After celebrating the five-year anniversary in March of the Nasdaq 100 exchange-traded fund he created, John Jacobs isn’t resting on his laurels. The Nasdaq executive vice president is aggressively marketing the wildly successful ETF, which is known by the ticker symbol QQQ and trades a whopping 110 million shares per day in the U.S., to overseas investors. Jacobs brought versions of the fund to Mexico and Japan in May and plans to introduce it in Israel later this year. Also on tap is an expansion of the European-registered version of QQQ, which already trades in Belgium, Ireland and Italy, to Germany and Switzerland. “Our goal is to increase the visibility of, and investment in, our listed companies,” says Jacobs, 45, a 21-year Nasdaq veteran.
His offensive comes amid a broader pullback by Nasdaq CEO Bob Greifeld from his predecessors’ failed strategy of operating stock markets throughout the world. Licensing QQQ in major foreign markets could allow Nasdaq to maintain its brand overseas and bring in some much-needed extra revenue while focusing on its core U.S. businesses of trade execution, listings and market data. Indeed, the bourse continues to seek listings and investors from outside the U.S., efforts that Jacobs believes can be bolstered by promulgating Nasdaq’s popular ETFs globally. Operating foreign-based markets is not “a viable strategy,” he says. “So we stopped that one dead cold. But the others are very viable and will continue to exist because they’re good strategies.”
