Welcome to he NASDAQ OMX fourth quarter 2009 earnings results conference call. At this time I would like to turn the conference over to the Vice President of Investor Relations, Mr. Vincent Palmiere. Please go ahead, Sir.

Good morning everyone and thanks for joining us today to discuss NASDAQ OMX’s fourth quarter and full year 2009 earnings results. Joining me are Bob Greifeld, Chief Executive Officer; Adena Friedman, Chief Financial Officer, and Ed Knight, our General Counsel. Following our prepared remarks we will open up the line for Q&A. You can access the results press release and the presentation on our website at www.nasdaqomx.com. We intend to use the website as a means of disclosing material, non-public information and for complying with disclosure obligations under the SEC Regulation FD and these disclosures will be included under the Events & Presentations section of the website. Before I turn the call over to Bob I would like to remind you that certain statements in the prepared presentation and during the subsequent Q&A period may relate to future events and expectations and as such constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The actual results might differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements. Information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements is contained in our press release and in our periodic reports filed with the SEC. With that I will turn it over to Bob.

Thank you Vincent, thank you everybody for joining us this morning to discuss our fourth quarter 2009 results. Today is a day of celebration for us at NASDAQ OMX and not certainly because the Saints won last night. Today, February 8 is the anniversary date of the date that NASDAQ was founded, so its our 39th birthday. And we cannot think of a better way to celebrate than by announcing the launch of INET in seven of our cash equity markets in the Nordic and the Baltics. The launch of this trading platform is designed to increase liquidity, increase trading velocity, and improve operational efficiencies. So if you’re in New York near our 1 Liberty Plaza office, please stop by for a birthday cake and a celebratory cake. Now I’d like to turn to the quarter, I will begin my remarks by spending a few minutes highlighting some key accomplishments and then update you on the progress of our initiatives. Adena Friedman, our CFO will walk you through the financials in details. This morning we reported net income of $43 million or $0.20 per diluted share. On a non-GAAP basis we delivered a solid quarter with net income of $99 million or $0.46 per share, an increase of 11% when compared with pro forma non-GAAP net income of $89 million or $0.42 per diluted share for the third quarter of 2009. During the quarter we witnessed growth in many of our business drivers enabling us to benefit from the scalable nature of our model. In European derivatives trading and clearing our volumes grew to more than 28 million transactions, up 18% from the third quarter of 2009 and reaching the highest levels for the year. In January, 2010 we saw volumes grow again with average daily volume increasing another 18%…

Thank you very much Bob and good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us today. This morning we reported that net income attributable to NASDAQ OMX for the fourth quarter on a GAAP basis was $43 million or $0.20 per diluted share. The GAAP results include an impairment of $51 million related to our investments in Dubai and Agora-X net of tax, $16 million in pre-tax expenses related to occupancy sublease reserves, work force reductions and other non recurring items, and $12 million of pre-tax gains on the sale of certain businesses. Excluding these items our non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter of 2009 was $99 million or $0.46 per diluted share, an increase when compared to non-GAAP net income of $89 million or $0.42 per share in the third quarter of 2009 or a decrease when compared to the non-GAAP net income of $110 million or $0.52 per diluted share for the fourth quarter of 2008. As you can see on slide six of our presentation this impacts the non-GAAP diluted EPS was $0.01 when compared to non-GAAP EPS in the third quarter of 2009 of $0.02 when compared to the fourth quarter of 2008 when you’re looking at the impact of FX rates on our results. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP results can be found in the attachments to our press release and in the presentation that’s available on our website at www.ir.nasdaqomx.com. Consistent with our prior calls the remainder of my comments will address our non-GAAP results unless I note otherwise. Net exchange revenues were $369 million, an increase of $20 million or 6% when compared to the third quarter of 2009 but a decrease of 8% when compared to the prior year quarter. US cash equities revenues were higher when compared to the third quarter of…

At this time we are going to take questions.

