It started at a Houston dinner in the fall of 2022, when Greg Abbott told a half-dozen friends that Texas should have its own stock exchange. Sitting across the table was the man who would build it.
On Friday at 9:30 a.m., the Texas Stock Exchange — TXSE, pronounced “tex-ee” — opened for real. It runs from temporary offices in Dallas, trading a handful of small stock symbols.
The rehearsals were serious. Goldman Sachs and Citadel Securities ran practice sessions, trading mock symbols before the open.
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. Texas would love a land grab from the NYSE–Nasdaq duopoly — a duopoly is a market controlled by just two players.
An open IPO window means new companies need venues, and new venues need companies. Everyone at this party is looking for a dance partner.
A Network With No Crowd Is a Building
Here is the sober part. An exchange is a network business — it gets more valuable as more people use it, and it is worth little until they do.
A network with a handful of tenants is not a moat. It is a building with a nice sign.
Every startup exchange faces the same chicken-and-egg problem. Companies list where the traders are, and traders go where the companies are.
History agrees on the timeline. It took Nasdaq two decades to get competitive with the NYSE. TXSE is on day three.
Day three is not an insult. It is just early. Ribbon-cuttings are easy; liquidity is hard.
Texas has money, momentum, and a governor who plans dinners well. None of that is liquidity yet.
The Tripwire We Set
TXSE goes on the watch list with one specific tripwire: a real company choosing to list there.
We care when a real listing moves, not when a ribbon gets cut. Announcements are marketing. Listings are revenue.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs stays reinforced in the Capital Wealth Growth Portfolio regardless of who wins.
Goldman makes money on the plumbing of markets, whichever venue hosts the trade. That is exactly why it survived the last three “NYSE killers.”
Owning the plumbing beats betting on the race. Pipes get paid either way.
What This Means for Your Account
For clients, the read is even simpler. Where your shares trade has never once determined whether your plan works.
Fees, taxes, and time do that. No trading venue — Dallas, New York, or the moon — changes those three.
So we will watch tex-ee with genuine curiosity and zero dollars. If a real listing moves, you will read about it here first.