What you probably already know: Prominent Texas business leaders first announced their plan to create the Texas Stock Exchange in June 2024, with plans to launch in 2025. They missed that date but, in late March, parent company TXSE Group just “nabbed its first primary listing commitment” from Westwood Holdings Group, an asset management firm based in Dallas, according to The Dallas Morning News. Dallas-based TXSE now plans to launch this July, with corporate listings beginning in October and the first initial public offerings expected early next year. Organizers say the exchange will serve both the U.S. and international markets, with the potential to “transform” U.S. capital markets.
Why it matters: Though the current push began recently, the Texas Stock Exchange website says it “has been a long time coming,” noting that the Texas legislature first commissioned a study more than 50 years ago. The new TXSE will become a formal competitor to the New York Stock Exchange, with some observers saying — as Formidable reported in October 2024 — that it is a response “to what some business and political leaders have called ‘woke capitalism.’” The TXSE site notes that the entire Southeast quadrant of the United States is already home to more than 20% of the nation’s 4,600 publicly traded companies and has contributed more than half of total job growth in the U.S. since 2018.
What it means: TXSE Group has already raised $275 million across several funding rounds and is backed by more than 85 major investors, including BlackRock (the world’s largest asset manager), Citadel Securities, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Charles Schwab and Goldman Sachs. TXSE says its mission is “to reverse the decades-long decline in the number of U.S. public companies by reducing the burden of going and staying public.” “Our strong capital position validates our mission to bring increased competition to the U.S. capital markets,” TXSE Group Founder and CEO James H Lee says. TXSE “will alter the trajectory of our public markets and help establish Texas as a new global leader in capital markets. Real competition has finally arrived.”
What happens next: In February, the New York Stock Exchange launched the NYSE Texas Advisory Board to help shape its future, two months after NYSE Texas reached a milestone of 100 dual listings. The University of Chicago Business Law Review notes that TXSE “is arguably the most formidable challenge to the NYSE and Nasdaq duopoly in recent memory,” adding that “it has raised expectations not only among those who champion the rise of Texas as a finance center and resist the imposition of progressive norms, but also among scholars who favor competition as a solution to structural problems in the national market system.”