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Daniel Fannon - Jefferies & Co Daniel Fannon - Jefferies & Co : You’ve historically kind of mapped out what you think the revenue opportunities are for some of your new initiatives and ranked them and I think last call you mentioned IDCG as being the biggest and just wanted to get an update. You still have several things out there that you’re working on, what you think has the biggest opportunity, both near-term as well as long-term in terms of your initiatives.

We certainly believe that the interest rate swap market is the largest untapped market for us to try and gain traction in. And our feeling is its almost hard to comprehend in 2010 that a market that large really doesn’t have any sort of basic organization to it. So that stands alone. Many good things going on here, I would certainly direct you to the UK power market where as I said in my prepared comments the spot market is at this point very successful. The large opportunity for us is in the derivatives market and its our goal to have that derivatives market launched sometime in the spring. So we’re optimistic about that. We are certainly excited about what a price size market can mean. Its hard for us to quantify us that in any meaningful way at this point in time. We also have to get regulatory approval for that effort. So I would say just a number of good things going on here and they have different dimensions to them, size led by IDCG. I think immediacy by UK power but like any of these investments you make you never know which one’s going to win at the end of the fourth quarter. Daniel Fannon - Jefferies & Co : And then with regards to your MTF in Europe can you give us some color as to what you think has been the challenge there for you in terms of gaining market share in a meaningful way as some people have, if it was just a first mover advantage with some of the other upstarts or what you think you need to do to get that going.

I think you need to have basic and fundamental deal support for your MTF and for us to get the higher levels of success in that market we’re going to have to be that much closer to our customers. Daniel Fannon - Jefferies & Co : And so are you doing things now to, initiatives or programs to get that going.

Yes, when you certainly recognize the problem being that you have to have the dealer support and that support has to come in some basic and fundamental way we’re working hard at making that happen.

Your next question comes from the line of Richard Repetto - Sandler O'Neill

First congrats on the upward trend in the revenue captured equities, you broke the trend.

That we did, we did. We’re also happy with the $0.46 a share, that was a good trend reversal.

First question is on the balance sheet and the debt restructuring, and with the restructuring can you talk a little bit about the flexibility in regards to what your capital management strategy and the flexibility or not do you get in regards to acquisitions, buybacks, and dividends.

For the first time in two years, we do have financial flexibility in terms of how we use our existing cash and how we can continue to use debt as a means for us to grow. So I think that the new term loan does give us the flexibility to use our cash to buyback shares or pay dividends as well as the acquisitions and investments and we also have the ability to increase our debt to take on acquisitions if we like. That’s one of the main focuses of the refinancing was to give us that new flexibility.

The other thing I would say is we recognize that we’re not a bank, we have a large amount of excess cash on the balance sheet today. You’re keenly aware that this business model generates a lot of cash and that number will obviously increase then as 2010 waxes on. So I think its definitely a consideration of the management and the Board of Directors of NASDAQ OMX in terms of how to best deploy that capital and its something that we’ll be thinking about in the weeks and months to come.

And then the follow-up question is on expenses, normally there has been an associated drop in technology expenses and actually people as well with the consolidation of the platforms and we know INET and now you said whatever, seven or eight Nordic, I guess the question is this already in the run rate because we see the modest uptick in overall year over year expense guidance but is there incremental expense savings from the platform consolidation.

I would say this, one in terms of the move to the consolidated platform today that obviously will result in some expense synergies within the context of NASDAQ OMX in the time to come. But its important to recognize that that’s a smaller scale against a larger organization. So when you look at the expense guidance today it represents some decrease in expenses based upon the [inaudible] today but also there’s other parts of the businesses where we have growth opportunities where there’s necessarily some increases in expenses. So that’s how we net them out in the guidance that we gave.

That’s exactly right. We continue to drive efficiency in the operations, and we do have that type of synergy associated with retiring facts of when that happens this year but we also have other areas where we want to invest in our growth.

