An investment firm is launching a new fund that will bet against companies with "woke" policies, its boss told Newsweek.
Tuttle Capital Management has applied to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to create an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that it says will invest in companies that "meet its politically conservative or politically neutral criteria."
The fund will also take short positions (bets that a stock price will go down) in U.S.-listed companies that it considers to have woke policies, according to its SEC filing.
It will be listed under the ticker GWGB, an acronym for "Go Woke, Go Broke."
"My goal is I want to sell more of the product at a higher price. Boom, done," Matthew Tuttle, the firm's chief executive, said. "Those companies should outperform companies that don't do that. So we decided to create an investment product around that."
Companies like Target and Disney, which have come under attack for their pro-LGBTQ+ policies, have seen their share prices fall following the consumer backlash.
Target's share price is down more than 26 percent over the past year and Disney's more than 28 percent.
Tuttle's new fund aims to profit on such share price drops. It will also filter out companies that exhibit "woke" policies and those with high scores in environmental, social and governance (ESG) approaches, its SEC filing showed.
The CEO said that the firm is also creating a separately managed account that's politically neutral.
"Companies that are totally neutral, not involved in any way, shape, or form, just tunnel vision, we make this product, we sell this product, not interested in all this other stuff, right or left doesn't matter," he said.
Asked how he will define a woke company, Tuttle said he recalls what a Supreme Court Justice (presumably Potter Stewart) once said: "'I don't know how to define pornography, but I know it when I see it?' Unfortunately, it's a lot like that."
He argued that he will aim to look at more than just ESG scores to determine whether a company is woke or makes decisions that alienate customers and shareholders.
The ETF plans to launch in about 75 days, Tuttle said.
There has been a rise of such products over the past few years, including by Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy's Strive Asset Management. It was created in 2022 and now manages assets worth more than $1 billion, according to Business Insider.
But there is a suggestion that not all such platforms are successful. Last month, 2nd Vote Funds shut two of its ETFs after it struggled to bring in assets to continue operations, according to the Financial Times.
While some firms go into this business with some money, Tuttle wasn't sure how much he will raise for his ETFs.
"They'll come out, and it'll be what it'll be," he said. "We try to come up with concepts that I think have really good use cases and will be popular. Sometimes you're wrong. So just no way to know."
Update 09/08/2023 6 a.m. ET: This story was updated with additional information.
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