Nasdaq (QQQ) on Solana

Nasdaq Inc. (NDAQ) is trading around $89.23 per share at a roughly 25.4x P/E ratio, which an Excess Returns valuation model suggests aligns with intrinsic value following an 82% share price run over three years. The analysis, citing a projected EPS of $4.85 and a return on equity of approximately 20.4%, concludes the market has already priced in the company's above-cost-of-equity returns, leaving limited margin of safety at current levels.

Growth prospects center on Nasdaq's expansion into AI-driven analytics and private markets data — accelerated by acquisitions including the recent Dasseti deal. While one community analysis places the stock roughly 19% undervalued based on AI upselling potential, the piece also flags recent insider selling as a cautionary signal. The overall picture is of a well-run exchange operator trading fairly, not cheaply, with future upside contingent on new product lines delivering expected margin expansion.

SpaceX's weighting in the Nasdaq 100 is expected to more than double in a scheduled late-September 2026 rebalance, rising from approximately 1.28% to around 2.82%, according to pro forma data from Nasdaq's Global Index Watch. The expansion follows the expiration of share lockup restrictions that capped SpaceX's free float when the company joined the index in July, freeing additional shares for passive tracking funds to absorb.

The adjustment is expected to trigger billions of dollars in purchases from index-tracking vehicles. The Invesco QQQ Trust — the primary ETF tracking the Nasdaq 100 with roughly $481 billion in assets — will need to increase its SpaceX exposure proportionally to match the new weighting. Additional lockup tranches are scheduled to expire in coming months, which could push SpaceX's allocation even higher in subsequent rebalances.

The companies at the top of the Nasdaq 100 — Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle — are collectively spending more than $1 trillion on AI infrastructure across 2025 and 2026, and an increasing share of that is debt-funded. Combined bond issuance by hyperscalers hit $121 billion in 2025, up from a $28 billion annual average over the prior four years, representing roughly 30% of all U.S. investment-grade corporate bond net issuance last year. Through mid-2026, the pace has accelerated further to $170 billion year-to-date.

What makes the leverage difficult to assess is that a large portion of the financing occurs outside regulated bank channels — through private credit syndicates and non-bank lenders whose exposure does not appear on standard public market dashboards. Mid-tier cloud providers are using rapidly depreciating GPUs as loan collateral, while data centers financed by REITs and private equity depend on sustained hyperscaler lease demand. For QQQ holders, whose index is heavily concentrated in the same names driving this debt surge, the opacity of the underlying financing structures means the true leverage embedded in the trade is materially larger than balance sheets alone suggest. If AI software revenue fails to scale fast enough to justify the infrastructure spend, the feedback loop — reduced cloud consumption, mid-tier provider defaults, private credit freeze — runs directly through the index's largest constituents.