Adena Friedman | All-In Summit

Over the year to date, Nasdaq shares are up 14%. Over the last year, Nasdaq shares are up 40%. Over the 5-year period, they've more than doubled, up over 100%. You've been on a real tear.

She is often on the list of not just the most influential women in finance, but just the most influential. Adena transformed Nasdaq into a global tech powerhouse. Adena is a dealmaker at her core. Nasdaq is in the business of deals.

We are here to advance economic progress for all. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome NASDAQ CEO Adena Friedman. Welcome.

Hey, Jason, how are you?

Thanks for coming. How are you?

Hi. It's great to see you.

Hey, great. It's great to be here. Welcome. Thanks for coming out.

What a day you've been having.

Yeah. So, you caught some of the action earlier today, right?

I did. I've been watching from behind the scenes. It's been amazing to watch. You've been hanging backstage. Did you have a favorite moment or speaker?

I never like to pick favorites at Nasdaq. We don't pick favorites. We have great companies, but obviously, Rene Haas is wonderful, and I've gotten to know him very well through Arm. I would say I always have great conversations.

But Nasdaq is more than a market. I wanted to start with this really important question because, when we were talking, I didn't realize that Nasdaq was more than just the Nasdaq market that we all know. Maybe, just for the audience, you could share a little bit more about the broader business.

Sure. Thank you. First of all, we are really proud of our foundation as a market. But as we started to grow and expand the business, when I became CEO, we had about $2.5 billion in revenue. Today, or as of the end of last year, we had a little over $2.5 billion of EBITDA. So, we've grown and expanded the business quite dramatically.

We've done that by taking our core as a market and saying, “What more can we do for our clients?” We are an architect of modern markets. We provide our technology to our 17 markets, and we sell it to 135 other markets around the world. Market infrastructure is our business, and we do that globally.

The second is really powering that innovation economy, with companies like Arm and other great companies. We've expanded that. Our index business now has about $700 billion of assets under management tied to those great innovators, in addition to creating better abilities for companies to navigate the public markets and for investors to find investments.

And you had a big announcement today.

The third is also building trust across the financial system. That is anti-financial-crime technology, market-surveillance technology, and other technologies that the banking industry and the broker-dealer industry really need to manage their lives in the markets. You're right, we had a big announcement today.

Vlad almost foreshadowed it before you actually announced it.

Yeah. It actually goes right back to that first pillar: being the architect of modern markets.

Tell people what you announced.

Yeah. This morning, we announced that we're going to be bringing tokenization into our markets, making sure that equities are tokenized and traded on the markets—not in a sidecar, but actually in the core markets.

So, is the eventual goal—or is it today—24/7/365 equities, just letting them rip constantly?

I think we're all moving in that direction. We announced several months ago that we're moving to 24/5, so we're moving that way.

So, Saturday and Sunday—not for equities yet?

I think we have to walk before we run, but getting to 24/5 is a major advancement for the U.S. equities markets. On top of that, with tokenization, if we can introduce that into the markets, it allows us to think about streamlining the post-trade process and bringing in and modernizing elements of the markets that have a lot of friction.

We are hyper-resilient and hyperscale. Today, we had 95 billion messages come into our systems, and we had a median response time of 20 microseconds from order to trade. We handle about 3 million messages a second. It's hugely scaled.

At the same time, once that trade occurs, there's a different process. The post-trade process, as we know, is an area where tokenization really shines. Cutting down the friction, managing capital flows across the global ecosystem, and bringing that capability into the market is going to be the next step.

I want to get your reaction to this. There's this very famous curve where you get this early bout of insanity, then there's the trough of disillusionment, and then you grow through it. Does it seem like crypto—or blockchain—is finally real? There are real companies doing real things, stablecoins, and what Sacks did with the GENIUS Act.

I actually want to point to that because, honestly, having regulators who want to work on bringing it into the mainstream and want to create the rules of the road is such a refreshing thing. I think it allows us all to understand how we can operate within a world where there are tenets of investor protection.

The technology is going to have things we can and can't do, but also being forward-thinking and forward-leaning in how the technology is going to be applied is going to be critical. We're very excited about the fact that we finally have this convergence of regulation between the traditional markets and the digital markets.

How do we bring it all together to, frankly, advance all markets? We're very, very excited about that.

