Transcript of The New Era of the Stock Market with Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman | All-In Summit 2025

Over the last year to date, up 14%. Over the last year, Nasdaq shares up 40%. Over the five-year period, 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.

Adina transformed Nasdaq into a global tech powerhouse.

Adina is a dealmaker at her core.

Nasdaq is in the business of deals.

We are here to advance economic progress for all.

Ladies Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Nasdaq CEO, Adina Friedmann. Welcome.

Hey, Jason. How are you? Thanks for coming. How are you? Hi, Chamal. It's great to see you. Hey, Dina. 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 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?

Oh, I'd never like to pick favorites. At Nasdaq, we don't pick favorites. We have great companies, but obviously, Rene is a wonderful Nasdaq listed company, and I've gotten to know him very well with Arm. So I would say I always have great conversations.

Sorry, but Nasdaq is more than a market. I think I wanted to start with this real 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 just share a little bit more about the broader business. Sure.

Thank you. Well, so first of all, we are really proud of our foundation as a market. But as we started to grow and expand the business, first of all, when I became CEO, we had about two and a half billion dollars in revenue. Today, or as of the end of last year, we had a little over two and a half billion dollars of EBITDA. So we've grown and expanded the business quite dramatically. And how we've done that is taking our core as a market and saying, what more can we do for our clients? So we are an architect of modern markets. We provide our technology to our 17 markets, and we sell it to in 35 other markets around the world. So market infrastructure is our business, and we do that globally. Then the second is really being powering that innovation economy, like companies like Renee, Arm and other great companies. So we've expanded that. So our index business now has about $700 billion of assets under management that are tied to those great innovators, in addition to creating better abilities for companies to navigate the public markets and investors to find investments.

And you had a big announcement today.

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

Which almost Vlad foreshadowed before you actually.

Yeah. And actually it goes right back to that first pillar of being the architect of modern markets. You want to tell people what? You think we should? Yeah. Okay. So this morning we announced that we're going to be bringing tokenization into our market. So making sure that equities are tokenized and traded on market, in the markets, not in a side sleeve, but actually in the core markets.

So the eventual goal or is it today? 24 by 7, 365. Equities just let it rip constantly.

I think we are 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?

Not for equities yet. I think that we're walking before we run. But I think that getting to 24/5 is a major advancement for the US equities markets. And then on top of that, now with tokenization, if we can introduce that also into the markets, it allows us to really think When we think about streamlining the post-trade processing, bringing and modernizing elements of the markets that have a lot of friction, we are hyper resilient and we're hyper scaled. We manage... Like today, we had 95 billion messages come into our systems today, and we had a median million return time of 20 microseconds from order to trade. We handle like 3 million messages a second. It's hugely scaled. But then at the same time, once that trade occurs, there's a different process. And then the post-trade process, as we know, is an area where tokenization really shines and really cutting down the friction, managing capital flows across the global ecosystem, and really bringing that capability into the market since it could be the next-I'm curious.

Your reaction to this. You know there's this very famous curve, which is like you get this early font of insanity, and then there's the trough of disillusionment, and then you grow through. Does it seem like crypto is actually a blockchain? It's finally real. It's like there's real companies doing real things, stablecoins, what Sacks did with the genius act.

Well, 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 because I I think that 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 and 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, 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 or anything, but wasn't there a concept around the markets having an end of the day at four o'clock, allowing people to have a life and to sleep and to 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 or some crazy event happens in the world, God forbid, a terrorist attack or a hack or something, and now we've all got to wake up at 3: 00 in the morning and decide, do we trade or not? Was that the resistance to this? And then how do you justify it like, Hey, it's going to be worth the fact that none of us are ever going to sleep again. Yeah.

So I think, first of all, I started at Nasik in 1993. And back in the '90s, we had a vision to go to 24/7 markets, and we just couldn't achieve it both technologically, the technology wasn't there to do it, but also regulatory. A big part of that was that resistance from the industry saying, I like to be able to finish my day and go home. Actually, we need those points in the day. I mean, the market open the market closed will continue to exist in a world of 24/5 markets. But you'll have a US trading day and you'll have non-US trading day. Our systems turn on at 4: 00, and they turn off at 8: 00 at night. 4: 00 in the morning, 8: 00. Trading occurs during that entire period of time. But the official trading days of the United States are 9: 34. 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. I mean, we have the Nasdaq itself. We have the top seven companies in the world that's on Nasdaq.

Those companies are global. Investors have global interest. The Nasdaq 100 is one of the most traded products in the world. The futures trade 24/5, so why shouldn't the underlying That's how we look at those non-US trading hours and then the trading hours and trying to find that confluence in the way it would-There's a lot of hand wringing about the number of companies that have gone public, the weight of being a public company, the stay private longer moment.

