“Y’all Street” Is Open: What the Texas Stock Exchange Means for Your Money
On Friday, July 10th, a handful of small stock symbols started changing hands on a brand new exchange in Dallas. The Texas Stock Exchange, TXSE, (or “tex-ee” if you want to say it the way the people who built it say it) is officially live.
I run a financial planning firm in the Dallas area, so I’ve been watching this one with more interest than most. Somebody just built a stock exchange down the road from my office – that’s unusual. The last time anyone successfully launched a fully integrated national exchange in this country, disco was still a going concern.
So what actually happened, why did anyone bother, and does it change anything for a retiree in Plano?
Short answers: less than the headlines suggest, but not nothing. Here’s the longer version.
What launched
The SEC approved TXSE on September 30, 2025, making it the 29th registered national securities exchange in the United States and the first fully integrated one (with listings and trading on a single platform) to get approved in decades.
The exchange raised roughly $275 million, which its team will tell you is the most money ever assembled to launch a national exchange. The backer list reads like a who’s who of people who normally compete with each other: BlackRock, Citadel Securities, Charles Schwab, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Fortress, Bank of America. Energy Transfer CEO Kelcy Warren is the majority owner. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry sits on the board.
The rollout is deliberately slow. Test symbols traded on July 6. Real trading in a small set of stocks began July 10. All U.S.-listed symbols are expected to be tradeable by the end of this month. ETF listings are planned for the third quarter, corporate listings for the fourth quarter, and the first IPOs in 2027.
Here’s the part that gets buried in most of the coverage: TXSE currently has zero companies listed on it. Right now it is a place where you can trade stocks that are listed somewhere else. The listing business, which is the whole point, hasn’t started yet.
How stock exchanges make money
Most people assume a stock exchange is something like a public utility, neutral infrastructure that just sits there and matches buyers with sellers. It isn’t. Exchanges are for-profit businesses. The NYSE is owned by Intercontinental Exchange. Nasdaq is itself a publicly traded company. They have shareholders, earnings calls, and growth targets.
They make money four ways:
- Transaction fees. A fraction of a cent per share, charged on trades that execute on the venue. Individually trivial, collectively enormous when you’re processing billions of shares a day.
- Listing fees. Companies pay an upfront fee to list and then an annual fee to stay listed. For a large company this runs into six figures a year. This is the prestige business, and it’s the one TXSE actually wants.
- Market data. Exchanges sell their real-time quote and trade feeds to brokers, data terminals, and trading platforms. U.S. exchanges successfully argued in court that this data is their intellectual property, which means if you want real-time Nasdaq quotes, you pay Nasdaq. Market data typically runs somewhere in the neighborhood of 15% to 30% of a major exchange’s revenue, at very high margins.
- Connectivity and colocation. Trading firms rent rack space in the exchange’s data center so their servers sit as close to the matching engine as physically possible. Microseconds have a price.
Notice which of those are recurring and sticky: listings and data. Trading volume is cyclical and fee-competitive. Listings and the data that flows from them are the annuity. That’s why a group of serious institutions put $275 million behind a startup exchange, and it’s why “we have no listings yet” is the only sentence in this article that really matters.
The scale of what they’re taking on
A little context for how big the incumbents are.
U.S. equity markets traded an average of 17.6 billion shares per day in 2025, worth about $1.1 trillion a day in dollar value. Volume was up more than 40% year over year. Stock trading has never been bigger, which is exactly why now is an interesting moment to plant a flag.
The New York Stock Exchange, founded in 1792, and Nasdaq, which launched as the first all-electronic exchange in 1971, together account for essentially all of the corporate listings in the United States. That’s the duopoly TXSE is aiming at. Between them they list somewhere around 5,000 to 6,000 companies, including nearly every household name you own in your index funds.
And it wasn’t always this way. The U.S. used to be full of local exchanges. Philadelphia, founded in 1790, was the oldest, and there were exchanges in New Orleans, Chicago, and Spokane, among others. Technology and consolidation ate all of them. Nasdaq bought Philadelphia. The NYSE’s parent bought the American Stock Exchange. What’s left is a two-horse race.
One more sobering data point: Nasdaq needed roughly two decades after its 1971 launch before it was a real competitor to the NYSE. And more recent challengers, like IEX (of Flash Boys fame) and the Long-Term Stock Exchange, have gotten almost no listing traction at all.
So why build a new stock exchange?
