Azoria Partners LLC announced its plans Thursday at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, declaring Starbucks Corp. as its first target
A new exchange-traded fund (ETF) targeting companies with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies is set to launch early next year, with Starbucks as its initial focus. The announcement was made at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's Florida resort.
Azoria’s fund, set to launch early next year under the ticker SPXM (S&P Meritocracy), will exclude S&P 500 companies that integrate DEI practices into their hiring processes.
Co-founder James Fishback criticized DEI initiatives as harmful to shareholders, saying, “Americans, whether they voted for president Trump or not, do not want to invest in companies running woke science experiments.”
Starbucks, with a market cap of approximately $110 billion, denied in a statement to the Financial Times that they implemented hiring quotas. Instead, the company clarified its policies as expired aspirations for greater racial diversity among corporate employees, emphasizing they were “not targets or quotas.”
The fund’s launch highlights a growing trend among Trump-aligned investors to oppose environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives in corporate America. Fishback argued that companies factoring diversity into hiring practices underperform their peers, although a 2022 McKinsey report contradicts that claim, saying that there’s a 39 percent increased likelihood of outperformance for those in the top quartile of ethnic representation versus the bottom quartile.
Unlike traditional activist hedge funds, Azoria’s strategy focuses on excluding companies from its portfolio rather than acquiring stakes to push for change. With no assets under management yet, the fund currently lacks the financial muscle to directly influence Starbucks or other major corporations.