Took Uber 11 long years. Stripe is private now, close to 15 years, SpaceX. We have some folks who maybe think things should run differently. We had Spotify go public in a direct listing. You have Chamath experimenting with SPACs, what should the IPO market look like and how can we make it now that we have a government that's maybe a little more engaged, let's say, and less napping as administration? How should the An IPO market change and that process change to encourage people to maybe not stay private so long because all the gains are being captured by the elites, by the qualified purchasers. The accredited investors can barely get in, and 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 two or three.

Yeah. First of all, I think it's really good to remind all of us why the public markets so important for the economy. When a company goes public, they get 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 just the performance of the Nasdaq 100 over 40 years of its existence, the average return on the Nasdaq 100 over those 40 years is a 14. 25% annual return.

So that's double the broader market.

It's an incredible return. If individuals have access to these great companies, As you know, I saw your pot 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 and the growth of the economy and the success of the economy. I've always believed in the balance between public and private markets. I think there are reasons for them both to thrive and be great for everyone. But the public market experience has become this massive burden. 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 take that decision. We have talked very closely with the SEC and others about what can we do to lighten the load, to make it so that it's not such a huge change. We've advocated for changes in disclosure reforms, proxy reform, litigation reform, all of those things. They're 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 actually do think that you will find that there is really good, valid reasons for certain disclosures. I think disclosure is a cleansing event. But they have to disclose so much more than that's 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 offering 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 the capital raise. Why not have that? We have that ability today. And then SPACs are another avenue to public markets. Icos over time, we'd like to bring that. That, to me, is frankly a tokenized direct listing. So how do we bring all those capabilities into the markets and make them available and make these companies feel like it's exciting. What if that requires the SC...

Hold on, just one follow-up, if I may. That requires the SEC to take a little bit more risk, and they seem like an organization that is incredibly risk-off and very conservative in their approach, did they need to change their approach to be a little bit more forward-thinking in your mind?

Well, first of all, I would say that Chair Atkins is 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 this all need to exist? Because there's a lot of that, too. 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 these things convert? Well, can I ask you? 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 perks 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?

Will 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 are always investor protection first, always. So how do we make sure that we create the right structure with fairness and equality for our investors while also being really big innovators? We've moved our markets to cloud. We've really brought forth 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.

And is that something that if the federal government just creates that clarity, you could compete with Coinbase, you can compete with Binance, you can compete with OKX, you can compete with the decentralized?

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

Today, all of your markets are equities. These are securities that have secured interest in an underlying business asset. There's a business that's buying and selling stuff and has employees and those stuff. But much of what we see the volume today in prediction markets, in crypto markets, there aren't underlines. There's a point of view value on some value of, for example, in the prediction markets, an event. Historically, you'd have to figure out a way to play that event with some equity trade. Do the prediction markets actually create a new way to express investment BCs that are going to perhaps be a superset of the way we trade equities? Or are these just fundamentally different, that owning an interest in a business is different than having a point of view on a thesis?

I have to say the options markets are as much match a prediction market as the other prediction market. We own and operate the largest options marketplace in the United States. We're very engaged in looking at how do you think about... You are making a decision as to the direction of travel in an underlying equity, but you're not actually trading in the underlying equity. So 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, no, versus an option market, you're layering in your bets across multiple price points and different durations. There's, by the way, a million and a half strikes in the options markets today. I think that in some ways, the 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 more simple. There is an opportunity, and I think it's also good that the SEC and the CFD we see, by the way, are joining forces to think about these markets much more comprehensively, because if we can bring that regulatory paradigm across the markets and make more of these asset classes more 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 San wanted to buy a bunch of Uber when it was a private company, they did that through Nasdaq, and I guess secondMarket.

Yeah, Nasdaq private market.

Nasdaq private markets, which came through the acquisition for secondMarket. That's right. It did. If I remember my history, correct? That's pretty good. 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 an OpenAI share or SpaceX shares or Stripe shares?

I think the first thing we focus on in the private market is being issuer first and 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, etc. And there is a second 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, to 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. And so the institution becomes the owner. Remember, the wealth clients are not actual owners of the shares. They're owners of the SPV that are owners of the shares. But letting the issuer have the ultimate decision on whether or not they invite those investors in, I think is actually really important in the private context. And That's part of, I believe, is what makes now the private market different than other providers in the private space is we always partner with the issuer.

Because they're going rogue, basically. They're going around the backs of the CFO and CEO 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 it is a different responsibility. There is different risk that's involved in opening the aperture to billions of people. There should be disclosures also provided as a result of that. 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 just an absolute abundance of index funds. It It 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 seven, eight or nine 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? Because you've seen it now for 30 years.