Four reasons, roughly in order of how much weight I’d put on each.
- Texas is genuinely where the business is now. More Fortune 500 companies are headquartered here than in any other state. Dallas now ranks second only to New York City among U.S. metros for finance-sector employment. Goldman Sachs had fewer than 900 people in Dallas a decade ago; it has around 4,500 today and is building a campus for more than 5,000. JPMorgan employs more people in Texas than in New York. This is not a hypothetical financial center.
- The Delaware exodus. Texas established its own Business Court in 2023, explicitly to compete with Delaware’s Court of Chancery for corporate incorporations. It’s working. Tesla and SpaceX moved their incorporation to Texas after Delaware’s court struck down Elon Musk’s pay package. Coinbase and Dell followed. Exxon Mobil announced a move earlier this year. TXSE is the capital-markets bookend to a corporate-law strategy that’s been running for years.
- Issuer-friendly governance. The idea got real momentum in 2024, after Nasdaq adopted a rule requiring companies to disclose board-level diversity data. (Nasdaq no longer has that rule.) Traders started talking about an “anti-woke” exchange in Texas. CEO James Lee has consistently pushed back on that framing and says the exchange is apolitical and simply CEO-friendly. Whatever you call it, the direction is clear: Texas has passed laws raising the bar for shareholder proposals at companies incorporated, headquartered, or listed in the state, and TXSE’s CEO has been publicly campaigning to curb the influence of the proxy advisory firms.
- Better plumbing. TXSE built its matching engine from scratch, which means no decades of accumulated technical debt from bolting new functions onto old systems. Listings and trading run on one integrated platform. That’s a real engineering advantage, if it holds up.
Worth noting, because it cuts against the “race to the bottom” assumption: TXSE’s listing standards are stricter than the incumbents’. A single tier, an earnings test, a $200 million minimum market cap, a $4 minimum share price, four required market makers (one more than Nasdaq), and a mandatory confidential pre-application review. Lee has said the bar is high enough to disqualify roughly 1,500 companies currently on Nasdaq and 200 on the NYSE. The pitch to institutional investors is quality, not permissiveness.
The incumbents noticed
If you want evidence that Wall Street is taking this seriously, look at what Wall Street did.
The NYSE rebranded its electronic NYSE Chicago venue into NYSE Texas and reincorporated it in the state in 2025. Nasdaq did the same thing this year, converting Nasdaq BX into Nasdaq Texas. SpaceX dual-listed on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas in its $86 billion IPO. Both incumbents got their Texas venues operational before TXSE, the actual Texas company, got its own doors open.
So “Y’all Street” now has three exchanges. TXSE’s counterpunch is that it’s the only one actually built, headquartered, and incorporated in Texas. That may or may not matter to a CFO in Houston. We’ll find out in Q4.
The quiet thing that actually matters
Here’s the development almost nobody wrote about, and it’s the one that determines whether any of this works.
In May, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced it was adding TXSE to the list of eligible exchanges for the S&P U.S. Indices, effective when continuous trading began. CRSP, whose indexes underpin Vanguard’s total-market funds, announced the same thing.
Translate that: a company can list on the Texas Stock Exchange and still be eligible for the S&P 500. It will still land in your index funds.
Without that ruling, TXSE would have been dead on arrival. No sitting CEO is going to move a listing to a venue that gets the company ejected from the S&P 500 and out of the passive flows that come with it. The index providers just handed TXSE its permission slip, and it cost the exchange nothing.
What this actually means for your portfolio
Now the part you came for.
You don’t need to do anything. If you own broad index funds, TXSE-listed companies will show up in them automatically once they list and qualify. There is no new fund to buy, no allocation to make, no box to check. Your portfolio is already positioned for this by virtue of being diversified.
You can’t invest in TXSE. The exchange is privately held by its backers. Anyone offering you a way to “get in early” on the Texas Stock Exchange should be treated with the suspicion you’d normally reserve for a stranger with a bag of gold coins.
Where a company lists doesn’t change what it’s worth. Same business, same cash flows, same shares outstanding. A listing venue is a distribution and governance decision made by a management team. It is not a valuation event for you as a shareholder.
The one legitimate investor question here is governance. The Texas laws raising the bar for shareholder proposals, and TXSE’s campaign against the proxy advisory firms, both point the same direction: companies listed in Texas would face less shareholder pressure than companies listed in New York. If you think shareholder activism has become a distraction that keeps good managers from running their businesses, that’s a feature. If you think shareholders owning a company should be able to hold its board accountable, it’s a bug. Reasonable investors land in different places. It’s worth watching over the next few years. It is not worth reacting to this week.
