It started at a Houston dinner in the fall of 2022, when Greg Abbott told a half-dozen friends the Lone Star State should have its own stock exchange. Sitting across the table was the man who would go on to build it.
On Friday at 9:30 a.m., after practice runs in which Goldman Sachs (GS) and Citadel Securities traded mock symbols, the Texas Stock Exchange — TXSE, “tex-ee” — opened for real, from temporary offices in Dallas, with a handful of small stock symbols. The timing is not an accident: stock trading has never been bigger. SpaceX’s $86 billion IPO was the largest ever, OpenAI and Anthropic could go public within months, and Texas would very much like a land grab from the NYSE–Nasdaq duopoly.
Here is the sober part. An exchange is a network business, and a network with a handful of tenants is a building, not a moat. It took Nasdaq two decades to get competitive with the NYSE. TXSE is on day three.
So TXSE goes on the watch list with a specific tripwire — a real company choosing to list there. Goldman (GS) stays reinforced regardless: it makes money on the plumbing whoever wins, which is exactly why it survived the last three “NYSE killers.”
No action — and that is the action. TXSE goes on the watch list with one tripwire: a real listing moving, not a ribbon-cutting. Goldman (GS) stays reinforced because it earns on the plumbing regardless of which venue wins — the reason it outlasted the last three “NYSE killers.” For clients the read is simpler: where your shares trade has never determined whether your plan works. Fees, taxes, and time do that.