Who owns NASDAQ? Does it collect fees from stock transactions?
"NASDAQ OMX Group owns NASDAQ, a stock exchange. It is a corporation, and is listed on the NASDAQ as NDAQ. It makes money by: source NASDAQ also charges for market data services, found in the NASDAQ ""Datastore"". Other information about the fees charged by NYSE and NASDAQ may be found in the Investopedia article The NYSE And Nasdaq: How They Work."
"Without any highly credible anticipation of a company being a target of a pending takeover, its common stock will normally trade at what can be considered non-control or ""passive market"" prices, i.e. prices that passive securities investors pay or receive for each share of stock. When there is talk or suggestion of a publicly traded company's being an acquisition target, it begins to trade at ""control market"" prices, i.e. prices that an investor or group of them is expected to pay in order to control the company.  In most cases control requires a would-be control shareholder to own half a company's total votes (not necessarily stock) plus one additional vote and to pay a greater price than passive market prices to non-control investors (and sometimes to other control investors). The difference between these two market prices is termed a ""control premium.""  The appropriateness and value of this premium has been upheld in case law, with some conflicting opinions, in Delaware Chancery Court (see the reference below; LinkedIn Corp. is incorporated in the state), most other US states' courts and those of many countries with active stock markets. The amount of premium is largely determined by investment bankers who, in addition to applying other valuation approaches, review most recently available similar transactions for premiums paid and advise (formally in an ""opinion letter"") their clients what range of prices to pay or accept. In addition to increasing the likelihood of being outbid by a third-party, failure to pay an adequate premium is often grounds for class action lawsuits that may take years to resolve with great uncertainty for most parties involved. For a recent example and more details see this media opinion and overview about Dell Inc. being taken private in 2013, the lawsuits that transaction prompted and the court's ruling in 2016 in favor of passive shareholder plaintiffs.  Though it has more to do with determining fair valuation than specifically premiums, the case illustrates instruments and means used by some courts to protect non-control, passive shareholders. ========== REFERENCE As a reference, in a 2005 note written by a major US-based international corporate law firm, it noted with respect to Delaware courts, which adjudicate most major shareholder conflicts as the state has a disproportionate share of large companies in its domicile, that control premiums may not necessarily be paid to minority shareholders if the acquirer gains control of a company that continues to have minority shareholders, i.e. not a full acquisition: Delaware case law is clear that the value of a dissenting [target company's]   stockholder’s shares is not to be reduced to impose a minority   discount reflecting the lack of the stockholders’ control over the   corporation. Indeed, this appears to be the rationale for valuing the   target corporation as a whole and allocating a proportionate share of   that value to the shares of [a] dissenting stockholder [exercising his appraisal rights in seeking to challenge the value the target company's board of directors placed on his shares]. At the same   time, Delaware courts have suggested, without explanation, that the   value of the corporation as a whole, and as a going concern, should   not include a control premium of the type that might be realized in a   sale of the corporation." Generally Google gets their data,  directly from the exchanges (Nasdaq, NYSE). This is really expensive   -- tens of thousands of dollars a month just for the license from the exchange, and lots of telecom costs on top of that. A lot will depend on wether you have in your possession the physical share documents or just numbers in your brokerage portfolio. Electronic shares are not traceable as they do not exist as individual entities. ETrade certainly knows who bought how much, but no concept of which ones. Lets say ET buys 1000 shares of Acme, their database looks like this: Now they sell 400 shares to Bob: Bob sells 200, Alice buys 100: ( skipped one transaction for brevity ) Did Alice get 100 shares out of ET's original 1000, or did she get 100 shares that were previously owned by Bob? Or 27 from ET and 73 from ET? Another, less exact way to picture the process is one share is 1ml of liquid. If you return 50ml to the pot it becomes indistinguishable from the rest. At the bottom of the page you linked to, NASDAQ provides a link to this page on nasdaqtrader.com, which states Each FINRA member firm is required to report its “total” short interest positions in all customer and proprietary accounts in NASDAQ-listed securities twice a month. These reports are used to calculate short interest in NASDAQ stocks. FINRA member firms are required to report their short positions as of settlement on (1) the 15th of each month, or the preceding business day if the 15th is not a business day, and (2) as of settlement on the last business day of the month.* The reports must be filed by the second business day after the reporting settlement date. FINRA compiles the short interest data and provides it for publication on the 8th business day after the reporting settlement date. The dates you are seeing are the dates the member firms settled their trades. In general (also from nasdaq.com), the settlement date is The date on which payment is made to settle a trade. For stocks traded on US exchanges, settlement is currently three business days after the trade. This is too lengthy for a comment. The following quoted passages are excerpted from this Money SE post. Before electronic trading and HFTs specifically, trading was thin and   onerous. No. The NYSE and AMEX were deep, liquid and transparent for nearly 75 years prior to high frequency trading (HFT), in 2000 or so. The same is true for NASDAQ, but not for as many years, as NASDAQ is newer, being an electronic market. The point is that it existed, and thrived, prior to HFT. The NASDAQ can be active and functional, WITH or WITHOUT high frequency trading.  