And then you did touch a little bit on the regulatory landscape and it looks promising, you’re access services collocation revenues went up as you predicted, what’s been the demand of collocation given the increased visibility the SEC has brought on at say in the last month and a half or so. Could you still see increases in revenues due to collocation.

Definitely, I think the deliberations that the SEC or others willing to take will have zero impact in terms of the business that we have in collocation access services. And in a certain respects increased regulation could be seen as a positive because clearly our collocation business is under the regulatory regime of the SEC. They have complete and transparent insight into the business and I think they’re aware that we run this as a fair access standard business where we make sure that every single customer of ours is treated in the exact same manner and as we’ve spoken about before we ensure that if somebody is 50 feet from the matching engine they have an identical user experience to somebody who is 300 feet. So there’s a lot of pluses to how we run the collocation in terms of fairness so we think that will be a positive for us in the days to come.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Vinciquerra - BMO Capital Markets

I just wanted to go back to the new technology in the Nordic, can you give us a sense for the speed differential between INET and the previous platform you had in place there just to give us a sense for what traders are seeing in terms of increased performance.

Definitely, as you know they’re getting the new version of INET in the Nordics, we’re down to about 250 microseconds, so its about a tenfold increase in speed in the environment. And I think as important as the speed is the fact that we now have a common interface. So our customers in the US or customers in London can essentially do a plug and play into the Nordic marketplace today. So we certainly expect to see increasing velocity coming on the heels of the go live to date today.

And now that you have that project out there, are you going to start looking at rolling INET out to your OMX technology customers to give them the same advantages.

Well its interesting I spoke of [Genium] INET and really this is one of the wonderful outcomes of the merger together, so when you look at the INET technology it is the best in class at handling high volumes of relatively simple instruments. The old OMX technology had the ability to process any variety of asset class, any variety of instrument. So with the Genium project we’re basically using the messaging layer of INET to deliver outstanding speed and combining that which was the application functionality that [Click] brought to the marketplace. So I think you’ll see the vast majority of our customers choose the Genium power by INET platform.

And then in the tech business, nice surge there of course from revenues, can you give us a sense for what the margins are in that business today and what a reasonable expectation would be going forward.

I’d say the margins are better than they’ve ever been. It was a relatively low bar. We have established a long-term goal for this business to get it in and around a 30% margin business which we think is reasonable for a technology business. Its not going to be the level of some of our other businesses and I think today we’re in the mid teens.

Yes, I think that we actually ended the year probably closer to 20% in that business.

And then on the option side, you talked a bit about the growth in market share and of course you mentioned the dividend trading having an effect there, but net revenues actually down $3 million sequentially and I calculate you’d probably traded about 16 million more contracts, was there anything besides the dividend trading that lowered your net capture in that business or is that something, the only driver there that changed things.

I don’t want to say the only driver but it was the dispositive driver so whatever else happened was really not material. It was the dividend trades.

Your next question comes from the line of Howard Chen - Credit Suisse

Happy Birthday to the exchange.

We’re going to be a perpetual 39 now. This is it.

You start counting backwards now, I know there’s a lot floating around Washington right now, I just had a question specifically about the Volcker Rule and the proposals to curb proprietary trading, could you just help us frame how you think about the contribution to your business, or overall market volumes that’s driven from sell side trading operations.

That’s a great question, its kind of impossible for us to answer because we don’t have the orders coming in delineated between proprietary and non-prop and in a sense that shows you the difficulty that the legislators would have prescribing anti prop trading. I think it’s a hard job for them to do because once you get into what’s prop, what’s customer facilitation, what’s riskless principal, it gets impossible. So I think they would have to find a different path to go would be my personal feeling. So we certainly see our customer business primarily focused on serving the buy side institutional efforts and we certainly don’t think that will be impacted by whatever comes out of Washington.

