It acquired a computerized market.
But there are other ideas to keeping computerized markets in check.
The venture also had trouble persuading the Osaka exchange to adopt Nasdaq's computerized market-making systems and to introduce investment vehicles like exchange-traded funds.
These are unhappy developments for a city that has symbolic cultural power and serves as a congested hub point of computerized market, media, and banking integration.
High-speed trading firms have thrived in the computerized markets and now account for more than half of all stock trading, up from 26 percent in 2006, according to the Tabb Group, a financial markets research firm.
When attention has turned to the risks of the computerized market, the new trading sites and high-speed trading firms have managed to fend off critics by pointing to benefits that long-term investors have derived from the sophisticated markets.
Wall Street invested heavily the past couple decades in a computerized market where quantitative investing and trading models correlate past movements between asset classes, then use them to predict future gains and losses, also to arbitrage mismatches.
"We feel we created a monster," says one of the creators of Island, the pioneering electronic securities exchange The first workable fully computerized market, coded in 36 hour marathons by a reclusive whiz-kid named Josh Levine, who allegedly has never been photographed.
In late 2007 when Thain went on to run Merrill Lynch leading the firm while it crashed and burned during the 2008 financial collapse, Niederauer got his shot at running the Big Board, where he promptly apologized for the Vinny remark, and continued the NYSE's move into computerized market making of stocks.
What excites some investors is the idea that the Amex-Nasdaq deal might eventually bring about a kind of hybrid market, a highly computerized auction market that would incorporate the best of both systems.
