As CEO of Island ECN, Andresen, with his ragged band of 20- something followers, captured a quarter of Nasdaq’s trading volume between 1996 and 2001. Now some Nasdaq insiders think Andresen might be just the guy to save the day, by replacing Wick Simmons, who plans to step down as CEO. That would be some coup for the 32-year-old, who before fomenting a trading revolution at Island listed “day trader” as his occupation.
“It would mean that Nasdaq had finally acknowledged that they need someone innovative, someone who thinks out of the box,” says Richard Repetto, an analyst for Putnam Lovell NBF Securities. “He would set that place up to be a lot more nimble, more trader-oriented and a lot more aggressive.”
It’s far from a done deal, however. A representative of San Francisco private equity shop Hellman & Friedman, which owns 10 percent of Nasdaq -- and whose chairman, Warren Hellman, is one of the more powerful directors on Nasdaq’s board -- has approached Andresen about the job, say sources close to the situation. But so far the informal discussions have centered only on the CEO job and not the chairman post that Simmons also holds. Andresen, Hellman and Nasdaq officials won’t comment, but sources say that one scenario the board is considering calls for installing an experienced trading executive to operate the business as CEO alongside a chairman who would act largely as an ambassador to regulators and the public. The favorite for the chairman post is Rick Ketchum, Nasdaq’s deputy chairman and president and a former head of market regulation at the Securities and Exchange Commission. But people close to Andresen say he’s unlikely to sign on for that ride, because it wouldn’t give him the control he’d need to cut through Nasdaq’s complicated bureaucracy and make dramatic changes to right its listing ship. Also complicating things are rumors that Nasdaq is seeking to acquire an ECN such as Archipelago or Instinet.
Then there’s the matter of pay. With Nasdaq’s dream of going public in serious jeopardy, it might not be able to put together as attractive a package as Alliance Capital, which in October hired Andresen from Island to head global trading for its Sanford C. Bernstein brokerage subsidiary. Still, the idea of the onetime rebel controlling the establishment may just be too delicious for Andresen to resist. “He’s very aware of the irony, of what him being in this job would symbolize,” says one person close to Andresen. “That just might sway him.”