And then switching gears, a follow-up on market technology and the really strong results maybe could you provide us any sense of the composition of the order intake and the big backlog improvement, I don’t know if its geographic or newer versus legacy customers, and how reliable do you think those figures are as we think about the trajectory of that growth going forward.

One is when you look at 2010 in market technology the success was driven by I think a multitude of smaller projects and that has a way of hitting the income statement sooner rather than later. So when we look across our broad range of customers we did I think a good business with the vast majority of them in 2009. I think 2010 is going to be characterized by large amounts of business with a smaller subset of our customer base.

I think we look at the fact that we’ve got Osaka and Kuwait coming on, we also have some larger enhancement initiatives that we hope to achieve in 2010, and those can have some level of delay in terms of revenue recognition since with US GAAP you have to wait until you’ve delivered and the customer has accepted the enhancement. But at the same time we do get continuous requests from our clients to do small enhancements. We call them client requests, CRs, and we continue to see a very healthy number of those coming in but sometimes we don’t, they’re less easy to predict because as they go through the year they might need a small enhancement that needs to get done so you kind of have layered on top of each other some larger implementations in 2010 along with just a continuous request for enhancements coming from our clients. So its very good, the numbers that we provided you are in fact as we said committed just not delivered and that means that the revenue will be coming forward as we get those implementations completed.

And the general comment I will make is that the technology we provide to our fellow exchanges is fundamental to their success. We provide the central matching engine, we provide the core clearing technology. So in that environment there is always things to be done with our customer base. And I think we’ve become increasingly effective at providing those services and that helped drive our 2009 results.

I just want to finalize by saying one thing about architect though, is we’re spending a lot more time with our clients looking at a more holistic view of their exchange in terms of how we can be a strategic partner to them with technology as the foundation so with some of our clients they are looking at our corporate services and how they can deploy those to our issuers. They’re looking at how we can leverage the global market data distribution and broaden their distribution market data and there are other partnership opportunities that are going to come and those will also help bring in revenue probably more towards revenue sharing or what I would call shared risk model.

Was hoping you could provide a bit more detail about the $54 million of discretionary spending, where is it heading in 2010 and maybe help us frame how you gauge the payoff from the $50 million-ish you spoke to spending in 2009, [inaudible] a lot of that was longer term growth initiative in nature.

I would say this, with these initiatives its very important for us to know when to move on from the initiative so we have I think a very good cross functional management process to make sure everything we do is evaluated. We also take an initiative away from this category when it has been profitable for a period of quarters. So as we look at 2010 obviously BX and NOM moved from the new initiative category to part of our core operations in terms of how we manage it. So there’s always more demand for investment dollars than we have supply which I think is a healthy dynamic within the organization. With respect to the new initiatives some of them are small, some medium, some large. We tend to highlight the larger ones on the call. Those that have a bigger claim on the balance sheet. The two biggest efforts right now with respect to dollars are IDCG and [Nuro]. But they’re just one of a number of new initiatives. So I’m not sure what your question was anymore.

Your next question comes from the line of Roger Freeman - Barclays Capital

I guess just coming back to Nuro, it sounds like your refocusing on the dealer fund to get support but dealer support has been the hallmark of your new initiatives, I guess is it that the opportunity has changed where you can get dealer support now where you couldn’t before with turquoise or have you really sort of changed attacks with respect to how you approach it.

I think both factors are coming into line for us. Clearly we led with low pricing and with a small [order] router in, with the benefits of hindsight we probably would have led with a consortium based effort. So I think in terms of our mental evolution combined with other things that are going in the market it seems to be a opportune time for us to do something a little bit differently.

And then as you look at the increased flexibility that you’ve got now under the credit agreements, number one, did they previously hamper any strategic initiative that you would have undertaken.

