Latest news with #Trump-powered
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Is the Trump-Fueled Crypto Mania Dying Down?
The Trump administration is affecting the crypto sector in quite a few ways. The president's official token has hurt the sector. The newly proposed policies and newly appointed leaders could be positives. 10 stocks we like better than Official Trump › President Donald Trump didn't invent speculative exuberance, but he has a knack for bottling it. In mid-January, the Official Trump (CRYPTO: TRUMP) meme coin debuted with fireworks on Solana, very briefly driving the entire meme coin complex higher and padding early buyers' wallets before collapsing and inflicting dramatic losses. Even sober observers had to concede that the president knows how to move markets. Yet euphoria can often wither quickly in crypto. To some, today the cup feels half empty, and it's natural for investors to be wondering whether the Trump-powered party is winding down or just taking a breather. Let's take a look at the evidence here. With the Official Trump meme coin, enthusiasm met gravity in record time, and there was plenty of fallout as a result. By Feb. 3, the token had surrendered roughly 75% of its peak value amid significant insider selling despite the president's cheerleading on social media. A broader February slide wiped almost $1 trillion off aggregate crypto market caps, erasing most of the post-election bump. Some seasoned crypto investors attributed this dip to the lost capital that the president's coin extracted from the ecosystem, since it also may have discouraged new investors from participating immediately after their entry to buy the president's token. Even now, the Trump coin still has a $1.9 billion market cap, with 80% of its circulating supply controlled by accounts linked to the Trump family and a single allied firm. Concentration that steep limits the token's natural public float and makes every incremental seller more painful for newcomers. Volume tells the same story. Spikes align with promotional events featuring the token, like the president's dinner raffles, but fall off quickly, signaling speculative rather than sticky demand. If you arrived late, you're effectively wagering that fresh money will underwrite insiders' paper gains. That is possible, but not exactly a margin of safety or the basis for a sound investment thesis. Before writing the post-mortem on the crypto market run, recall that presidents wield policy levers, not just Twitter flair. On March 6, Trump signed an executive order mandating the creation of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) as well as a Digital Asset Repository, instructing the U.S. Treasury to hang on to seized crypto rather than auction it. Though these two stockpiles have not yet been implemented, the order theoretically turns the government into a structural non-seller, tightening supply for Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies. Regulatory tone is changing as well thanks to the administration's appointments of senior leaders. Paul Atkins, a longtime critic of financial regulation enforcement, now chairs the Securities and Exchange Commission and has already reassigned several enforcement lawyers away from crypto probes while floating various exemptions for decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms. A friendlier set of rules tends to invite bigger pools of capital to the markets. On that note, Bitcoin notched a fresh all-time high of $123,000 on July 14. That move has more than a few causes, but recent regulatory changes are doubtlessly part of the story. Meanwhile, Trump-controlled enterprises keep inventing fresh crypto on-ramps. For example, World Liberty Financial's dollar-pegged stablecoin and forthcoming governance token have already raised more than $550 million. During the week of July 11, a company from the United Arab Emirates injected another $100 million into the platform, elevating a project entwined with presidential branding, and raising numerous unanswered questions regarding the high likelihood of conflicts of interest. Regardless of one's view on the propriety of foreign businesses investing in ventures that the president has a direct financial interest in, those funds are real bids that lift valuations across adjacent tokens. Add in the White House's June 30 crypto summit and appointment of a dedicated crypto czar, and it's hard to argue the administration is backing away from the sector. So, is the crypto mania dying? Nope. It's actually picking up after a lull. Price charts of Trump-related coins say enthusiasm cooled, but policy and capital flows suggest the broader Trump-crypto axis still has horsepower, and that the president's impact on the market is far wider than his impact on his branded tokens. Long-term investors should separate the noise of meme token gyrations from the signal of structural supply constraints and increasingly dovish regulators. Assuming Washington follows through on developing sound custody rules and with its reserve accumulation plans, crypto's rise will persist well beyond this news cycle -- though it is unlikely that the Official Trump tokens will ever keep pace with the sector's flagship assets. Before you buy stock in Official Trump, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Official Trump wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $680,559!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,005,670!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,053% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 180% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of July 15, 2025 Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin and Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin and Solana. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Is the Trump-Fueled Crypto Mania Dying Down? was originally published by The Motley Fool
