Nasdaq Surveillance

Market surveillance and trade surveillance are often used interchangeably, and terminology can vary by organization, jurisdiction, and buyer. In Nasdaq’s product portfolio, the distinction is based on the audience and surveillance use case each solution is designed to support. 

Nasdaq Trade Surveillance supports market participants that need to monitor their own trading activity, controls, and potential conduct risk across markets, venues, products, instruments, and entities. It helps surveillance teams identify, investigate, and document potentially suspicious activity within their own trading and compliance environment. 

Nasdaq Market Surveillance supports exchanges, regulators, SROs, and market operators that need broader oversight across participants, venues, products, asset classes, and markets. It helps market oversight teams monitor activity across a wider ecosystem, review events, and support fair and orderly markets while helping oversee potential market abuse. 

Cross-market and cross-product surveillance brings together relevant market, reference, enrichment, and participant activity data so teams can review relationships across venues, instruments, asset classes, and participants in context. This can help identify behaviors that may not be visible in a single-market or single-product view. 

For market participants, Nasdaq Trade Surveillance supports cross-market and Cross Product surveillance by helping firms connect activity across related instruments and venues, including securities, ETFs, futures, options, ADRs, warrants, indexes, and other related products. This helps surveillance teams review connected activity together and investigate potential abuse across their own trading environment. 

For exchanges, regulators, SROs, and market operators, Nasdaq Market Surveillance supports a broader market oversight view across participants, markets, venues, products, and asset classes. This helps oversight teams reconstruct events, understand relationships, and assess potential market impact across the wider market ecosystem. 

Nasdaq Trade Surveillance and Nasdaq Market Surveillance can support different surveillance review cadences, including real-time, near-real-time, intraday, T+1, and post-trade review. This allows surveillance teams to review activity at the point in the workflow that best fits their market, data environment, internal processes, and regulatory obligations. 

Real-time or near-real-time review can help teams identify potentially suspicious activity closer to when it occurs. T+1 or post-trade review can support analysis using completed trading-day information, broader datasets, and additional context. 

For market participants, Nasdaq Trade Surveillance can support review of the firm’s own trading activity across the cadence that fits its compliance program and operating model.  

For exchanges, regulators, SROs, and market operators, Nasdaq Market Surveillance can support market oversight models that require real-time review, T+1 review, or a combination of both. 

A surveillance solution should support the review cadence that best fits the organization’s regulatory obligations, market structure, data inputs, and operational workflow. 

Cloud-based and on-premises surveillance models can both support effective oversight, but they differ in deployment, maintenance, scalability, and control considerations. Cloud-based models may support faster scaling, managed infrastructure, and more frequent updates, depending on the vendor and service model. On-premises models may be preferred where organizations require direct control over infrastructure, data residency, or internal technology governance. 

The right model depends on regulatory requirements, information security policies, data architecture, integration needs, and operational preferences. Buyers should evaluate deployment choice alongside resilience, update cadence, configurability, auditability, and support model. 

Nasdaq Trade Surveillance is delivered as a SaaS solution and hosted on AWS cloud infrastructure. It provides the scalability of cloud-based surveillance while helping firms address common considerations around security, resilience, operational management, and data handling. Buyers should evaluate cloud-based surveillance solutions based on factors such as security, resilience, data governance, regulatory requirements, integration needs, and operational support. 

Growing firms, exchanges, regulators, SROs, and market operators should look for surveillance solutions that can scale across additional venues, asset classes, products, entities, users, data volumes, and use cases as their surveillance needs evolve. Scalability should not only mean handling more data; it should also include configurable analytics, workflows, reporting, governance, auditability, and the ability to add or adjust coverage over time. 

For market participants, Nasdaq Trade Surveillance is a SaaS solution designed to support firms as they add new markets, asset classes, products, venues, data volumes, or operating windows. Nasdaq can deploy additional markets and scale the underlying server environment as client coverage needs grow. 

For exchanges, regulators, SROs, and market operators, Nasdaq Market Surveillance is designed to support market oversight as market structures evolve. It can support new markets, new asset classes, additional participants, and changing data volumes, helping organizations adapt their surveillance coverage over time. 

Buyers should assess whether a surveillance solution can support both current requirements and future growth, including new markets, new asset classes, tokenized or digital assets, expanded trading activity, and changing regulatory or oversight expectations. 