I would say no, but they probably would have. Let’s take credit for what we accomplished in 2009. We completed the integration of Philly, we completed the integration of Nordic in particular the clearing houses and certainly came to the end of our NASDAQ OMX integration highlighted by the achievements today and as we’ve said to everybody before we’ve always built upon a solid platform and we wanted to make sure that operationally we were integrated before we would contemplate doing anything larger. So I think the timing worked out well where we are now able to declare victory with respect to the acquisitions we have done. We have delivered to our investors and to our customers what we’ve promised and now through the actions of our financial staff we have that kind of flexibility. So it puts us into a different place.

I was getting at it from an acquisition perspective, because one of the things you had hinted at was that you thought you’d be in a position to consolidate over in Europe and you haven’t done anything yet and obviously you’ve had a lot on your plate but it hasn’t been the financial flexibility that’s prevented that.

No, we certainly had a lot to accomplish in 2009 which we’ve done. If we didn’t do what we did on the refinancing then certainly in 2010 it would have been a barrier.

Looking back at the US market share December and January we saw some reversal of the share gains over the course of the fall, internalization was up, couple of your smaller competitors were gaining again, can you just kind of talk to some of the dynamics there.

I would also direct you to the fact that we certainly have made progress in the latter part of January and certainly more progress again in February so I would attribute this more to the ebb and flow. We’re happy with the share gains in the fourth quarter, we’re happy with what we’ve done now in the first quarter and as you know we live in time where we still have individual stocks that can drive market share and depending upon how you’re positioned in that stock at that moment in time, its either a plus or a minus. So in the grand scheme of the market share battle I think its just noise, and we feel happy with our progress.

Your next question comes from the line of David Grossman - Thomas Weisel Partners

It seems like there were a lot of moving pieces in the fourth quarter, a lot of things actually reversing in your favor I think access services we had a price increase, we changed the pricing structure in the US and the transfer from EDX to OMX, did you get a full quarter of benefit from that in the fourth quarter or should we continue to see some tailwinds at least on a run rate basis into the March quarter.

In terms of the changes in pricing on the US side, we did see a full quarter effect from the change in the BX pricing but two months of effect from the change in the NASDAQ pricing. So there could be a little bit of a pickup on that. And then on EDX most of the change in the move over to the Nordic trades system at clearing house came in December, actually the very end of November up to December 7th so we really did not see a full quarter effect of that. In fact most of the numbers came in right at the end and they started trading and clearing really starting in December. So we should see more tailwinds coming from that initiative. And then lastly in the access services side we did see a full quarter effect because that change in pricing was made in the middle of the third quarter.

And I would just add that we have seen on a fairly dramatic uptick in the equity trading in the Nordics in the first quarter of 2010, so that’s been quite pleasant.

And then on the pricing side, obviously you took the move in the fourth quarter and your share really was relatively stable if not improving modestly after that change, is your gut feeling that we’ve gotten to a point where pricing is really stabilized in the US.

I think I’ve said in previous calls that the pricing battles are more around the edges where we all recognize that we have customers across a wide spectrum who have different initiatives and goals through our pricing actions. And you have to decide through your pricing actions which subset of your customers you choose to attract. And every action you take has equal and opposite reaction and then you have to gauge the net effect. So when I look at the pricing actions in 2009 it was contemplated in 2010 its more of the to and froing around which subset of customers you’re trying to get and it’s a fundamentally different game than what existed in 2007 where it was a net wholesale reduction across a wide range of customers.

Your next question comes from the line of Niamh Alexander - Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Niamh Alexander - Keefe, Bruyette & Woods : This is the second consecutive quarter now where your derivatives net revenues exceeded your cash which is congrats to you on the diversification, can I just ask if you take a step back for the options industry how should we think about NASDAQ taking leadership there with some changes because we’ve got the [bifurcated] pricing structure, you’ve got both models right now, is now a good time to think about maybe moving the Philly onto the make or take model or especially with the high frequency volume starting to pick up.

