NYSE Wants to Sell Data to Web Sites

NEW YORK — The New York Stock Exchange, a unit of NYSE Euronext, has asked the U.S. Securities Exchanges Commission for permission to start selling real-time market data to media and Internet organizations starting in July, seeking to join NASDAQ OMX and BATS Trading, which recently announced similar projects.

NYSE plans to launch the new product, called NYSE Realtime Reference Prices, on July 1 for a four-month pilot, contingent on SEC approval of the trial project.

NYSE will charge a flat fee of $100,000 per month for data derived from NYSE trades of NYSE-listed stocks. It hasn’t announced a fee schedule for trades on NYSE-listed stocks on other exchanges.

Exchanges need regulatory approval to sell market data to websites, and in January 2007, NASDAQ OMX and NYSE submitted separate requests to the SEC for the right to do so. The use of pilot projects allows the exchanges to go ahead while they wait for definitive approval.

Last week, NASDAQ OMX announced a deal to sell its real-time share data to the Google’s (NYSE: GOOG) Google Finance and other sites for up to $100,000 per month, and two weeks ago, BATS Trading, a fast-growing trading venue that handles about 9 percent of U.S. equities, announced it was providing data free of charge to Yahoo’s (NASDAQ: YHOO) Yahoo Finance.

The moves by NYSE and NASDAQ OMX come at a time when the exchanges are seeking to generate as much revenue as possible from market data, which now makes up for a larger share of revenue than equities trading. At NASDAQ, market data generates 20 percent of revenue, while at NYSE, the figure is 14 percent.

NYSE’s executive vice president for market data, Ronald Jordan, said the plan increases the exchange’s transparency.

“At the same time, our proposal provides for a fair and reasonable economic incentive to the Exchange to produce this data,” he said in a statement.