Yeah, I have. Well, first of all, I think that the rise of index investing is making investing more accessible in general. It's a very, very inexpensive, very accessible and very liquid way to have a view into a sector or 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. I had to teach him how to read an S1 or a 10K. That's tough. He spent some time on it. But indexes makes, I think, investing much more accessible. However, I also agree with you that you also have to balance it with active management. You 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 world within the markets. Whenever it skews towards the passive, what happens is that 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 that the Nasdaq 100 or these innovative companies, they are performing the way they're performing for reason. And it becomes very difficult to beat the index because these companies are very hard. It's hard to find companies that deliver a better return than they do. And I think that's where active management has struggled, just because they are 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 I think that there is a trend of de-dollarization underway. There's a report that just came out on central bank holdings that have shown dollar-denominated, I think it was treasuries declining from 60 to 40%, gold going from 10 to 20% over just the last decade, with some acceleration perhaps underway. Obviously, China selling down treasuries. What's your view on where we are with respect to spending, with respect to central bank interest in dollar-denominated and what that implies for our markets. Yeah.

I think, first of all, I am a huge believer in dollar as a reserve currency, and the fact we will be persistent as a reserve currency over a long period of time. I think our economy is just such a powerhouse. I think that the rule of law and the stability that we have and that we deliver to the world is going to continue to provide that anchor for the dollar to be the reserve currency. But investors will express themselves that they see certain risks started to manifest. I do think, as you guys talk about a lot, the amount of debt that we have in the country is something that we're starting to see manifest itself in the markets, and we'll make it so that they look for alternatives. If they feel like the return characteristics of a treasury are different than what they could get in another, the risk-weight of returns versus other currencies or other treasuries. They're going to express themselves. I believe in the US. I feel like I believe in the power of the US economy to work its way through this. I believe that you guys talking about it a lot is Are we going to help us make ourselves work our way through it.

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

Do you think that there's a data issue at the Fed? I've talked about this before. I worry that bad inputs, bad decisions, and they don't necessarily benefit from the best of what's available. And quite frankly, the best of what's available is held close by certain companies and not really shared broadly because that they think is their edge. So I'm just curious how enabled the Fed is to actually see the tea leaves and actually see what's actually happening on the field.

I can only say, I can just speak from my own experience. The Fed is very data-driven. They get sources of data, private sources of data, public sources of data. They'll get private databases of information that they're not going to disclose or they're not going to share with others as an input. But there are many, many inputs that they take into consideration. They share every 10 days. We go through and understand a market update, an economic update to help us understand and frame what's happening in the economy, and 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, but what are your thoughts broadly on the Fed and independence and the importance of that and their mandate?

Yeah, I know there's a debate. A healthy debate. A health debate, I would say on that point. I do have a point of view. I do think that the Fed, we've benefited for almost 250 years on having Fed independence. I think that it's important to allow the Fed to think long term. That's why the term of the Fed chair is six years, to think longer term than through an individual political cycle skills and to be data dependent. I agree to Moth, there should be new sources of data that are made available to allow the Fed to continue to make those smart decisions. I think 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 to think longer term. Are they going to make perfect decisions every time? No. Are they a political-With 2020 Hindsight, we could all look back and say, Oh, we would have done it differently.

Are they a politically-driven organization in your experience?

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

They take pride in that, I take it?

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

Do you think that we need to think more about the underlying leverage that the Fed enables in market participants? And specifically, I've said this, I worry that we financialize so much of the economy that hedge funds. They can take on so much leverage that even if you have 60, 70 billion, you're running a trillion long. And a trillion is not what it used to be, but it's still a lot of money where you can really screw up the infrastructure of America if you blow up or if things go wrong. And there just doesn't seem to be this robust check and balance anymore, yet again. I mean, 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. So I don't know if you see that from your vantage point, if you have a point of view on that.

Certainly, as the CEO of Nasdaq, we do see it not so much in our specific ecosystem, although there are highly levered, let's say, 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 forces us to go back towards the mean, and there is an oversight that the SEC has on leverage products are at least brought into the public markets. In terms of the Fed and looking at leverage, I think that the way that they focus it is what really truly creates systemic risk. The too big to fail. Yeah. 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've addressed a lot of that. And yes, some of that activity moves off outside the banking system that they don't necessarily have complete control over. But their view is that it's distributed enough that it doesn't necessarily create a systemic risk or having a too big to fail hedge fund, for instance.

But that's how they manage that risk. Leverage is not part of the system, but I think there's a responsibility we all have 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. Private credit.

Can I just say, I've I've heard about this now for several years, and I also would say that the banks, to the extent they have a lot of real estate in their portfolio, they've been working through that.

I do think that as we start to be in an environment where we can start to see rates come down, I think that there'll be a lot of pressure that's eased off of 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. But I do think that a lot of banks have been working through those issues and have been managing actually quite well. We have over 5,000 banks in this country, so it's also, again, it's pretty a distributive risk.

I'm going to go buy stocks tomorrow.

I think that's a great idea.

Everyone is joining me in thanking Tina Friedmann for being here today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That was great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.