I was concerned that you might find bad new in the fact that our derivatives revenue is doing so well, I’m glad you haven’t. So we’re proud of that. And your question leads right into as you’re obviously aware of what we did in January with the pro rater make or take program with Philly. And we started it with the [spiders] and in November we had about 7.6% market share. In January it shot up to 21.1 and in February its running at 21.5. So clearly this is probably the first hybrid market structure that has worked and its worked from the get-go in a dramatic way. So we’re learning from that and again we’re breeding a culture of innovation in NASDAQ OMX and this is clearly indication of that and we’re proud of it. And that we rolled it out to a couple of options in February and we’ve seen also dramatic changes, we went from 16% to 26% just in, from the beginning of the month. So we’re proud of that. So we’re on to that and we certainly intend to take a leadership role in leveraging the strengths of the dealer market combining it with the maker taker. Niamh Alexander - Keefe, Bruyette & Woods : And just help me understand, I assume the maker taker is typically more lucrative for an exchange, what would be the objection, or what would be the impediments should we say to do a more aggressive transfer over to the maker taker, is the risk that you lose the customer volume.

I would not say, I would not agree with your premise that its more lucrative. It really depends and I think in the options world the maker taker is lucrative but I don’t mean to any way point any negative comments on the dealer centric model there. We play with both. Its really a question what does the customer want and what can you do to leverage your existing platform so we’re focused on that. And when you look at the pro rate maker taker that we rolled out it did have capabilities in that plan to make sure it retained its attractiveness to retail order flow. Niamh Alexander - Keefe, Bruyette & Woods : And then just I know you like to lever the mother ship when we talk about non organic growth but if you could update there in terms of are we still thinking about putting new products on existing platform or should we maybe think about NASDAQ expanding into kind of new services as it were, maybe some more horizontal integration. Like new kind of services instead of just products shall we say.

Let me talk about our listings business for a second where I think we’ve led the world in providing additional services to our listed companies and you see that that provision of services is one driving revenue growth for us, increasingly driving profit growth and also driving switches. So when you look at the number of companies that switched from competing exchanges to NASDAQ OMX the provision of services directly from us has been a key differentiator. So we want to continue with meeting our customer needs, continuing to drive our revenue growth in that business and I think you’ll see us intensify our effort in that area in the time to come and we think that’s just a wonderful growth opportunity. We have this privileged relationship with 4000 listed companies and its our job to make sure that we one, provide services and lever that distribution channel. Niamh Alexander - Keefe, Bruyette & Woods : If I could clarify real quick, with respect to the expense guidance there was just over like $30, $35 million related to the debt retirement, would that be kind of the one-time in the first quarter.

I’d say its closer to $40 million because it was $30 million associated with accelerating the fees from the old debt and then $10 million from the expiration of the interest rate swap so its closer to 40 on related to that particular transaction and then the other $10 million or so is really related to continued efforts in the technology area to become more efficient and as we do that we’re going to have some one-times associated with that effort throughout the year so that’s pretty much what comprises the full $50 million. Niamh Alexander - Keefe, Bruyette & Woods : And then with respect to the debt, would that most of it hit in the first quarter.

It will all be in the first quarter.

Your next question comes from the line of Edward Ditmire - Macquarie Capital

Is there anything discrete that might be keeping you from doing a stock buyback such as being a load to take on more financial leverage after getting your debt upgrade or is it should we simply interpret the decision between buybacks which seem like they would be highly accretive right now with the stock at 9x versus M&A opportunities that of course could offer more upside.

Our stock is at 9x, that seems mighty low doesn’t it. I would say this as I said before we now have flexibility. We have excessive cash on our balance sheet and we certainly recognize we’re not a bank. I think our Board of Directors recognizes that and its for the Board to consider how to best allocate that capital. And this is something that we will be focused on in the weeks and months to come.

There’s no preexisting buyback authorization.

No.

Your next question comes from the line of Celeste Mellet Brown - Morgan Stanley

Just coming back to the Nordic surprising on a positive front that you maintained your share on the equity side, can you help us think about the competitive dynamics over the next 12 months, a lot of changes with clearing and INET launching today, do you expect to see more competition coming into that market as your competitors see the increased volumes etc.

