A new investment fund is saying no to DEI-focused companies.

In the race to attract the best employees, American companies have always played to win.Apple pays millions to poach star executives and Nvidia spares no expense to hire top AI researchers.

Why? Because hiring the best and brightest on skill and ability is the secret sauce to American innovation.Sadly, some companies have rejected the practice of hiring on skill and ability and are now hiring on the basis of race and gender.My investment firm, Azoria, has identified three dozen S&P 500 companies with explicit racial and gender hiring targets.Early next year, we’ll launch an ETF fund that invests in every S&P 500 company — except those that use these hiring targets.The premise is straightforward: companies that hire on skill and ability will outperform those that hire on race and gender.Best Buy is one of the three dozen companies we won’t be buying.

It’s a $20 billion business that has a written policy that “1 in 3 new corporate salaried positions” are “to be filled by BIPOC.”Companies like Best Buy label these hiring targets as “inclusive,” but the truth is that they hurt everyone, especially the very people they claim to help.When Best Buy says “one in three new ..

.positions” will go to BIPOC Americans, they’re implying that Americans of color can’t ascend to these roles without special treatment.We don’t support this type of thinking.

It diminishes the qualifications of minority applicants and spreads the divisive lie that their success is only possible through lowered standards rather than their own merit.Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — a brilliant black legal scholar — has spoken about the cloud that affirmative action cast over his achievements, unfairly branding him as a token and implying he couldn’t succeed without special treatment.We saw a similar phenomenon in 2022 when President Biden announced he would nominate a black woman for the Supreme Court — no matter what.Then he announced Ketanji Brow...