In the fall of 2022, the governor of Texas went to dinner in Houston with a half-dozen friends. Before the plates were cleared, Greg Abbott told his buddies around the table that there was something else he wanted to order—and it wasn’t on the menu. He’d like the Lone Star state to have its own stock exchange. Sitting across from the governor, James Lee was just the man to build it. Even for a state that takes pride in making everything outsized, the idea was a big one. When Nasdaq launched in the 1970s it took the exchange two decades to become competitive with the New York Stock Exchange. This week, traders from Goldman Sachs and Citadel Securities, traded mock symbols in practice runs on the Texas Stock Exchange. On Friday, at 9:30 a.m., a handful of small stock symbols began trading and TXSE—“tex-ee” as they say—was up and running for real.