Let’s say this as compared to a year ago, we are certainly significantly better positioned to compete. So a year ago we had an environment where the lack of CCP gave a fundamental advantage to MPS out in London. So today we have CCP, a year ago we had a platform while improved was not competitive with other MPS. Today we have the fastest platform on the planet running our Nordic marketplace. So we feel obviously very strong that we’re in a position to grow this market in some fundamental ways. We know our market is incredibly attractive to our US based customers now that we have essentially a plug and play capability. And I think its important to recognize the pricing action we took in the Nordics in January and it was a new and creative response as an established exchange to the pending competition from MTS and other exchanges and we allow people to essentially hit a max payment rate to us. And this allows us to lock into revenue that we had in 2009 and the ability to then grow that revenue based upon new entrants coming into the marketplace and that as I said is different, we haven’t seen it done by any established exchange before. We think it will be surprisingly effective.

And sticking to the Nordics, again on the derivatives side how tight do you think you have a grasp on the derivatives volumes that have moved over from EX. We’ve seen talk of competitors trying to step up their efforts in that market. Do you feel like now that you’ve made the move you’ve locked it or there’s still some risk as the year progresses.

There’s always risk but the greater risk was moving the volume away from EDX so we definitely feel proud of the fact that that volume essentially moved. I won’t say 100% but certainly 99% of the volume has moved. So there’s always risk but on a scale the risk is dramatically declined to where it was three and six months ago. We will continue to stay close to our customers and make sure that we’re delivering value to them. And obviously they have recognized that by the wonderful success we had in December of 2009. And I think its important to recognize now with this EDX transition we have essentially turned our Nordic clearing house into a European clearing house. The new members, the 60% growth in membership was driven not by new members from the Nordics, but by European members coming in and they also requested us to make some changes to our clearing house practices that brought it more in line to what they are expecting in Europe and we have done that. And so now this clearing house is positioned, we have the connectivity with the customer base and there’s many ways we can lever this clearing house in the time to come.

Your next question comes from the line of Robert Napoli - Piper Jaffray

Question on, just to follow-up on the US options business it does, what do you view the outlook for capture rates in the US options business as we move into 2010 and 2011. It does seem like the competitive battles are maybe ramping up somewhat there and I know you talked about the mix in the fourth quarter but I was wondering if you could give a little bit of an outlook, your best feel for capture rates.

I would focus on the market structure first and foremost. So it’s a little bit different than the equity dynamic so the nature of the market structure and the participants who are engaged in your market structure in some ways are more important than your particular nominal rate on a transaction. So we have to continue to deliver market structure innovations and advancements that retains and increases our customer base. So certainly with the pro rate maker taker model we put into Philly we’ve done that. We increased share. We have some reduction in rate for those particular options but clearly the overall revenue has increased dramatically. So I think the options space is more nuance than the equity space and allows I think a good management team the opportunity to execute very well.

A question on the access services revenues and margin, can you remind me the pricing, how you price that business and what are the, if you give some feel for the operating margins on the access services business.

So on access services we, its purely a monthly fee although we do allow people if they want to pay forward essentially and guarantee their [inaudible] for a year, they can pay us a slightly reduced rate and knowing that we have a year revenue locked in. But generally it’s a monthly fee and it depends on the service so if they’re getting just a port, just a fixed connection into our market, its in the hundreds of dollars a month. But if they’re collocating in our data center and putting servers in the data center we call them cabinets, then they’re paying us a few thousand dollars a month to collocate those servers and some customers will have one server and some customers will have 25 servers. Just depends on how much volume they’re flowing into the marketplace. And then they also pay for the market data that they’re receiving as a distributor so they’re paying the distributor fees for the market data that they’re receiving as well. So it adds up to a few thousand dollars a month and I think all of our rates are published so they’re available for everyone to see and everyone pays the same. But it is essentially monthly revenue. In terms of margin its not dissimilar to the overall margins in market services. We don’t break out the services margins but under the new contract with Verizon that we entered into late last year we feel comfortable in saying that the margins on that are at least the same as what we get overall for market services.

