A small New York brokerage and one of finance Twitter’s loudest voices just teamed up to build ETFs around the trading habits of politicians and other market whales. Siebert Financial (NASDAQ:SIEB) announced on August 18, 2026 a strategic partnership with Unusual Whales to develop and launch a new series of exchange-traded funds. Siebert stock closed at $2.04, up 5.15% on the day and 21.43% over the past week, though shares are still down 41.88% year to date.
The pitch is simple: package the market data that has made Unusual Whales a retail obsession, including congressional trading disclosures, unusual options activity, and institutional flows, into ETFs sold through a real broker-dealer.
What Each Side Brings to the Table
Siebert is a Nasdaq-listed brokerage with a market cap of roughly $83.5 million. It contributes roughly $19 billion in assets under management, more than 176,000 retail customer accounts, and about 59 years of operating history as a brokerage.
Unusual Whales, operating since 2019, brings the audience and the data. The platform covers political trading disclosures, unusual options activity and institutional flows, and claims more than 5 million followers on X and social media.
Siebert CEO John J. Gebbia said Unusual Whales has “built a powerful window into parts of the market that investors increasingly want to understand, from political trading activity to signals that often sit outside traditional research.”
Unusual Whales CEO Matt Saincome went further: “Retail investors shouldn’t be the last ones to know what’s happening in the market. If politicians are trading, potential insiders are placing large bets, or unusual options activity is bubbling up beneath the surface, regular people deserve the tools to see it too.”
The Precedent Is Already Trading
Political-trading ETFs already exist. The Unusual Whales Subversive Democratic Trading ETF (CBOE:NANC), which tracks stocks disclosed by Democratic members of Congress and their spouses, currently trades near $51.63. NANC held $238.88 million in net assets as of March 31, 2026, with top positions in NVIDIA (10.33%), Alphabet (6.08%), and Microsoft (5.96%).
NANC is up 13.2% year to date and 19.31% over the past year. The Siebert announcement does not mention NANC, KRUZ, or the Subversive brand, so whether the new lineup will complement or eventually compete with those existing funds is unclear.
What They Didn’t Say
The disclosure is unusually thin on specifics. No tickers, no individual fund strategies, no expense ratios, no launch dates, and no financial terms were released. The products remain pending SEC regulatory filings, and until those filings appear, there is no way to evaluate what exposures retail investors would actually be buying.
The Catch Investors Should Understand
Every product in this category leans on one law: the STOCK Act, which requires members of Congress to disclose personal securities trades. Legislation to restrict or ban congressional stock trading has been introduced repeatedly in Washington without passing. If a ban ever became law, the raw material feeding these ETFs could thin out or disappear.
There’s also a timing problem. Congressional disclosures arrive well after the trade is executed, meaning any copycat strategy is acting on delayed information rather than real-time signals. The bet here is that the underlying stock picks still have enough edge to matter even after that lag. The open question is whether packaging that data into a fund, with fees on top, actually beats a plain index once the delay is priced in.
What to Watch Next
The next real milestones are regulatory. Investors will want to see the initial N-1A registration statements to learn how many funds are planned, which Unusual Whales data streams each will track (political trading, options flow, institutional activity, or a blend), and what the expense ratios look like versus the expense ratio range typical of thematic ETFs. Until those filings appear, Siebert’s roughly 40.9 million shares outstanding, its $88.2 million in trailing revenue, and NANC’s ongoing performance are the numbers to keep an eye on.
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