Yeehaw: Trump’s Truth Social Funds to Acquire God Bless America ETF (YALL)

From the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam.

Yorkville America Equities, the investment advisor for Trump Media’s Truth Social Funds, is planning to buy the God Bless America ETF (YALL) from Curran Financial Partners and rebrand it under the Truth.Fi lineup, effectively tripling the brand’s assets. The $102 million fund would become the first actively managed fund among Truth’s suite of passive index offerings, which hold roughly $46 million in net assets altogether. Curran would continue to manage the fund as a sub-advisor.

While ETF mergers and acquisitions remain relatively rare, they can be used as a shortcut to scale, allowing issuers to expand product lineups and tap into existing investor assets. “This kind of one-off ETF acquisition is unusual,” said Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “But, Truth Social ETFs didn’t really set the world on fire when they launched, so this does help them get substantial assets.”

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YALL promotes itself as an investment for “God-fearing, flag-waving conservatives” who want to stop investing in “woke companies.” “Our investment philosophy is America First,” Steve Neamtz, president of Yorkville America, said in an email, adding the firm plans to launch or acquire similar funds in the future. “YALL reflects that philosophy.”

Ultimately, it’s not totally surprising that the fund would consider selling to Truth. “Would YALL have sold for the same price if Strive offered the deal?” Balchunas said in an interview with Advisor Upside. “My spidey sense is because it’s a company actually linked to the president, it’s just very exciting and adds a lot of attractiveness to the offer.”

The fund has an expense ratio of 0.65% and holds roughly 40 companies with the largest allocations in familiar names like Nvidia, Tesla and Broadcom. Its smaller holdings include home construction firm D.R. Horton, payroll services provider Paychex and Public Storage. “Anytime you try to sell morality or politics in investing, it’s tough,” Balchunas said. “But, I would imagine that if anyone can move the needle on it, it’s the president’s company.”

Other recent full or partial acquisitions in the ETF industry include:

• Goldman Sachs completed its acquisition of Innovator Capital in December that included 159 defined outcome ETFs with roughly $28 billion in assets.
• BlackRock’s iShares Large Cap Value Active ETF (BLCV) is set to absorb the CornerCap Fundametrics Large-Cap ETF (FUNL), according to regulatory filings from late December.

Not Dead Yet. “The ETF industry is still very much in a growth phase where the people who launch them want to be their own, big company,” Balchunas said. “It’s not like mutual funds, where some have been around for 80 years, and it’s a lot of decrepit, dying stuff that gets acquired.”