Contributor, The Freeport Society
Editor’s Note: The vice president of the United States has about as much official responsibility as the king of England. They cut ribbons and kiss babies… but they don’t really do anything. Except wait. Perhaps rather than the king of England, the better example would be the prince of Wales. Your job is to be ready in case your boss keels over.
The attempted assassination over the weekend was a reminder that the vice president is one heartbeat away from the presidency. It’s a sobering thought. So, with that in mind, what do we know about Donald Trump’s new running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio? We know he’s intelligent. His memoir Hillbilly Elegy was a brilliant analysis of everything that went wrong for rural working-class America. And Vance rose from humble origins to earn a law degree from Yale Law School before enjoying early success as a venture capitalist. He’s able to move freely between Silicon Valley and the Rust Belt, speaking the language of both.
But we also know he’s a political prostitute. As soon as it became politically convenient, he jumped from being a “never Trumper” who called Trump “cultural heroin” to being one of the ex-president’s hard-core defenders. He’s identified as “far right,” yet he partnered with Senator Elizabeth Warren – on the far left fringe of the Democratic Party – to introduce legislation to stop mergers and break up big banks. And he recently said “it’s time America wages war on companies,” which makes him sound more like Karl Marx or Joseph Stalin than Adam Smith or Ronald Reagan.
Maybe the man is ideologically flexible… Or maybe he’s schizophrenic. We may never know for sure. But we can at least peek over his shoulder and see what he’s up to in his stock portfolio. Thanks to the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012, we get to see what politicians like Vance are investing in or trading… and we get to follow suit. This gives us a legal “insiders” edge.
Charles
On Monday, former President Donald Trump announced his vice president for his second term: Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Lucky for us, Vance just so happens to be an extremely savvy investor.
In 2020, Vance launched venture capital firm Narya Capital with $93 million in seed money. Narya’s backers included Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Before that, Vance was a managing partner at early-stage VC firm Rise of the Rest Seed Fund. Today, he has an estimated net worth of $8.69 million.
Vance has done his fair share of investing in public equity as well. According to Quiver Quant, he owns stakes in the three benchmark indices: the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY), the Invesco QQQ Trust Series 1 (QQQ), and the SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF Trust (DIA). These positions were disclosed on October 30, 2023, and represent his portfolio in 2022.
Vance has not yet filed his 2023 positions and has requested an extension.
Vance’s last disclosed trade, on October 3, 2023, involved the sale of between $50,001 and $100,000 of Walmart (WMT) stock. He still owns an estimated $10,700 of that stock.
We Can See Vance’s Anti-ESG Stance
Vance also owns several other positions that catch our eye. One of these is the ProShares K-1 Free Crude Oil Strategy ETF (OILK). The exchange-traded fund seeks to track the return of the Bloomberg Commodity Balanced WTI Crude Oil Index.
This is interesting because Vance is against environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies and supports oil and gas as as viable form of energy. He’s even gone as far as proposing a $7,500 tax credit for gas cars instead of electric vehicle (EVs), adding that it could create domestic jobs because many EVs are made in China.
“ESG is basically a massive racket to enrich Wall Street and enrich the financial sector of the country, at the expense of the industries that actually employ a lot of Ohio’s workers for middle-class jobs,” Vance said in 2022.
Vance has previously spoken out against President Joe Biden and his administration’s policy of subsidizing alternative energy sources, adding that it has resulted in “wanton harassment of fossil fuel companies, to the detriment of the American people.”
He’s also a supporter of fracking, a controversial practice used for extracting oil and gas from the ground.
Another one of Vance’s interesting investments is Bitcoin (BTC-USD). According to Business Insider, he owned between $100,000 and $250,000 of the cryptocurrency through a Coinbase account. That seems to line up with Trump’s supportive stance on crypto, as the presidential candidate is set to speak at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville later this month.
All told, Vance clearly has some investment smarts… looking to the many of the same industries that we invest in at The Freeport Investor. We could fault him for his ideological flexibility… but our time is better spent paying attention to his investments.
To life, liberty, and insider insights.