I don't mean this to be glib, but wasn't there a concept around the markets having an end of the day at 4:00, allowing people to have a life and to sleep and not have this anxiety? Are we all going to live in a world where we have to check our stocks at 2:00 in the morning?

If some crazy event happens in the world—God forbid, a terrorist attack or a hack or something—are we all going to have to wake up at 3:00 in the morning and decide whether to trade? Was that the resistance to this? And how do you justify it? Is it going to be worth the fact that none of us are ever going to sleep again?

I've been at Nasdaq since 1993, and back in the ’90s, we had a vision to go to 24/7 markets. We just couldn't achieve it. Technologically, the technology wasn't there to do it, but there was also regulatory resistance. A big part of that was the industry saying, “I like to be able to finish my day and go home.”

We need those points in the day. The market open and the market close will continue to exist in a world of 24/5 markets, but you'll have a U.S. trading day and a non-U.S. trading day. Our systems already turn on at 4:00 in the morning and turn off at 8:00 at night. Trading occurs during that entire period of time.

The official trading hours of the United States are 9:30 to 4:00. I don't anticipate that changing because we have to have those moments for the NAVs to be set for mutual funds and things like that. But allowing the entire world to trade these securities is important.

We have the top 7 companies in the world listed on Nasdaq. Those companies are global investors with global interests. The Nasdaq-100 is one of the most traded products in the world, and the futures trade 24/5. So, why shouldn't the underlying securities?

That's how we look at those non-U.S. trading hours and the trading hours, trying to find that confluence and wait a little bit.

There's a lot of hand-wringing about the number of companies that have gone public, the weight of being a public company, and the “stay private longer” moment. It took Uber 11 long years. Stripe is private now, close to 15 years. SpaceX, as well.

We have some folks who think things should run differently. We had Spotify go public through a direct listing. You have Chamath experimenting with SPACs. What should the IPO market look like? And how can we make it change, now that we have a government that's maybe a little more engaged, let's say, and a less hands-off administration?

How should the IPO market and that process change to encourage people not to stay private so long? All the gains are being captured by the elites. Qualified purchasers and accredited investors can barely get in, let alone the public. By the time the public gets in, it does feel like, “Oh, I'm getting into Instacart,” and it's going to go sideways for a year or 2 or 3.

First of all, I think it's really good to remind all of us why the public markets are so important for the economy. When a company goes public, it gets access to billions of investors, and every citizen in this country gets a chance to become an owner in the economy.

When we look at the performance of the Nasdaq-100 over the 40 years of its existence, the average return on the Nasdaq-100 over those 40 years is a 14.25% annual return. That's double the broader market.

It's an incredible return. If individuals have access to these great companies, that's so important. As you know, I saw your podcast a few weeks ago showing the performance of the public markets. It's such an important part of our economy to engage the population in the economy, the growth of the economy, and the success of the economy.

So I've always believed in the balance between public and private markets. I think there are reasons for both of them to thrive and be great for everyone. But the public-market experience has become this massive burden, and I think that we call it—you have to cross the Rubicon to become public. It's become very daunting for CEOs and companies to make that decision.

We've talked very closely with the SEC and others about what we can do to lighten the load, to make it so that it's not such a huge change. We've advocated for changes in disclosure reform, proxy reform, litigation reform—all of those things. There's such a different existence. It shouldn't be so different.

Does the burden actually improve the quality of the companies that are public? Does it improve the fraud rates?

It's a good question. I do think that you will find there are really good, valid reasons for certain disclosures. I think disclosure is a cleansing event. But they have to disclose so much more than is actually necessary for an investor to make a smart investment decision.

Let's strip that away and get back to the core disclosures, and then offer different ways to actually enter the public markets. We think the direct listing—and we've actually worked closely with Bill and others on a direct listing with a capital raise—why not have that? We have that ability today.

And then SPACs are another avenue to the public markets. ICOs, over time—we'd like to bring that as well. To me, frankly, that's a direct listing, a tokenized direct listing. So how do we bring all those capabilities into the markets, make them available, and make these companies feel like it's exciting?

That requires the SEC to take a little bit more risk, and they seem like an organization that is incredibly risk-averse and very conservative in their approach. Do they need to change their approach to be a little bit more forward-thinking, in your mind?