Surveillance platforms may include tools for alert queues, assignment, prioritization, evidence collection, investigation workspaces, escalation, approvals, case management, audit trails, and reporting. These tools help teams move from alert review to investigation, documentation, and decision-making in a more consistent workflow. 

Nasdaq Trade Surveillance includes workflow capabilities such as alert queueing, case management, escalation, audit trails, and regulatory reporting within the same system. This helps surveillance teams review alerts, investigate activity, document outcomes, and manage cases more consistently. 

Depending on the organization’s needs, configuration, and surveillance use case, Nasdaq Market Surveillance can support oversight teams with tools such as Investigation Canvas, Evidence Cards, Replay, Spread Analysis, and Entity Activity View. These tools are designed to help teams reconstruct market events, review supporting evidence, understand trading relationships, and assess potential market impact. 

These capabilities can support productivity by bringing alerts, data, visualizations, evidence, workflow, and reporting into one platform, which may reduce the need for teams to move across disconnected tools during review and investigation. 

When evaluating surveillance software, buyers should look for a solution that can help teams connect relevant data, detect potential market abuse behaviors, prioritize alerts, investigate efficiently, document decisions, and adapt as markets and regulatory expectations evolve. Important areas to assess include market and asset-class coverage, data integration, configurable alerting, risk-based prioritization, investigation tools, workflow, case management, reporting, auditability, deployment model, scalability, and vendor expertise. 

For market participants, Nasdaq Trade Surveillance supports firm-level surveillance across trading activity, markets, products, venues, asset classes, and entities. Key capabilities include connected data, configurable alert scenarios, risk signals, Z-scores, investigation tools, case management, workflow, audit trails, and reporting. 

For exchanges, regulators, SROs, and market operators, Nasdaq Market Surveillance supports broader market oversight across participants, markets, venues, products, and asset classes. Key capabilities include configurable analytics, scoring, rolling benchmarks, signal alerting, contextual mitigating and aggravating factors, machine learning, artificial intelligence alerting, Evidence Cards, Investigation Canvas, Replay, Spread Analysis, and Entity View. 

These capabilities can help surveillance teams review activity in context, reduce alert noise, focus on higher-risk behaviors, reconstruct events, and document how alerts were reviewed, escalated, closed, or reported. 

Digital asset and crypto surveillance solutions should be evaluated based on the organization’s business model, asset coverage, trading venues, data sources, regulatory obligations, and growth plans. “Digital assets” is a broader term that may include crypto assets, tokenized assets, stablecoins, and other digitally represented instruments, while “crypto” is often used more specifically to refer to cryptocurrencies and related trading activity. 

Buyers should assess whether a solution can detect potential market abuse behaviors that may appear across both traditional and digital asset markets, such as insider trading, wash trading, spoofing, layering, manipulation, front running, and cross-product abuse. Digital assets and crypto may introduce additional considerations around venue structure, liquidity, data quality, custody, and market fragmentation, but many surveillance risks still require the ability to understand trading behavior in context. 

Nasdaq Trade Surveillance and Nasdaq Market Surveillance can help support crypto and digital asset surveillance for startups and growing firms, depending on the firm’s needs and surveillance use case. Nasdaq's surveillance technology can help teams monitor for potentially suspicious activity, review connected trading behavior where relevant, and investigate alerts with supporting evidence and context.

Within surveillance platforms, alert parameters and risk thresholds are often configurable so teams can tailor monitoring to the markets, products, entities, and behaviors under review. This may include adjusting scenarios, thresholds, scores, queues, escalation rules, or reporting views depending on the platform and deployment model. 

Both Nasdaq Trade Surveillance and Nasdaq Market Surveillance are informed by Nasdaq’s surveillance expertise, customer base, and evolving client needs. The specific configuration tools differ by solution. 

Nasdaq Trade Surveillance supports configurable alert scenarios, signals, and Z-scores. These capabilities can help firms compare activity against relevant historical behavior or expected patterns so surveillance teams can assess whether activity appears unusual in the relevant instrument, entity, market, product, or alert context. 

Nasdaq Market Surveillance supports configurable analytics such as signal alerting, mitigating and aggravating factors, scoring, rolling benchmarks, and artificial intelligence. These capabilities can help oversight teams compare activity against relevant patterns or benchmarks and assess whether behavior appears unusual in the relevant market, instrument, participant, or alert context. 

Any configuration process should be supported by appropriate governance, testing, documentation, and review so changes remain appropriately governed and aligned with the organization’s surveillance objectives.