I want to know Nasdaq's market capitalization for sometime in
September 2003 (Ideally, say today)
a) This is the entire Nasdaq's market capitalization, and not just the
Nasdaq 100 or Nasdaq Composite
b) Can you state sources and where I can retrieve the information
c) Better still, if there is some place where I can retrieve some sort
of time data

Hello.

You can get daily statistics on this from Wilshire.com:

The total market cap of all U.S. stocks, as of today, was $11.9
trillion.
NASDAQ stocks represented 21.32% of this total value.
source: Wilshire.com
http://www.wilshire.com/Indexes/Broad/Wilshire5000/Characteristics.html

If you don't have a calculator handy,
21.32% of $11.9 trillion is $2.537 trillion.

(Courtesy of Google's new calculator feature:
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=21.32%25+of+11.9+trillion


Note that the total of 3249 NASDAQ companies that are included in the
Wilshire index is slightly less than the total number of issues listed
on the NASDAQ. The reason for this is that Wilshire combines multiple
classes of stock from the same company (i.e., common, preferred, A, B,
etc.). There are few other minor exclusions. See Wilshire
Characteristics for more information:
http://www.wilshire.com/Indexes/Broad/Wilshire5000/Characteristics.html

search strategy:
market capitalization, nasdaq, trillion

I hope this helps.

---

Clarification of Answer by juggler-ga on 25 Sep 2003 23:50 PDT

I notice that the Wilshire figure of $11.9 trillion was actually not
for today, but rather for 8/29/2003 (i.e., they seem to post the total
on an end-of-month basis).

Nonetheless, you could still use the Wilshire Total Market Index to
estimate daily values for the total market cap of the NASDAQ.

Each Wilshire point represents about $1.21795 billion.  This figure is
arrived at by divided $11.9 trillion by 9,770.46 (the value of the
Wilshire Total Market Index on 8/29/03).  You can get the Wilshire
value for a particular day by using the historical quote feature at
BigCharts.com. The symbol is TMWX
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/historical/default.asp?detect=1&symbol=tmwx&close_date=08%2F29%2F03&x=0&y=0

Now, if you wanted to get an estimate of the market cap of the NASDAQ
for 09/25/03, it'd simply be a matter of multiplying the today's
Wilshire value of 9726.40 times 1.21795 billion times 21.32%.  The
total would be $2.525 trillion, slightly below the value a month ago.

I hope this helps.

This sounds like an easy question but it's actually hard to get data
(short of datastream etc). Thanks