The world's most heavily traded stock isn't that of an American software giant, a Japanese mega-bank or a European cell phone company. In fact, it's not the stock of one particular company. It's an exchange-traded fund, or ETF. The Nasdaq 100 Index Trading Stock, better known by its symbol, QQQ, trades nearly 100 million shares per day-half again as many as Intel or Microsoft. Much of that volume comes from professional traders, but the QQQs also attract plenty of buy-and-hold investors. John Jacobs, who helped create the QQQs for Nasdaq and is now creating locally denominated versions of the shares for stock exchanges around the world, figures that about 800,000 to 900,000 of the portfolio's million shareholders (a breadth of ownership matched by only a few dozen companies) are long-term investors. He expects those numbers to climb as ETFs are increasingly offered in 401K retirement plans, an area that has up until now been largely the domain of mutual funds.
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