This is not historically true, nor is it true now:  Without a bid or ask at any given time, there could be no trade... Market makers, also known as specialists, were responsible for hitting the bid and taking the offer on whatever security they covered. They had a responsibility assigned to them by the exchange. Yes, it was lucrative! There was risk, and they were rewarded for bearing it. There is a trade-off though. Specialists provided greater stability on a systemic level, although other market participants paid for that cost. Prior to HFT, traders who were not market makers were often bounded by, boxed in, by the toll paid to market makers. Market makers had different, much higher capital and solvency requirements than other traders. Most specialists/market makers had seats, or shared a seat on the NYSE or AMEX. Remember that market makers/specialists are specific to stock markets, whereas HFT is not. If this is true, then we are in trouble: HFTs have supplanted the traditional market maker Why? Because trading volume is LOWER now than it was in the 1990's! EDIT In the comments, I noticed that OP was asking about the difference between  I suggest reading this very accurate, well-written answer to a related question, The spread goes to the market maker, is the market maker the exchange? That explains the difference between "Is NASDAQ's CTO the same guy that put the login credentials needed to completely WIPE the production facility of a company in the ""new workers manual""? (something that was rather popular on reddit recently).  I really hope the SEC looks into this..." No, the expense ratio would be something you wouldn't be charged. If you bought shares of the ETF long, then the dividends are usually reduced by the expense ratio if you wanted to know where to find that charge in general. You would have to make up for any dividends the underlying stocks as part of general shorting since the idea is that once you buy to put back the shares, it has to appear as if they weren't missing in the first place. No, the authorized participant would handle changes to the underlying structure if needed. "That share class may not have a ticker symbol though ""Black Rock MSCI ACWI ex-US Index"" does have a ticker for ""Investor A"" shares that is BDOAX.  Some funds will have multiple share classes that is a way to have fees be applied in various ways.  Mutual fund classes would be the SEC document about this if you want a government source within the US around this. Something else to consider is that if you are investing in a ""Fund of funds"" is that there can be two layers of expense ratios to consider.  Vanguard is well-known for keeping its expenses low." (yes, this should probably be a comment, not an answer ... but it's a bit long). I don't know what the laws are specifically about this, but my grandfather used to be on the board of a company that he helped to found ... and back in the 1980s, there was a period when the stock price suddenly quadrupled One of the officers in the company, knowing that the stock was over-valued, sold around a third of his shares ... and he got investigated for insider trading.  I don't recall if he was ever charged with anything, but there were some false rumors spreading about the company at the time (one was that they had something that you could sprinkle on meat to reduce the cholesterol).  I don't know where the rumors came from, but I've always assumed it was some sort of pump-and-dump stock manipulation, as this was decades before they were on the S&P 500 small cap. After that, the company had a policy where officers had to announce they were selling stock, and that it wouldn't execute for some time (1? 2 weeks? something like that).  I don't know if that was the SEC's doing, or something that the company came up with on their own. NYSE and Nasdaq are secondary markets where stocks are bought or sold. The process of creating new stocks via IPO or private placements etc are called Private Market. The missing information is at the end of the first line: the price is from NASDAQ (most specifically Nasdaq Global Select), which is a stock exchange in the USA, so the price is in US Dollars. Say a stock is listed in Nasdaq, and the same company has a stock listed in Tsx. Does the Nasdaq price affect the Tsx price as trading commences? Not directly. Basically, an exchange is a market, and the price is defined only by supply and demand in that market. However, any substantial price differential for a commodity traded in multiple market creates an arbitrage opportunity, and there are many traders whose job it is exactly to find and use such opportunities. Their activity in turn has the effect of reducing the price differentials to the point where transaction costs make them unprofitable. With high-frequency traders around, the time for a price differential to disappear is nowadays measured in milliseconds. If a trader buys from one exchange, will it affect the price of the other? Only through the mechanism mentioned above.  Are there any benefits to being listed in two exchanges? It increases the liquidity of a stock. For a company listed on NASDAQ, the numbers are published on NASDAQ's site. The most recent settlement date was 4/30/2013, and you can see that it lists 27.5 million shares as held short.  NASDAQ gets these numbers from FINRA member firms, which are required to submit them to the exchange twice a month: Each FINRA member firm is required to report its “total” short interest positions in all customer and proprietary accounts in NASDAQ-listed securities twice a month. These reports are used to calculate short interest in NASDAQ stocks. FINRA member firms are required to report their short positions as of settlement on (1) the 15th of each month, or the preceding business day if the 15th is not a business day, and (2) as of settlement on the last business day of the month.* The reports must be filed by the second business day after the reporting settlement date. FINRA compiles the short interest data and provides it for publication on the 8th business day after the reporting settlement date. I agree. Small investors got screwed worse with manually traded shares. Electronic trading was a big part of why fees for trades have come down so much over the years. HFT acts as a tax on small traders, but it is fairly insignificant.  This isn't to say that HFT isn't a problem. Systems that cause flash crashes with no one understanding why, isn't good for the market. A small fee is a small change that could provide a solution to the problem. "I don't understand what the D, to the right of APPLE INC, means. This means the graph below is for the ""D"". There is selection at top and you can change this to Minutes [5,20,60,etc], Day, Week [W], Month [M] I'm not understanding how it can say BATS when in actuality AAPL is listed on the NASDAQ. Do all exchanges have info on every stock even from other exchanges and just give them to end-users at a delayed rate? BATS is an exchange. A stock can be listed on multiple exchange. I am not sure if AAPL is also listed on BATS. However looks like BATS has agreement with major stock exchanges to trade their data and supplies this to trading.com"