How much capacity do you have to grow that business as far as the collocation portion, what kind of a revenue growth rate would you place on that business over the long run.

In terms of capacity we actually Verizon completed a build out of the data center and we have the ability, we actually have a further build out later this year locked into our contract so that we have the ability to essentially I think we tripled the capacity of the data center associated with the build out. So we now have excess space and the ability to take in new demands from clients and I think that its something that we expect to continue to grow in terms of demand and we’re out there actively selling space.

As we said a year ago we had more demand than supply. We have that in the right balance right now where we have supply certainly for what would be the foreseeable future and the sales force is out there selling.

And then just on the deal front now that you do have more flexibility I was wondering if you could give a little color into what opportunities you see in the market. I’m sure any time anything is available that you are on the distribution list, is there a lot of activity going on in the market today.

We’re an automatic recipient of any deal and that’s probably not that far from the truth, but that being said in the environment you describe which we essentially agree with, the necessity of maintaining discipline is paramount and so we do that. We have our north star in terms of which guides us. We have to be leveraging the mother ship. It has to accrete within 12 months. Very large deals can go slightly longer but not so much longer that you’re trying to predict the future. So that being said there’s definitely opportunities out there. Things that we consider. But our discipline will always guide us.

Your next question comes from the line of Jonathan Casteleyn - Susquehanna Investment Group

You mentioned starting the trading of your UK power business within the next six months how does that compare to your original scheduled timeframe and is there any way to quantify the impact either in startup costs or new earnings.

Its sooner than we originally thought and the good news here is the users in the marketplace, the spot market are saying you need to go live sooner rather than later. And at this point in time its our internal issues to be ready to go live. So we thought we had six months, we have less time than that. We’re working hard to make it happen sooner. That being said we’re not quantifying at this point what the revenues are. We just know that the UK power market is roughly equivalent in size to the Nordic power market and you can see how large an opportunity that is for us.

And I would say in terms of the investment its really existing resources that we’re using to build out this capability because its obviously building on the strength of our know how and our expertise in the Nordic power market so its basically leveraging the systems and people we already have.

And the work we did to consolidate the clearing houses in 2009 provides the platform for us to now lever that to use it for UK power so that network has been done and its not so much incremental expenditure it’s a question of what takes the priority. So we’ve moved this up on the priority list with respect to our projects and obviously there’s a cost on the downstream of some other things that are not getting done.

So any costs associated with the initiative are in your run rate guidance.

No doubt.

And then any chance we can get an update on the Borse Dubai holding, I know they’re a separate entity, but any communicate with them and any sort of indication of their longer term intentions with the stock holding.

Well as you know we have representatives on their Board, they’re actively engaged Board members and they have certainly communicated to us in no uncertain terms that they are long-term holders of their position in NASDAQ OMX.

Your final question comes from the line of Johannes Thormann – HSBC Global Bank Johannes Thormann – HSBC Global Bank : One question, you talked about your success in migrating business from EX to your own strong Nordic [inaudible] and mentioned also clearing what is your risk for this migration if a competitor buys EMCF from [inaudible] or a majority stake at least in that platform.

Well those two are not related, to the EDX’s are NASDAQ OMX branded license derivatives products. EMCF was set up as a cash equity clearing house. We currently own 22% of it. At the time of the investment we made it very clear that we were not trying to create a vertical silo and we invited others whether it be exchanges and/or MPF to take an equity interest in EMCF. Our goal with respect to clearing in Europe is to create a competitive dynamic that drives down the cost of clearing in Europe but then has a secondary benefit of increasing the velocity of trading in the market.

There are no additional questions at this time; I would like to turn it back over to management for any additional or closing comments.