USA Today
08-07-2025
- Business
- USA Today
Should investors bet against DEI? What to know about new anti-'woke' index fund
One S&P 500 please, hold the diversity, equity and inclusion. That is the proposed selling point of a new index fund launching Tuesday: The exchange-traded fund mirrors the S&P 500 but excludes 37 companies that engage in DEI. It is the brainchild of James Fishback, an ally of President Donald Trump who used to work for the hedge fund Greenlight Capital and recently became more widely known as the Department of Government Efficiency adviser who proposed sending taxpayers stimulus checks. Last week, Fishback launched a Trump super PAC to back the president in his feud with the GOP's largest individual donor and former DOGE architect Elon Musk. With the Azoria 500 Meritocracy ETF, Fishback is piggybacking on the Trump-powered DEI backlash. He unveiled his plans in December at the president's Mar-a-Lago resort. 'I am making the bet of my career that, generally, stocks that hire on skill and merit and not on race and gender will do better,' Fishback, CEO and founder of investment firm Azoria, told USA TODAY in an exclusive interview. 'The next couple years are going to decide if this strategy is a success.' Is anti-DEI a good investment? Morningstar analyst Bryan Armour said he expects some investors will flock to the index fund which trades under the ticker symbol SPXM. 'Investors are often drawn to the siren song of a good narrative, especially one that speaks to their views,' Armour said. 'My guess is there will be some appetite for an ETF like this.' But, he said, investors are best off "separating investing and politics.' Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, are bundles of stocks that trade on public exchanges like individual stocks, giving investors the ability to buy hundreds of securities in a single purchase. Anyone with a brokerage account can put money in ETFs, which can be bought and sold like shares during the trading day. Ideologically driven S&P 500 trackers tend to charge high fees and attract meager investment, University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter told USA TODAY in December. 'We will probably see some more anti-'woke' ETFs but only the biggest will survive,' Ritter said. 'Each year, a lot of small ETFs get closed or merged because there is not enough liquidity to attract investors and cover the costs of managing the ETF.' Is there a DEI 'drag' on stocks? Fishback told USA TODAY his index fund filters out more than three dozen companies that use explicit race and gender quotas in hiring decisions including Nike, Airbnb and Intel. Airbnb and Nike declined to comment. In a statement, Intel said its hiring and promotion practices "follow a competitive and fair process in compliance with the law and we do not use identity based quotas.' Initially, Fishback thought the announcement of his S&P 500 tracker would put pressure on the nation's largest companies to roll back these policies, but in conversations with business leaders, Fishback said he discovered they 'genuinely believe that their DEI hiring targets help their long-term business" and few could be persuaded to make changes. 'I thought a lot more companies would have taken these policies off the table," he said. "But the fact that six months later, there are still three dozen companies hiring on race and gender tells me that this product has to be there." The Florida investment fund manager said his research shows a 'DEI drag' has caused these 37 stocks to underperform for the last two years. "We identified DEI hiring targets as the likely driver of underperformance by studying a diverse set of 37 companies across 26 industries that share little in common except for one policy: explicit, quantitative DEI hiring targets. This uniformity allowed us to isolate that variable as a common denominator," Fishback said. On average, the companies saw their stocks rise 3.8% in the 30 days after dropping diversity hiring targets, compared to the S&P 500's average monthly return of 1.24%, according to Fishback. "Our research demonstrates a strong negative association between explicit demographic hiring targets and stock returns," he said. Analysts were skeptical. 'I find it hard to believe that DEI hiring practices can be directly linked to stock underperformance,' Armour said. The Azoria 500 Meritocracy ETF charges a management fee of 0.47%, meaning if an investor puts in $10,000, they will have paid approximately $48 in fees to the fund manager after one year. Even if diversity targets were the common denominator, the omitted companies would need to "underperform by a lot" to make the fund a worthwhile investment when an investor can buy an S&P 500 fund "for three basis points of fees or less," Armour said.
