DALLAS — With the ring of a golden bell and a roar of cheers sounding through the halls of their temporary home in North Dallas, Jim Lee and his staff celebrated a milestone they’ve worked years to make a reality.
“The Texas Stock Exchange has successfully completed its launch of trading and is now firmly part of the global market structure,” said Lee, CEO of the Texas Stock Exchange.
The team celebrated that with their first closing bell ceremony on Friday, July 31. The market’s operations and trading are now fully live.
For the average investor or 401K holder, this means future trades in your portfolio may be executed through the Texas Exchange, though that tends to be in the behind-the-scenes workings of the process that most don’t actually see. Workers at the exchange do say they hope to begin offering more forward-facing products like exchange traded funds later this year, and they hope to begin business listings on the market in 2027.
Folks in the North Texas business world say that will likely be the milestone where eyes really start turning toward the so-called Y’all Street.
“This gives some exciting optionality,” said Scott Simari from Sendero Consulting.
Simari works with businesses to help prepare them for listings on public markets and their initial public offerings. He says that’s generally a very big task that comes with a lot of barriers to entry — and to remaining listed over time — that many companies simply aren’t in the position to undertake.
However, he said that may be the draw to the new Texas Exchange for many businesses.
Over the past two legislative sessions, Texas lawmakers enacted a number of measures aimed at making the state more business friendly, especially when it comes to going public on a market. In fact, many credit those efforts, in part, to the Texas Stock Exchange eventually becoming a reality, along with the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ also setting up offices in North Texas.
Now, Simari says, it appears those efforts are going to make listing on the Texas Stock Exchange a bit less daunting for many of the companies he works with, cutting out some of the red tape and legal roadblocks that have prevented them from pursuing listings in the past.
“The Texas Stock Exchange does present another option there where, okay then, maybe something that was off the table is now potentially back on the table,” said Simari.
While the new exchange continues to roll-out, the wider Y’all Street is already growing throughout North Texas. The new Goldman Sachs campus is getting closer to completion near the American Airlines Center in downtown Dallas, and several other new and existing businesses have also begun expanding their investments throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area.
Eventually, the Texas Stock Exchange also plans to move to a larger downtown location, with plans to feature a lot of the bells and whistles most would expect to see at a major stock exchange.
During the ceremonial bell ringing, leaders with the exchange said the hope is to become a real competitor to the existing exchanges and help make Y’all Street a competitor to New York’s Wall Street.
“This is pure infrastructure, built to support what comes next. Real competition for primary listings, for the first time in decades,” said Lee as he rang the big golden bell for the first time, and likely not the last.