First of all, I would say that Chair Atkins—my first meeting with him was just amazing. He's great. He is forward-leaning. He wants to create change. He wants to make IPOs great again.

He wants to really support the public markets while also, frankly, looking at elements of the market structure in the established markets and saying, "Does all of this need to exist?" Because there's a lot of that, too. And then also really embracing the crypto ecosystem, to say, "What elements of this could be brought in?" That regulatory convergence is real.

How can we create a regulatory road for crypto markets? How can we actually create a regulatory road for tokenized securities markets? How do those things converge? Can I ask you—he's great. I mean, I would say he's off to a great start. Outside of the equity markets, the biggest liquid pools that are trading right now, whether it's the actual tokens or perps or what have you, or the crypto markets themselves, it would seem relatively logical that you guys or others would want to play in that game. Why don't you?

Yeah, I think what's held us back is the lack of regulatory clarity. I say that Nasdaq is really good at operating regulated markets, and so you ask us to go into a completely unregulated space—that's a pretty different existence. The risk tolerance is much higher.

We want to make—I mean, we are always investor-protection-first, always. So how do we make sure that we create the right structure with fairness and equality for investors while also being really big innovators? We've moved our markets to the cloud. We've brought a lot of modern technology into markets, but we also operate best when we have the rules of the road. What's happening now in Washington is the potential for rules of the road, and that gives us an opportunity to participate in a market that has not been available to us.

If the federal government just creates that clarity, is that something where you could compete with Coinbase, Binance, OKX, and the decentralized exchanges?

I would say that what we would want to do is really work with our institutional clients, because they also have not been able or willing to play in the markets. Their risk tolerance is similar to ours. We have a similar profile.

So if we can actually bring the institutional ecosystem into crypto assets, and bring tokenization into securities assets, that's a really interesting way for us to play a role in helping evolve these markets and bring them to the mainstream. Many flowers will bloom in that ecosystem.

Today, all of your markets are equities. These are securities that have a secured interest in an underlying business asset. There's a business that's buying and selling stuff, has employees, and does stuff.

But much of the volume we see today in prediction markets and crypto markets—whether it's the actual tokens or perps or what have you—doesn't have an underlying. There's a point of view on the value of, for example, an event in the prediction markets. Historically, you'd have to figure out a way to play that event with some equity trade.

Do prediction markets actually create a new way to express investment theses that are perhaps going to be a superset of the way we trade equities? Or are these fundamentally different—that owning an interest in a business is different from having a point of view on a thesis?

I have to say, the options markets are as much a prediction market as the other prediction markets. We own and operate the largest options marketplace in the United States, and so we're very engaged in looking at how you think about making a decision as to the direction of travel in an underlying equity without actually trading in the underlying equity.

Options are, I think, a great reflection of a prediction market. The difference, though, is that in a prediction market, it's a binary yes-or-no, versus in an options market, you're layering in your bets across multiple price points and different durations. There are, by the way, 1.5 million strikes in the options markets today.

In some ways, prediction markets make these types of bets more accessible to more people, because the options markets are quite complex. Prediction markets are a little bit simpler. I think it's also good that the SEC and the CFTC are joining forces to think about these markets much more comprehensively. If we can bring that regulatory paradigm across the markets and make more of these asset classes accessible, I think that's good for everyone.

Maybe you could talk about private markets and the secondary sales that are occurring. There's an SPV boom. We heard Vlad talk earlier today about tokenizing OpenAI and SpaceX. I know when Masayoshi wanted to buy a bunch of Uber when it was a private company, they did that through Nasdaq—and I guess SecondMarket.

Nasdaq Private Market.

Nasdaq Private Market, which came through the acquisition of SecondMarket. That's right, if I remember my history correctly. That's pretty good.

So how do you think about those opportunities and aggressively going after them? Right now, I take it you are invited into those and people hire you to do that. But what about making markets for OpenAI shares, SpaceX shares, or Stripe shares?

I think the first thing we focus on in Nasdaq Private Market is being issuer-first in how we work with these private companies. They are private companies, and they're private for a reason. They want to have control over their shareholder base, and yet they want to create liquidity for their employees, their early investors, and so forth.

There is a secondary market that is created on the back of these private shares. So how do we work with them to allow that to happen in a fair way, and make it so that we can introduce them to other investors that they want to have in their cap table?

