Short answer
The Nasdaq is a US electronic stock exchange and the name of the indexes built from its listings. The Nasdaq Composite tracks almost every company listed on the exchange — over 3,000 of them — while the Nasdaq-100 tracks the 100 largest non-financial listings. NQ futures track the Nasdaq-100.
"The Nasdaq" is used for three different things in the same sentence all the time, which is why the term confuses new traders. It's an exchange, it's a broad index, and it's a 100-stock index — and when a futures trader says "Nasdaq", they almost always mean the third one.
1. Nasdaq the exchange
The Nasdaq Stock Market opened in 1971 as the world's first electronic quotation system. There is no trading floor and no specialist shouting orders: matching happens in a data centre, order book against order book. That electronic-first design is why it attracted technology listings from the start and why its market data has always been cheap to distribute.
2. The Nasdaq Composite
The Composite (ticker IXIC) is the broad index: it includes nearly all common stocks listed on the exchange, weighted by market capitalisation. Because the exchange is tech-heavy, the Composite behaves like a technology benchmark even though it holds retailers, biotechs and industrials too.
3. The Nasdaq-100 — the one you trade
The Nasdaq-100 (ticker NDX) holds the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the exchange, rebalanced annually and modified-cap-weighted so a handful of megacaps can't fully dominate it. Every futures contract, ETF and CFD marketed as "the Nasdaq" for day traders references NDX, not the Composite.
How many stocks are in the Nasdaq?
It depends which "Nasdaq" you mean, and the exchange figure moves constantly as companies list, delist and merge.
| Thing | What it is | How many companies |
|---|---|---|
| Nasdaq Stock Market | The exchange itself | Roughly 3,000–4,000 listed companies, changing weekly |
| Nasdaq Composite (IXIC) | Broad index of exchange listings | Effectively all common-stock listings |
| Nasdaq-100 (NDX) | Large-cap non-financial index | 100 companies (a few firms hold two share classes) |
| NQ / MNQ futures | Futures on the Nasdaq-100 | Tracks the 100, not the Composite |
If someone asks "how many stocks are in the Nasdaq" and expects one number, the honest answer is: about 100 in the index traders quote, and a few thousand on the exchange behind it. Check the current count on Nasdaq's own listings page before quoting a figure — it changes every month.
Why day traders care about the Nasdaq-100 specifically
- — Concentration: a small group of megacap technology names drives most of the movement, so the index trends cleanly instead of averaging itself flat.
- — Volatility: NDX typically moves further per session than the S&P 500, which means more range to work with intraday.
- — Liquidity: the NQ futures contract on it is one of the most liquid equity index products in the world, with tight spreads through the whole US session.
- — Reaction to macro: rate expectations hit long-duration growth stocks hardest, so CPI and FOMC produce large, tradable moves.
From index to contract
You cannot buy an index. To trade the Nasdaq-100 you buy something derived from it: the QQQ ETF, an index option, or a futures contract. Futures are what most intraday traders use, because they trade nearly around the clock and are priced per index point rather than per share.
The index is the scoreboard. The futures contract is the thing you actually hold.
Learn it by watching it
Reading a definition of an index tells you very little about how it behaves at 09:30. The fastest way to build that intuition is to replay real Nasdaq futures sessions bar-by-bar — watch how the open extends, where the pullbacks stop, and how the index reacts to a data release, with no money on the line.