Westwood Holdings CEO on Y’all Street, ETF tracking AI power ecosystem

CNBC CEO Council member Brian Casey has a front-row seat on Y’all Street. 

Over the past few years, Dallas has been transformed into a hotbed for the financial services sector, with pledges for massive offices and headcounts coming from firms like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase. 

That’s building on the larger growth of industry across sectors in Texas, which now boasts the most Fortune 500 companies among states in the U.S., as well as the massive population boom being seen across the state. 

While the lure of lower taxes and lighter regulations has always drawn companies to Texas, recent pushes to become even more business-friendly have resonated well with the corporate community, especially among executives and companies who have raised issues with legal interpretations coming out of Delaware, such as Elon Musk and ExxonMobil. 

Dallas’s efforts to become a corporate hub took another step this summer with the opening of the Texas Stock Exchange, which has received backing from some of the largest institutional investors in the world such as BlackRock, Citadel and Charles Schwab. 

Casey, the CEO of Dallas-based asset manager Westwood Holdings Group, an investor in the TXSE, told us last week he is “very bullish” about what is happening with the exchange.

So what is now luring companies to Dallas and this new exchange, in the eyes of someone with long-standing roots in the community? 

“It’s a combination of factors,” Casey said, who credits political and business leaders in Texas for working together. 

“First and foremost is, I’ve always said we’re in the center of the country. We have one of the greatest and busiest airports in the world, and you can get to either coast and do a day trip if you need to. It’s a very convenient place to travel in and out of, but more than that, we have really tried to take on Delaware from the standpoint of beefing up our business courts, codifying the business judgment rule, and just making it easier and less expensive to incorporate in Texas,” Casey said. 

So far, that message seems to be resonating. Pipeline company Energy Transfer and fuel distributor Sunoco both recently announced they would be shifting their listings from NYSE to TXSE. Retailer Dillard’s also said it would be shifting from NYSE to TXSE, following the company’s move to reincorporate in Texas in 2025. 

Westwood is playing a role as well, launching the exchange’s first new ETF, Westwood Salient Enhanced Power & Infrastructure ETF, which will be in addition to other ETFs from the firm already listed on both NYSE and Nasdaq — Westwood itself is listed on NYSE. 

The AI trade has certainly gotten more complicated as the debate around safety and slowing development has grown.   

However, the underlying belief in AI that has made Nvidia the most valuable publicly traded company and pushed AI spending among megacaps to more than $750 billion this year hasn’t shown signs of slowing. 

But Casey said while much of the focus from an…