SPVs are a way to do that. You can roll up a lot of wealth interests in a company and create an SPV through a known institution. The institution becomes the owner. Remember, the wealth clients are not actual owners of the shares; they're owners of the SPV that owns the shares.

Letting the issuer have the ultimate decision on whether or not they invite those investors into their cap table is really important in the private context. That's part of what makes Nasdaq Private Market different from other providers in the private space: We always partner with the issuer.

Because they're going rogue, basically. They're going around the backs of the CFOs and CEOs of those companies at times, and it does piss them off.

I think it's important always to realize that the issuers—the companies, especially private companies—are being very mindful of who they have as owners. Let's let them continue to do that as private companies.

Once you enter the public market, then you've got public investors, and that's a different responsibility. There's a different risk involved in opening the aperture to billions of people, and there should be disclosures provided as a result of that.

So in that private marketplace, let's make sure that we keep some controls in place around that.

The stock market has mostly flipped from individual stock pickers to an absolute abundance of index funds. It kind of compresses returns in some way. It's hard to find a lot of alpha in the market. You have an enormous concentration with the top 7, 8, or 9 companies as a percentage of the overall market. When you see these kinds of structural things, what does it tell you about the moment of the cycle? You've seen it now for 30 years.

Yeah. Yeah, I have. First of all, I think the rise of index investing is making investing more accessible in general. It's a very, very inexpensive, accessible, and liquid way to have a view into a sector, a return profile, or a theme and not have to pick stocks.

As retail investors, it's hard to sit there and be a stock picker. It takes a lot of time. I worked with my son when he was a teenager. He really wanted to do it, so I had to teach him how to read an S-1 or a 10-K. You spend some time on it. But indexes make investing much more accessible.

However, I also agree with you that you have to balance it with active management. You have to have active investors. At the end of the day, I always say that there's a balance between the passive and active worlds within the markets. Whenever it skews toward the passive, that creates arbitrage opportunities for the active.

If the herd really starts to move the stocks in a certain direction, the active manager should step in and take advantage of that arbitrage. But the real foundation of it, though, Chamath, is this: the Nasdaq-100, or these innovative companies, are performing the way they're performing for a reason, and it becomes very difficult to beat the index because these companies are very hard to beat. It's hard to find companies that deliver a better return than they do.

I think that's where active management has struggled, just because they're trying to beat a benchmark, but that benchmark is such an attractive benchmark.

Let me ask a question unrelated to Nasdaq. Your role on the board of the New York Fed, from where you sit, and your role in capital markets: Do you think there's a trend of de-dollarization underway? There's a report that just came out on central-bank holdings that showed dollar-denominated Treasuries declining from 60% to 40%, gold going from 10% to 20% over just the last decade, with some acceleration perhaps underway. Obviously, China is selling down Treasuries.

What's your view on where we are with respect to spending, with respect to central-bank interest in dollar-denominated assets, and what that implies for our markets?

Yeah. First of all, I am a huge believer in the dollar as a reserve currency and in the fact that it will persist as a reserve currency over a long period of time. I think our economy is such a powerhouse. I think the rule of law and the stability that we have and that we deliver to the world will continue to provide that anchor for the dollar to be the reserve currency.

But investors will express themselves if they see certain risks starting to manifest. I do think, as you guys talk about a lot, that the amount of debt we have in the country is something we're starting to see manifest itself in the markets, and it will make it so that they look for alternatives. If they feel like the return characteristics of a Treasury are different from the risk-weighted returns they could get in other currencies or other Treasuries, they're going to express themselves.

I believe in the U.S. I believe in the power of the U.S. economy to work its way through this. I believe that you guys talking about it a lot will actually help us work our way through it.

Does the Fed?

And the Fed, I think, is a staunch believer in the dollar as the reserve currency. I don't think that they have any significant concerns that have arisen from what you talked about. At least my experience with them is that they don't have any significant concerns.

Do you think there's a data issue at the Fed? I've talked about this before. I worry that bad inputs lead to bad decisions, and they don't necessarily benefit from the best of what's available. Quite frankly, the best of what's available is held close by certain companies and not really shared broadly because they think that is their edge.

I'm curious how enabled the Fed is to actually see the tea leaves and see what's actually happening on the field.

