Capitalism opens a Dallas office: the Texas stock exchange has launched

1️⃣ Capitalism opens a Dallas office: the Texas Stock Exchange has launched

The Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) officially began operations last Monday (July 6) with its official headquarters in Dallas. Although they are still operating in a temporary office, they already have $275 million in seed capital, which is a record. This is the only real alternative to the duopoly of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq.

At this moment, they are trading with test tickers, but it is expected that by the end of the month, all market tickers will be able to trade. Exchange-traded products (such as ETFs) will start in Q3, followed by direct listings in Q4 (companies that only want to list there) and dual listings (companies listing on both TXSE and NYSE/Nasdaq), and finally, the first IPOs would begin in 2027.

What is interesting is that giants like BlackRock, Citadel, and Charles Schwab are major investors and some of the main promoters of the project, which many are perceiving as a clear example of the consequences of having hostile corporate (and fiscal) policies, as has been happening in New York, especially recently.

The question you're probably asking yourself is, how does this affect the average investor? Well, truth be told, not at all.  

💡 What you should know:  The US financial system is highly interconnected with federal-level regulations, so a trade in Dallas uses the exact same national infrastructure as one in Manhattan. However, institutional investors (hedge funds, asset managers, high-frequency traders, etc.) can indeed see a greater benefit from ultra-low latency transactions and cheaper fees, arbitrage opportunities, and a greater focus on fiduciary stability rather than social activism.

2️⃣ The new Fed divorces Wall Street 

In his first FOMC meeting, Kevin Warsh did a couple of things that completely changed the dynamics of the Fed over the last few decades: he eliminated forward-looking statements and did not add his vote to the Dot Plot. Two key elements for financial markets that hate uncertainty.

However, it was just last week in Portugal during the ECB's annual central banking forum that Warsh made his intention to completely eliminate forward guidance very, very clear: the practice of giving months of advance notice on what the central bank will do with interest rates.

While this practice was introduced to provide "reassurance" to market participants who relied on interest rates near 0%, during 2008 it was practically an additional tool that the Fed used to stimulate the economy without having to touch rates. If the market knew what the Fed was going to do, the market adjusted that very afternoon.

For a long time, this was an advantage that Wall Street did not hesitate to exploit. In fact, for most of the past two decades, financial markets were a better indicator of monetary policy because of the speed at which they adjusted to what the forward guidance indicated, and this is precisely what has come to an end.

💡 What you should know: Investors who look to Federal Reserve speeches and charts as signals to position themselves will have to operate under a new dynamic: less visibility with more surprises. From now on, markets will help guide the Federal Reserve, and not the other way around. Should we expect to start experiencing more volatility? In our opinion, it is highly likely. 

3️⃣ Apple vs. OpenAI

Apple is accusing OpenAI of stealing trade secrets and has just filed a lawsuit in a California federal court. It is pointing directly at two people, Tang Tan (former VP of iPhone design and current head of hardware at OpenAI) and Chang Liu (former iPhone engineer).

According to the lawsuit, OpenAI used hiring processes to conduct "show and tell" sessions, where Apple employee candidates were encouraged to bring physical prototypes and blueprints they had worked on at the company.  

One of the most alarming discoveries was that Liu allegedly downloaded confidential files about unreleased devices just before leaving the company. 

Clearly, Apple is not asking for a public apology with a handshake; instead, it wants OpenAI to halt all hardware development while the case is ongoing, compensatory and punitive damages, and an order barring OpenAI from recruiting any Apple employees for the next five years.

Additionally, they want independent auditors to have unrestricted access to OpenAI's servers to identify and destroy every last byte of code, blueprint, or design belonging to Apple. If you know one of the hundreds of Apple employees who left for OpenAI, tell them to get ready for an audit. 😮‍💨

Curiously, the 2024 partnership to integrate ChatGPT into the iPhone remained in effect at the time of the lawsuit, and rumors in Silicon Valley suggest that OpenAI was preparing to sue Apple for breach of contract for not receiving the expected benefit from the alliance. 

💡 What you should know: Apple no longer sees OpenAI as a software provider, but rather as a direct competitor in smart hardware. This legal move by Apple eliminates any trace of trust and will likely accelerate the migration to Google models within the iOS ecosystem.

4️⃣ Meta opens a new business segment

Meta launched a new business segment called Meta Compute. The intention is to rent out the power of its unused servers so that other companies can train language models, or charge them for using tokens that run Meta's models, like Muse Spark. 

So far, most of Meta's computing power is still driven by Nvidia chips. Practically all of Meta's AI training and inference depends on Nvidia, and until now, all of the CapEx represented a liquidity leak without any type of immediate return like those seen by Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft, for example, which sell part of their computing capacity. 

In short, Meta was the only one that was "only spending," and in our opinion, that is one of the reasons why it was one of the hardest hit in Big Tech (we covered this in the most recent Meta video).

However, mass production of Meta's own AI chips (MTIA) was confirmed for September 2026. With this, they will flood their data centers with their own silicon, reducing commercial costs and the painful dependence on Nvidia.

Officially, Meta will stop being the only one just "spending" with nothing to show for it in the short term, and will now become a key provider in the AI race.

💡 What you should know: Meta could be killing several birds with one stone: it would aggressively diversify its revenue beyond digital advertising, directly monetize its physical infrastructure, mitigate the massive capital expenditures of recent quarters, and transform itself into a heavyweight in the lucrative computing rental business.

5️⃣ 7 things you didn't know about the Roth IRA

If you've been around the channel over the past few weeks, you'll know that we shared the positions we hold in our Roth IRA accounts. Since we started doing so several years ago, it has become a channel classic.

As usual with these types of videos, you left us with a lot of questions about the account, and besides answering them in the comments, we felt it was worth making a video addressing the most frequent and interesting ones, such as: why have we not invested in individual stocks within retirement accounts until now?

We leave you the video right here 👇