Nasdaq announced the expansion and relaunch of Nasdaq’s Mutual Fund Quotation Service (MFQS) as Nasdaq Fund Network (NFN). Nasdaq Fund Network is a global investment product information service, which brings greater efficiency and transparency to the world’s financial markets.
Nasdaq Fund Network provides the global investing public daily access to valuations for listed financial instruments, including mutual funds, money market funds, unit investment trusts (UITs), annuities, Separately Managed Accounts/Unified Managed Accounts, collective investment trusts, alternative investments, and structured products that are listed with Nasdaq. Previously, MFQS was limited to only mutual fund and money market fund listings.
“Nasdaq has been providing market transparency to mutual funds and money market funds more for than 30 years through MFQS,” said Bjorn Sibbern, EVP and Head of Nasdaq’s Global Information Services. “The launch of Nasdaq Fund Network is a great step forward to serve our clients with better market transparency, which is the cornerstone of fair and open markets. Nasdaq Fund Network will make financial markets more inclusive and less opaque for the world’s growing investing community.”
The Nasdaq Fund Network is the next generation of Nasdaq’s MFQS. Launched in 1984, MFQS was instrumental in bringing transparency to the mutual funds and money-market funds markets. Prior to its creation, investors struggled to find relevant, accurate and reliable pricing data on funds. Nasdaq helped provide the framework to make mutual funds more accessible and popular with investors, institutions, online portals and media outlets. This service now extends beyond US mutual funds to include many different types of investment products both domestically and abroad.
“We believe that all market participants are better served by access to information, and as a client and an alternative asset operator, the relaunch of Nasdaq Fund Network is a welcome event. In fact, we worked closely with Nasdaq in 2011 to create and formalize its platform for non-listed Alternative Investment Products, which provided increased transparency to the market,” said Bill Miller, President and CEO of CCO Capital, LLC, the dealer-manager subsidiary of CIM Group. “Shareholders of Cole Income NAV, the first daily-traded REIT that qualified for a Nasdaq ticker symbol and the first to be listed in the Alternative Investment Product category, have been able to efficiently access daily pricing information, and they will continue to obtain accurate data on the expanded Nasdaq Fund Network.”
Nasdaq Fund Network (NFN) lists and distributes performance data for 35,000-plus investable products to one million plus investors on a daily basis. Product issuers and asset managers benefit from an automated service that helps bring more awareness to and gather assets for new and existing products. Institutional and retail investors and the general investing public benefit from daily access to transparent fund-level data for a wide range of products to help inform investment decisions.