I can only speak from my own experience. The Fed is very data-driven. They get sources of data, private sources of data, and public sources of data. They'll get private databases of information that they're not going to disclose or share with others as an input. But there are many, many inputs that they take into consideration.

Every 10 days, we go through and understand a market update and an economic update to help us understand and frame what's happening in the economy. They use that data. They're quite wedded to understanding the data.

But they'll take in new sources if new sources become available or they find something that could be useful. They will absolutely take that into consideration, but it won't supplant everything else that they're looking at.

Do you have concerns about the Fed remaining independent? We've seen a bit of pressure from this administration. We've seen it from other administrations in the past. What are your thoughts broadly on the Fed, independence, the importance of that, and their mandate?

Yeah. I know there's a debate—even a healthy debate, I would say—on that point. I do have a point of view. I do think that we've benefited for almost 250 years from having Fed independence. I think it's important to allow the Fed to think long term, and that's why the term of the Fed chair is 6 years: to think longer term than through individual political cycles and to be data-dependent.

I agree, Chamath, that there should be new sources of data made available to allow the Fed to continue to make those smart decisions. In terms of the decision-making within the Fed, that independence allows them to look through a lot of different noise in the economy and think longer term. Are they going to make perfect decisions every time? No.

With 20/20 hindsight, we could all look back and say, “Oh, we would have done it differently.” Are they a politically driven organization, in your experience?

My perspective and my experience is that it is a very data-driven, very apolitical organization. The New York Fed has been very, very focused on just looking at the economy and looking at the market.

They take pride in that, I take it?

They take a huge amount of pride in that. They've gone through some very different political cycles. I've been there for almost 6 years, and yet it's been a very steady process of evaluating monetary policy. Very steady, while they also do a lot to operate the economy. It's pretty cool.

Yeah. Do you think we need to think more about the underlying leverage that the Fed enables in market participants? Specifically, I've said this: I worry that we financialize so much of the economy that hedge funds can take on so much leverage that, even if you have 60 or 70 billion, you're running 1 trillion long—and 1 trillion is not what it used to be, but it's still a lot of money—you can really screw up the infrastructure of America if you blow up or if things go wrong.

There just doesn't seem to be this robust check and balance anymore. Again, we had it for a few years coming out of the GFC because everybody was so burned by it. But I think that all these risk measures, if you look at them, many of them say a lot of these folks are running very levered. I don't know if you see that from your vantage point.

Certainly, as the CEO of Nasdaq, we do see it—not so much in our specific ecosystem, although there are highly levered ETFs and other things like that. Certainly, outside the regulated markets, in the crypto space, there's a lot of leverage there, too. In the derivatives markets, there is.

But at the same time, I think there are a lot of checks and balances within the securities ecosystem that force us to go back toward a mean, and there is oversight that the SEC has on what levered products are at least brought into the public markets.

In terms of the Fed and looking at leverage, I think that the way they focus it is on what truly creates systemic risk. The GFC really introduced the fact that there are certain banks that introduce systemic risk by capitalizing the banks the way they have. They feel like they have addressed a lot of that.

Some of that activity moves outside the banking system, where they don't necessarily have complete control over it. But their view is that it's distributed enough that it doesn't necessarily create systemic risk or a too-big-to-fail hedge fund, for instance. That's how they manage that risk.

Leverage is a part of the system, but we also, I think, have a responsibility to think about how much.

Where do you see the biggest risk in the market today? All markets.

There’s a lot of talk about climbing defaults in commercial real estate and the catalyzing effect that may result from delinquency rates starting to climb. There’s private credit—I’ve heard about those now for several years. I would also say that the banks, to the extent they have a lot of real estate in their portfolio, have been working through that.

I do think that as we start to be in an environment where we can see rates come down, there’ll be a lot of pressure eased off some of those concerns. People are also coming back to work. Commercial real estate is going through a cycle, but it’s going to go through a different cycle. I do think that a lot of banks have been working through those issues and have been managing them quite well. We have over 5,000 banks in this country, so it’s also, again, pretty distributed risk.

So, I’m going to go buy stocks tomorrow.

I think that’s a great idea.

I want everyone to join me in thanking Adena Friedman for being here today.

Thank you.

Thanks. That was great. Thank you.