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Nasdaq OMX Group Inc agreed to buy electronic Treasuries-trading platform eSpeed from BGC Partners Inc for $750 million in cash, providing the exchange operator an entry into one of the world's largest and most liquid cash markets.

The benchmark index has repeatedly come close in recent days, but has pulled back each time as investors grappled with concerns about the banking crisis in Cyprus. The benchmark index was recently trading over 1,565.15 points, up 0.2 percent, despite a report of rising claims for unemployment benefits.

...Today, as individual investors buy and sell common stocks less and less, the transaction symbolizes the rapidly advancing utilization of vehicles that are too esoteric for the general public to comprehend– futures contracts and options on the direction of interest rates, or oil and natural gas prices, or metals and agricultural products like wheat and corn, or precious metals like gold and silver, and especially credit instruments like mortgages and bank loans.

With large portions of lower Manhattan still dark early Tuesday, U.S. stock exchanges said they were testing contingency plans to ensure trading resumes as soon as possible this week after Hurricane Sandy smashed into the East Coast.
U.S. markets will be closed for a second day, but the New York Stock Exchange said that despite reports that its historic trading floor suffered irreparable damage, no such damage has occurred and that contingency plans are being tested only as a safety measure.

Apple is the world's most valuable company. The Dow Jones industrial average is probably the world's best-known stock index. So don't they deserve each other? Consider this: If Apple had been added to the Dow in June 2009, the last time there were serious rumors that it would happen, the average would be about 2,500 points higher than it is today and well above its all-time high.

The exchange operators extended the deadline for completing their planned tie-up to March 31 while European competition authorities continue an in-depth probe of the deal.

Nasdaq OMX and IntercontinentalExchange said they will take their bid for NYSE Euronext directly to shareholders after being rebuffed twice by the exchange.