This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.

As businesses flock to Texas, the fully electronic Texas Stock Exchange is positioning itself as the state’s premier marketplace. This week, TXSE launched its “Welcome to the real bull market” campaign, featuring TV commercials and billboard ads across downtown Dallas, where the exchange is headquartered. In the 30-second spot, New York City’s Charging Bull statue makes its way to Dallas and confronts a Texas longhorn on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. After an intimidating stare-down, the longhorn smashes the statue to pieces. We’re thinking that’s a metaphor for something.

“We are sending a clear message that the next chapter of American capital markets will be written in Texas,” TXSE Founder James Lee said in a statement, adding that 2026 is the year companies will finally be able to “declare independence” from the New York listing duopoly of the NYSE and the Nasdaq. However, both of those exchanges are also setting up shop in Texas and have decades of reputation and experience on their side. Can TXSE really take on the old guard?

Texas Tea

The move is part of a broader boom for Texas. Companies including Chevron, Fisher Investments, and Tesla have relocated to the Lone Star state for tax advantages, less regulation and a growing labor pool. Stock exchanges are following suit.

• TXSE, which received federal approval last fall, plans to open for trading in July and list its first ETFs in September. It has raised over $250 million in funding from investors including BlackRock, Charles Schwab and Citadel Securities.
• Meanwhile, the NYSE rebranded its Chicago-based electronic exchange as NYSE Texas in early 2025 and relocated operations to Dallas. Nasdaq also plans a regional headquarters and a Texas exchange later this year.

Beyond economics, the TXSE carries symbolic weight, said Brian Casey, CEO of Westwood Holdings Group, an investment management firm that has invested in the exchange. “For companies headquartered in Texas or across the Sun Belt, listing locally can reinforce corporate identity and stakeholder alignment,” he said, adding that he’s not expecting a mass migration to TXSE, but even modest adoption could reshape fees and innovation. “TXSE’s greatest impact may be pushing incumbents to compete harder, which ultimately benefits companies and investors.”

Ain’t My First Rodeo. Whether companies and issuers choose to list on the TXSE is ultimately going to come down to pricing, said Matt Tuttle, founder of the fund issuer Tuttle Capital Management. “You can talk about creating liquidity and all that stuff, but to me, that’s more on the market makers than it is on the exchange,” he told Advisor Upside. “If I were Vanguard, would I look at listing on all of the exchanges? Sure. It’s funny money at that point. But for us, we’re pinching the pennies and looking at cost benefits.”

Clearwater Capital Partners received a voicemail one weekend from what sounded like a client abroad, urgently requesting a fund transfer. Something felt off. The client had never asked for such a thing, and he referred to himself by his spouse’s name. “It was the wife’s name with the husband’s voice,” said Jeff DeHaan, the firm’s managing partner.

Imitation, the so-called sincerest form of flattery, is a time-tested tactic for scams, and AI makes it simpler than ever. While artificial intelligence helps advisors reduce costs, speed production, and communicate with clients, it’s also being exploited by scammers to defraud wealth managers and their customers. One emerging threat is “vishing,” where fraudsters use AI to mimic voices to authorize fraudulent transfers.

“It’s not enough just to recognize the voice,” DeHaan told Advisor Upside, adding that advisors need strong verbal verification processes to authenticate a client’s identity. “The reality is you can’t use the last four digits of their Social Security number or their spouse’s birthday anymore. The things that we’ve always used to make sure a person is who they say they are, don’t work.”

AI Got Your Tongue

AI voice cloning is surprisingly easy, said Freedom Dumlao, CTO at wealthtech firm Vestmark. “The barrier to entry has completely collapsed,” he told Advisor Upside. “It used to be that voice cloning required state-level resources; now anyone with a credit card can do it.”

The scam goes both ways, Dumlao said. Clients should be prepared to encounter fishy phone calls supposedly from their advisors. Scammers only need a short sample from social media, YouTube, or a phone call. “If I want to capture their voice print and create a clone, all I have to do is call up an advisor and say, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about moving my account,’ and I can have them on the phone for 30 minutes,” Dumlao said.

AI-generated content has become quite convincing:

• A 2025 study in Scientific Reports found participants mistook AI-generated voices for the real person 80% of the time and correctly identified AI voices only about 60% of the time.
• In a 2023 McAfee survey of people around the globe, 10% of respondents said they had received AI voice clone messages, and 77% of those lost money.

Hanging on the Telephone. Protecting clients from vishing doesn’t require high-tech solutions, however. If a supposed client asks for an urgent transfer, hang up and call the number on file. “That out-of-band verification is simple and goes through a channel you know is your client,” Dumlao said, adding that clients should be told advisors will never call urgently requesting money.

Firms should also implement unique authentication questions that only clients and advisors know. (We prefer the time tested: What was your high school’s mascot?) DeHaan even recalled a pre-AI case where fraudsters set up call forwarding on a client’s line. “The phone would ring once but then stop,” he said. “You can’t even trust the callback number.”

Just because you can, doesn’t always mean you should.

There’s a good argument for including private assets in 401(k) plans and that’s illiquidity. Because retirement savers are by definition long-term investors, they can benefit from locking up their assets, and the illiquidity premium that compensates them for the inability to quickly exit positions. That same illiquidity, though, presents major practical challenges that can end up robbing retirement investors of the intended benefits of private market participation. To work in 401(k) plans, some private equity investments would need far more readily available cash than investors might assume, sometimes up to 40% of the portfolio, per a recent Morningstar analysis. The potential drag on net-of-fee performance is real, the authors warn, and the propensity of novice savers to dump investments during market stress is nothing for fund managers to shrug off.

Nonetheless, clients who embrace private assets could see higher returns, but only if they avoid ill-timed trading and are mindful about fees. “We believe a modest allocation to private markets can make sense for both savers and actual retirees,” said Michael Conrath, chief retirement strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. “But there’s a big behavioral hurdle we need to get over before more robust distribution can happen.”

A Supply Side Push

Last week, Invesco launched the Invesco Core Plus Real Estate Trust, a collective investment trust providing access to private real estate through a daily valued structure. The trust gives exposure to core plus private real estate, complemented by an allocation to passive US REITs to support daily liquidity. The trust is structured as a daily valued CIT that participants can buy and sell at will:

• Fewer than 1% of DC industry assets are currently allocated to private market investments, Greg Jenkins, managing director of DC solutions at Invesco, said in a statement.
• However, Invesco expects the rise of professionally managed products, like target-date funds and managed account portfolios, to change the calculus.

“There’s a big supply-demand imbalance when it comes to private assets in 401(k) plans,” observed Jeri Savage, lead retirement strategist at MFS, who is seeing lots of product development but little plan sponsor interest. “That’s not a statement about the merits of these investments for retirement portfolios, which can work well in professionally managed allocations. It’s just the reality today in DC plans.”

In-Plan Income Struggles, Too. The slow uptake of private assets by DC plan sponsors and participants mirrors their behavior with in-plan annuities. “Legislative changes have eased the regulatory challenges of putting annuities on DC plan menus, and there has been an executive order seeking to promote private assets,” Savage explained. “What’s holding them back is the perceived complexity and potentially the cost, as well as first-mover risk. Plan sponsors are afraid of getting sued for doing something different.”