A Texas stock exchange wants to take on New York. The odds aren’t good.
livemint.comThe Texas Stock Exchange is looking to steal New York’s crown as the center of U.S. capital markets. It has a powerful force behind it: red-state frustration with the perceived liberal agenda of Wall Street.
But that might not be enough to win business from the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, which enjoy an effective duopoly on corporate listings and have withstood repeated attempts by others to break in. Earlier this week, the venture announced that it had raised about $120 million to launch a Dallas-based stock exchange that would let companies save money on costs of complying with NYSE and Nasdaq listing rules. The TXSE, as it is known for short, plans to file an application to run a stock exchange with the Securities and Exchange Commission later this year, according to Chief Executive James Lee.
Lee said his exchange would be apolitical. But prospective investors who heard the TXSE’s pitch said it leaned heavily on criticism of Nasdaq’s listing rule that sets minimum targets for racial and gender diversity of their boards. The rule, approved by the SEC in 2021, prompted criticism from Republican politicians and a court challenge from conservative groups.
A spokesperson for TXSE denied that the venture’s pitch emphasized the board-diversity rule. Still, one of the TXSE’s most prominent supporters—Texas Gov. Greg Abbott—has stressed that the new exchange won’t promote a left-wing social agenda.
He took a dig at Nasdaq’s board-diversity rule in a Thursday interview on CNBC. “We need to make sure that Texas companies, and companies similarly situated, are not going to be cut off from capital markets in New York with policy decisions made from the left in places like New York," Abbott said. Elon Musk, a vocal critic
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