The Scoop
Investors have been scrambling to keep up with the US president-elect, including some capitalizing on the political moment, testing how long the Trump trade will last.
One of the latest examples: Described in a recent pitch to prospective venture investors as “an S&P 500 fund without the woke sh*t,” the Azoria Meritocracy ETF will shun companies that use diversity quotas in hiring or promotion.
The fund is a bet on the Trump economy and the broader backlash to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts that the president-elect tapped into on his way to victory. It will launch early next year under the ticker SPXM, said Azoria’s co-founder James Fishback. (MAGA is already taken.)
“The country just wholeheartedly rejected DEI affirmative action,” he said in an interview. “We’re going to deliver that mandate to the private sector. These practices are not just unethical but bad business.”
Fishback is a 29-year-old college dropout turned Wall Street trader whom Vivek Ramaswamy, himself a pioneer in the anti-woke investment war, has called “a major Gen Z star in our pro-American movement.” Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are now leading Trump’s government efficiency effort.
Fishback is best known for a bizarre and ongoing fight with his former employer, David Einhorn’s hedge fund, Greenlight Capital. What began as a spat over Fishback’s title and contributions to Greenlight’s investment returns escalated into dueling lawsuits and online trolling that has bemused Wall Street since the spring. The dispute is now in arbitration.
Azoria is finalizing a roughly $25 million venture round, people familiar with the matter said. Fishback declined to name its financial backers but said they include “two prominent conservative-minded California venture capitalists” and several family offices.
The fund is playing for a slice of the $16 trillion that’s invested in funds that mirror the S&P 500. It will buy all the stocks in the index except for companies that use racial or gender quotas in hiring, promotions, or pay decisions, which Fishback said will disqualify about two dozen stocks.
“But we won’t give up on these companies,” he said. The fund will launch public campaigns and seek to engage behind the scenes to pressure companies to drop their DEI policies. He’s planning an accompanying podcast and livestreams on X, leaning into the wave of very online retail investors whose rightward leanings have been sharpened over the past year.
“We’ll make our case in the marketplace of ideas,” he said. “We’re also going to make some noise.”
There are already a handful of ideologically conservative S&P 500 trackers. They’ve attracted little money and charge high fees. The America First ETF, which invests in the 150 companies whose employees or corporate PACs have donated the most to Republican candidates, has $23 million in assets, charges 24 times what BlackRock charges for its S&P 500 fund, and has performed slightly worse than the index this year.
Fishback said he’ll unveil his first corporate target at a Mar-a-Lago event next week.
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Step Back
Fishback is a Gen Z MAGA avatar: articulate, combative, conservative, and very online. In recent weeks, he has talked up Trump’s government-efficiency czars, Musk and Ramaswamy, in The Washington Post, and endorsed Trump’s ultimate pick for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent. He has spoken out against what he sees as ideological censorship in high school debates and written for The Free Press, Bari Weiss’ outlet popular with Silicon Valley and Wall Street conservatives.
And he’s thrown his hat in the ring to replace Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, and requested a meeting with Gov. Ron DeSantis, who will fill the seat. “You miss all the shots you don’t take,” he said.
Azoria is planning more funds, including one that keeps a sleeve of cash to buy stocks that fall sharply (ticker: BTFD; Google it) and one that invests in companies that should benefit from the economic reforms of Javier Milei, Argentina’s right-wing populist president and Trump superfan.
Know More
Fishback’s fight with Greenlight is essentially about whether he was, or was not, “head of macro trading” at the hedge fund. He says he was responsible for, among other profitable investments, a bet that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates more quickly than the market expected. In our conversation, I pointed out that excluding two dozen companies from an index fund because of their hiring policies is about as far from macro as investing gets.
“Macro means big picture,” he said. “I can’t think of something more big picture than ideologues steering some of the world’s best companies in a way that is entirely inconsistent with the past 100 years of value creation.”
Liz’s view
Before Nov. 5, the MAGA movement looked to be running out of steam. Shares of PublicSquare, an Amazon for the “life, family and freedom” crowd, had cratered. Trump’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, slashed its fundraising goal by 90% on weak demand for its tokens. Bill Ackman’s efforts to parlay his far-right stardom in an IPO of his hedge fund failed.
Even Ramaswamy’s “anti-woke” investment firm had dialed back the ideological rhetoric after realizing its image as “political over investment oriented” was hurting its fundraising, Semafor reported.
Yes, conservative activist Robby Starbuck has pressured companies — including Walmart this week — to drop some DEI policies, but the ideological economy that conservatives had been calling for hadn’t materialized. As I wrote last year, owning the libs turned out to be expensive, and not that profitable.
But Trump’s win has given the movement new energy. 1789 Capital, a venture firm backed by Don Trump Jr. and several conservative donors, is off investing “patriotic capital” in what it calls EIG — entrepreneurship, innovation, and growth. Bitcoin is up 40% since election day. Shares of conservative streaming platform Rumble are up 30%. “Brands cannot ignore this forever,” its CEO said last week, touting new advertising deals in the pipeline.
Room for Disagreement
Conservative pitches only really work if they’re pushing against a perceived liberal establishment. The retreat of BlackRock from progressive politics removes a boogeyman. Trump Jr.’s pitch for PublicSquare — “it’s time to invest in companies that don’t hate you” — may be less effective when those companies are running away from DEI as quickly as they can and their CEOs are cozying up to the new administration.