Acquisition, Stock Market | featured news

Nasdaq OMX Group Inc agreed to buy electronic Treasuries-trading platform eSpeed from BGC Partners Inc for $750 million in cash, providing the exchange operator an entry into one of the world's largest and most liquid cash markets.

...Today, as individual investors buy and sell common stocks less and less, the transaction symbolizes the rapidly advancing utilization of vehicles that are too esoteric for the general public to comprehend– futures contracts and options on the direction of interest rates, or oil and natural gas prices, or metals and agricultural products like wheat and corn, or precious metals like gold and silver, and especially credit instruments like mortgages and bank loans.

The New York Stock Exchange is being sold to a little-known rival in Atlanta for about $8 billion, ending more than two centuries of independence for the iconic Big Board. The buyer, IntercontinentalExchange, a 12-year-old exchange that deals in investing contracts known as futures, said Thursday that little would change for the trading floor in Manhattan's financial district.

Nasdaq OMX has stepped up its opposition to the planned merger between NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Börse and said the deal would "irrevocably destroy" competition in Europe's listed-derivatives markets, just as the European Commission nears a decision on the tie-up.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Germany's Deutsche Boerse AG pulled off a $9.7 billion takeover of NYSE Euronext as shareholders approved a deal to create the world's largest exchange operator amid resistance in Frankfurt.

The New York Stock Exchange, an icon of American capitalism, is expected to take a crucial step toward ceding control to a German company on Thursday, with little opposition expected from investors.

The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange said Sunday that it rejected an $11.3-billion bid from Nasdaq and IntercontinentalExchange to buy the company.