Amusingly there is plenty of precedent (link below under Nasdaq Integrated Platform Suffix and the older ACT/CTCI suffixes) for using all of the wonderful character symbols to indicate different classes of securities.
Not as common, again, as it used to be...but still exists.
Nasdaq becomes more and more like a “normal” exchange every year. Historically, they’ve always just done their own thing for their own purpose, so it makes sense.
** for those that don’t know: NASDAQ stands for “National Association of Security Dealers - Automated Quotation (service)”. It was forced into existence by the SEC. Prior to that there was only the NASD, who traded blocks of shares amongst themselves so that each individual security dealer could meet the needs of their customers. As the trading amongst themselves grew larger and larger, the SEC added progressively more regulation until finally the had to build the NASDAQ computer system, which nobody would even recognize today.
So again, they were always separate from everything else and did things that made sense according to their own needs. They were very different until they were no longer allowed to be different.
Don’t disagree there, though this has been status quo for nearly two decades now.
By that measure regional exchanges were their own beasts for a long time. The environment has definitely streamlined a ton since RegNMS was implemented and the exchanges consolidated a bit.
Even the technology stacks the current markets run are basically identical within three families of design (even the upstart markets, and even those that are not directly licensing technology from ICE, Nasdaq, or Cboe). Differentiation just doesn’t pay like it used to.
Shit, MIAX is just the old BATS/Cboe technology with some local flair. There are multiple derivatives of the old Island/INET tech stack, mainly in ATSs, but the iteration Nasdaq is operating on only diverges where extreme message volume factors in.
No one is silly enough to want the abomination of design that is Pillar, but the point still stands that technical differentiation isn’t really important in the way it was 15-20yr ago.
I tried for a while to push internally and amongst a few of the markets to move to ISIN, Currency, MIC but yeah…anything but that.
Honestly the problem is the ticker is too valuable advertising for the listed company, and since listings are not governed by a central regulator in the same way they are in Europe, for example, there’s always going to be this sort of friction about who is willing to bend the most to win the business.
I think ISINs being used in Europe might even predate the EU taking charge of a lot of financial market regulation.
Probably they became more popular/important specifically because tickers did not, which in turn is probably because there are so many countries/exchanges that a global exchange-driven namespace was never really feasible?
Well, listings had domestic regulator control for the most part but I think you hit it on the head. Brokers in Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, or Milan needed to access 15-20 countries worth of exchanges, and the curse in the EU is the multi-currency cross listings.
Easier, if somewhat more verbose, to use the three in combo to identify. Helped somewhat by the message volumes being a small fraction of what they are in the US. Less need to optimize on a per order, or per market data packet basis.
Also explains why FIX is more prevalent in EU markets than it is in the US.
Good thing “xn--zp9h” fits, then.