“The transfer portal is not going the other direction.”

Jeb Hensarling
Strategic Advisor
Texas Stock Exchange
…on TXSE pulling senior exchange talent from Wall Street and LaSalle Street, in an April 22 interview with Bloomberg’s Julie Fine.

Jeb Hensarling borrowed from college football to describe how the Texas Stock Exchange is hiring.

“Jim Lee, our CEO, is a great coach, and he’s taken advantage of the transfer portal,” the former U.S. Representative and TXSE strategic advisor told Bloomberg’s Julie Fine. “We’ve got all kinds of talent that has come in from CBOE, from New York, and from NASDAQ, and they’re coming to the Texas Stock Exchange,” he said.

Since his last Bloomberg appearance, Hensarling said, TXSE has closed another capital raise and is “up to almost 300 million.” He listed a few of the backers: BlackRock, Citadel, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs.

“They believe that there is a place and a need for another stock exchange to compete with a duopoly,” Hensarling told Fine.

Trading should start mid-to-late this summer, he said, with listings to follow in Q4 2026 and the first IPOs in Q1 2027. The trading engine is built and tested. “There’s about eight or nine people who’ve had the experience and credentials to create that engine, and most of them have come to TXSE,” he said. The engine, he added, will be “world class.”

The first listings are set. In the exchange-traded product space, or ETP, TXSE has announced two funds from Cathie Wood’s ARK. “This is a lot of validation from the market and a lot of momentum,” Hensarling said.

The topic turned to large companies and dual listings. Companies aren’t “throwing all in” on TXSE at this point, Fine pointed out. It is, Hensarling agreed, and offered some history.

“Dual listings is something that the New York Stock Exchange used to sell,” Hensarling said, “and then they started to give it away for free once they … put their long-standing Chicago market medallion in a Federal Express envelope and sent it to Texas.” They may disagree with me on that, he said.

Both NYSE and Nasdaq have now opened Texas-branded operations. Hensarling said the competition is good for Texas, but he made a distinction. “There’s only one exchange that was Texas, born, bred, and led,” he said, “and that’s the Texas Stock Exchange.”

NYSE Texas and Nasdaq Texas are subsidiaries, Hensarling noted, with decision-making that still runs through New York. “It’s still a New York bubble when all the activity is moving to the boom belt and moving to Texas.”

Hensarling put TXSE’s opportunity inside what he calls the “boom belt,” 11 southern states he said are pulling in people, wealth, and, in his words, “all kinds of economic activity.”

The boom belt is also where TXSE thinks its first customers live. “We believe that’s the first natural market to be trading and listing on the Texas Stock Exchange,” he said.

“The economic center of gravity is coming to a different portion of the US, and to Texas in specific,” Hensarling said.

Watch the Bloomberg video here.

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R E A D N E X T

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