Walmart is moving from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq market. It's the biggest company to ever make the switch from platforming its stock down on New York's Wall Street to a company with a showroom in New York's Times Square. The thing is, Nasdaq has a cool kids, growth-through-tech vibe — it's where the stocks of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia live.  

To understand Walmart’s thinking behind the move, “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio recently chatted with Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: Let's be fair to Walmart here, right? We think of them as a big box retailer, but they have a sizable online presence that is a stiff competitor for tech company Amazon.

Jay Ritter: Absolutely. Indeed, because of the growth in their online business and successful competition against Amazon, Walmart is now selling at a higher price-earnings ratio than most of the so-called Magnificent Seven.

Brancaccio: You know, it's a popular way to invest these days, to buy the whole S&P 500 index. And so if you're in that index, companies stand to benefit just by virtue of that inclusion. Is there a kind of bump that Walmart might get for being included on the Nasdaq market, which is not an index in itself?

Ritter: By moving to Nasdaq, Walmart is able to be not only in the S&P 500 index, but also in Nasdaq’s QQQ index for the 100 largest companies at Nasdaq. And while not as much money is indexed there as with the S&P 500, some is, and an estimate is another $20 billion is going to be invested in Walmart as a result.

Brancaccio: Now, if you go visit Nasdaq, it's computer-driven. You go over the New York Stock Exchange, it's secretly computer-driven, but there are still some humans wandering around. That's where we still get the photographs at the end of bad market days over at the New York Stock Exchange. Do you think the New York Stock Exchange needs to do some rethinking about its brand?

Ritter: Not necessarily. There are many markets where the individual stocks get traded. So just because a stock changes from the New York Stock Exchange to Nasdaq, where it's listed, that doesn't actually mean that much of the trading volume is going to be changing. It is still the case that the New York Stock Exchange does provide certain certification, and, in recent months, Nasdaq has been under a little bit of scrutiny because of a lot of penny stock IPOs that have been listing there, many of which have been manipulated and most of which have crashed and burned.