Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Mergers between securities markets have been going strong over the past few years. Leading the charge, waaaay back in 2000, were the Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam exchanges, which combined to form Euronext. The past couple of years have seen particularly frenetic activity on this front, with various bourses touting new and bigger combinations. The venerable London Stock Exchange was the ripest target for takeover, and notional deals swirled: Would the Deutsche Börse buy the LSE? Would Euronext buy it instead? Or maybe the investment bank Macquarie? No, wait, Nasdaq!

Well, Nasdaq did finally buy more than 25% of the LSE, which drove away other suitors. Meanwhile, though, some Euronext shareholders wanted it to join up with the Deutsche Börse. In the end, Euronext merged with The Big Board to form NYSE Euronext.

Now the Wall Street Journal reports that NYSE Euronext may go after IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) an Atlanta-based derivatives market . . . which is itself embroiled in an M&A tug-of-war with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Both ICE and the Merc want to buy the Chicago Board of Trade.

So maybe one of these days we’ll be calling some hydra-headed NYSE Euronext ICE CBOT Inc. “The REALLY Big Board.”