If you live and work in North Texas, the jobs story is probably more relevant to you than the market story. Goldman going from 900 to 4,500 people in Dallas affects your neighborhood, your home value, and possibly your career. Whether AT&T’s shares match on TXSE or the NYSE does not.
The bottom line
TXSE’s website currently says, “Welcome to the real bull market.” Great copy. Very Texas.
But an exchange with no listings is, for now, a very expensive matching engine. Lee said it himself: the proof is going to be in the movement of companies. Watch the fourth quarter, when corporate listings open, and watch 2027, when the first IPOs are supposed to price. If a few large, recognizable Texas companies actually move, this becomes a real story. If they don’t, TXSE joins IEX and the Long-Term Stock Exchange in the category of well-funded exchanges that never quite cracked the duopoly.
Either way, the correct portfolio response for a Dallas retiree is the same as it usually is: enjoy the local pride, and continue following your financial plan/investment strategy.
That’s usually the right answer.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE)?
TXSE is a Dallas-based national securities exchange that began trading on July 10, 2026. It was approved by the SEC on September 30, 2025 as the 29th registered exchange in the United States and the first fully integrated exchange (listings and trading on one platform) approved in decades. It is backed by $275 million from BlackRock, Citadel Securities, Charles Schwab, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Fortress, and Bank of America.
Do I need to change my portfolio because of TXSE?
No. If you own broadly diversified index funds, TXSE-listed companies will show up in them automatically once companies begin listing on TXSE and qualify for the S&P and CRSP indexes. There is no allocation change, no new fund to buy, and no action required for a typical DFW retiree or pre-retiree.
Can I buy shares of the Texas Stock Exchange?
No. TXSE is privately held by its institutional backers. Anyone offering retail investors a way to “get in early” on the Texas Stock Exchange should be treated as a scam. The exchange is not publicly traded.
Will TXSE-listed companies still be in the S&P 500?
Yes. In May 2026, S&P Dow Jones Indices and CRSP both confirmed that TXSE is an eligible listing venue for their U.S. indices. A company can list on TXSE and remain eligible for the S&P 500 and for Vanguard’s total-market funds. This ruling was arguably the single most important precondition for TXSE’s viability.
How is TXSE different from NYSE and Nasdaq?
TXSE built its trading platform from scratch, runs listings and trading on one integrated system, and has adopted stricter listing standards than the incumbents (higher market cap floor, higher share price minimum, additional market maker requirement, and mandatory confidential pre-application review). It is also incorporated and headquartered in Texas, which management argues aligns it with the state’s issuer-friendly corporate governance laws.
When will companies start listing on TXSE?
ETF listings are planned for the third quarter of 2026, corporate listings for the fourth quarter of 2026, and the first IPOs for 2027. As of the July 2026 trading launch, TXSE has zero companies listed on it.
What is Y’all Street?
“Y’all Street” is the informal name for the emerging financial hub in Dallas-Fort Worth, driven by rapid expansion of Wall Street firms in the region (Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Charles Schwab), the Texas Business Court’s competition with Delaware’s Court of Chancery, and now three exchanges operating in the state: TXSE, NYSE Texas, and Nasdaq Texas.
Should a Dallas retiree do anything about TXSE this week?
No. The correct portfolio response for a DFW retiree is to enjoy the local pride and change nothing. The exchange’s success will play out over years, not weeks. The most relevant local development for North Texas residents is probably the finance-sector jobs boom, not the exchange itself.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, tax, or legal advice. It is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Market data cited reflects publicly reported figures as of publication.
Sources: Wall Street Journal; Texas Tribune; Dallas Morning News; Cboe Global Markets 2025 U.S. Equities Year in Review; S&P Dow Jones Indices; CRSP; TXSE Form 1 filing and listing standards analyses; txse.com.
About the author: Allen Mueller, CFA, CFP®, is an “engineer turned finance nerd” and founder of 7 Saturdays Financial, a wealth management firm based in Dallas, Texas.
The core focus of 7 Saturdays Financial is helping high performers retire with confidence and make the most of their 7 Saturdays a week.
If you’re interested in seeing if it’s a good fit to work together, the first step is to schedule a complimentary intro call.
