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Few investors know that when they ask their broker for a current price of a New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) or NASDAQ stock, the broker is paying for this data and that the revenue from the sale of market data is a major source of revenue for all the exchanges. The price for market data is set by a consortium of all the exchanges trading the same securities, and is thus a price set without competition. The consortium then disseminates a data stream that contains consolidated data from all the exchanges.

Over the thirty years since this structure was established by the Securities and Exchange Commission, many have wondered whether a price set in this way reflects the value of the data, whether data from all the exchanges are necessary for investors, and even whether the data properly belong to the exchanges that profit from their sale. Now that the NYSE and NASDAQ are both private, profit-making companies, these questions are coming to the fore with greater urgency. One reason the exchanges have privatized is to meet the competition from new electronic trading venues, and some observers have suggested that this new competitive environment provides a basis for competition in pricing market data. At this conference, a group of experts will discuss how the major exchanges are approaching this issue and what alternatives there may be for modifying the current system.