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.”

Howdy, Partner

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.”

The floodgates aren’t closing anytime soon.

Active management has become one of the dominant growth engines in the ETF market, and that was highlighted by a record number of fund launches last year. Issuers brought nearly 1,000 active ETFs to market, shattering the prior record of 584 in 2024, according to Morningstar. The surge came with casualties, however: A record 146 active ETFs shut down. Still, despite shorter lifespans than passive funds, asset managers show no signs of pulling back, betting that investor demand and advisor adoption of active products will continue to outweigh the risk of failure.

“For many traditional asset managers, this is a new vehicle and they’re seeing inflows,” said Stephen Welch, senior analyst at Morningstar, adding that active ETFs accounted for about one-third of the new money invested in ETFs last year.

Fire Away

Whether active ETFs beat the market or not — in the long term, many often don’t — it doesn’t diminish their appeal with investors. Active ETFs took in roughly $475 billion in inflows in 2025, and about half of that went to just six firms: JPMorgan, Capital Group, Dimensional, iShares, American Century and Fidelity.

The inflows partially signal further active ETF adoption among advisors, Welch said. “The flows are picking up steam, so I assume advisors are getting more comfortable with the vehicle and are more willing to put clients into them,” he told Advisor Upside. As for launches:

• The most active issuers were GraniteShares, Themes ETF Trust and Defiance, which launched 71, 63, and 59 active ETFs, respectively.

• “Short-term, trading-oriented” funds were the most popular products with more than 340 launches last year. Those include funds that use buffer strategies or offer exposure to niche areas and single stocks.

• Meanwhile, just 150 passive ETFs launched last year.

Spaghetti On the Wall. In some instances, active ETFs folded only a few months after launching, including the 2x Daily Software Platform ETF (SOFL) and the Azoria 500 Meritocracy ETF (SPXM). Welch said that happens when shops throw out as many ideas as possible to see what sticks with day traders, but that isn’t often the strategy deployed by traditional asset managers. “I could see that approach slowing down,” he said. “You know, it does cost money to launch these things.”

They don’t call them emerging markets for nothing.

Funds tracking foreign markets have been on fire of late. Emerging-market debt was the strongest performer in the bond market for both the fourth quarter and last year as a whole, according to Morningstar. This month, Franklin Templeton launched a new fund designed to capitalize on the trend, the Templeton Emerging Markets Debt ETF (TEMD), which combines exposure to US dollar-denominated and local currency-denominated debt. Still, whether their strong performance will continue remains an open question.

“It’s not a very big space, but it’s growing,” said Aniket Ullal, head of ETF research and analytics at CFRA, adding that there’s about $34.2 billion in emerging market bond ETFs. “If you look at flows this year, they’ve been pretty moderate.”

Circle of Life

TEMD will maintain at least half of its allocation to USD- and Euro-denominated debt securities, or obligations that have to be paid back in dollars or Euros rather than local currencies, said Dave Mann, head of ETF product at the firm. This strategy could lead to higher yields and total return potential, he added. “These markets are really setting the pace when it comes to things like semiconductors and electric vehicle batteries,” Mann said.

Still, emerging markets tend to be more cyclical in terms of investor appetite, said Ullal. “Investors are willing to take on more risk in the current environment, and emerging market debt is part of that story,” he added.

Some of the best-performing funds that capitalize on emerging markets include:

• The Vanguard Emerging Markets Stock Index Fund ETF (VWO), which is up 5% YTD.
• The Avantis Emerging Markets Equity ETF (AVEM), which is up 7% YTD.
• The Freedom 100 Emerging Markets ETF (FRDM), which is up 12% YTD.

A Dollar Short. Other supporting factors for the strategy include the weakening dollar, which has fallen to its lowest level in years, as well as specific outperforming markets in the Asia-Pacific region, Mann said. “The dollar weakening again… is certainly part of the considerations of this strategy,” he added. “Everyone’s looking at the performance in some of these emerging markets, something like Korea [or] Taiwan. These markets are booming.”