A visitor walks through the new lobby of the Nasdaq in New York. While the Nasdaq helped create the electronic revolution in stock trading, now it stresses the personal touch in its battle to make up lost ground in the competition for company listings with the New York Stock Exchange.

Bloomberg/New York


One morning in November, Jay Heller stood at his desk at the Nasdaq Stock Market monitoring thousands of orders to trade Virgin America. A crowd including the airline’s Chief Executive Officer David Cush looked on.
Heller was overseeing the share auction on Virgin America’s first day of trading following its initial public offering. After 17 minutes, he released the stock and a burst of 1.6mn shares were sold in a split-second. Heller shook hands with Cush and Nasdaq OMX Group CEO Robert Greifeld, celebrating the exchange’s latest successful IPO.
While New York-based Nasdaq helped create the electronic revolution in stock trading, now it stresses the personal touch in its battle to make up lost ground in the competition for company listings with the New York Stock Exchange. Heller, 42, is the fulcrum of the campaign, appointed a year ago to the newly created position of IPO execution officer.
“There’s always been humans at Nasdaq,” Heller, who’s been at Nasdaq since 2008, said during an interview. “But the changes bring a visibility and a transparency for companies that list on the exchange.”
While the two exchange operators have dueled for years over the hottest companies, momentum has swung in NYSE’s favour since the 2012 debut of Facebook. In that pivotal event, Nasdaq got the listing, its software blew the first trade, and two years later the biggest IPO in history - Alibaba Group Holding Ltd - was listing on NYSE.
Though Nasdaq has hosted more IPOs in each of the past two years - winning 101-95 in 2013 and 170-107 in 2014 - it trails in dollars raised, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In 2013, companies going public on NYSE raised $40bn compared with $15bn at Nasdaq, and last year NYSE won $65bn to $23bn, the data show.
Worse for Nasdaq, NYSE is winning an increasing number of Internet and technology firms. That’s an about-face from the 1990s boom when Nasdaq was the preferred home for tech startups from Netscape Communications Corp to Yahoo! Inc Among NYSE’s 2013 victories: Twitter, which at the time was the biggest technology IPO since Facebook.
To woo those companies, the NYSE relaxed standards to allow smaller firms to list and built contacts in the northern California hub of technology companies. That trend has continued after the NYSE’s parent was purchased in 2013 by Atlanta-based Intercontinental Exchange. “The NYSE’s hybrid market model and transparent IPO platform continues to attract companies of all sizes and industries from around the globe,” Intercontinental Exchange Chief Financial Officer Scott Hill said during a Nov. 4 conference call. “Our IPO pace is trending well above 2013 and we remain on track for our third consecutive record year in technology IPOs. We are making solid progress at the NYSE and we are optimistic about 2015.”
After Facebook, Big Board executives emphasized the role humans play in its IPO process, a message that resonated with some Corps. A critical factor in Alibaba’s decision was the memory of how a malfunction at Nasdaq delayed Facebook trading, according to two people familiar with the matter.
“Choosing NYSE came down to intangibles,” JD Sherman, chief operating officer of technology company HubSpot, said.