NANC vs. KRUZ: what these ETFs actually hold
Two exchange-traded funds have built a public brand around congressional trading: NANC, weighted toward disclosed trades by Democratic members, and KRUZ, its Republican-weighted counterpart. Both mechanically track public disclosures rather than picking stocks by hand — the same underlying filings that power a tracker like this one, wrapped as an investable product.
They are worth understanding for a reason beyond whether to buy them: they are a live, public, professionally executed test of the question everyone asks about congressional trading.
How they work
Both build holdings from public STOCK Act disclosures, filtered by party.
Because those disclosures carry the same 30–45 day lag everyone else faces, neither fund buys alongside Congress. It cannot. The filings do not exist yet at the moment of the trade. Both funds reconstruct a portfolio from delayed, public filings — exactly the information you or anyone else could read.
That matters because it removes the most common assumption about these products: that they somehow get closer to the source. They do not. They are faster and more disciplined at reading the same late paperwork.
What they inherit from the filings
Every limitation of the underlying data flows straight into the fund.
No execution prices. Filings disclose a date and an amount band, never a price. The fund buys at whatever the market offers when it rebalances.
No position sizes. $1,001–$15,000 is a range spanning fifteen times its
own floor. Any weighting scheme built on it is an estimate.
Household trades, not member trades. A significant share of disclosed activity comes from spouses and dependent children, filed under the member's name. The fund cannot separate them either.
Sales on the same lag. A member who exited three weeks ago still reads as holding.
The party framing is marketing, not method
Splitting by party makes a clean pitch and an easy story. Nothing in our data supports it as a predictor.
Mean Composite score across the members we track is +14.5% for the 11 Democrats and +13.2% for the 16 Republicans — a 1.3-point gap on samples that small, which is noise rather than signal. The top ten contains seven Republicans and three Democrats; the bottom four contains three Republicans and one Democrat. The full rankings.
If party drove returns you would expect the ranking to sort by it. It does not sort by it at all.
The question underneath both funds
Both products rest on a premise: that disclosed congressional trades, followed mechanically, produce something worth owning.
Our dataset gives that a direct test. Across 4,791 disclosed buys, the average purchase is up 5.15% three months on — which sounds like a strategy. Net of each stock's own sector benchmark over the same window, it is −0.32%.
The raw figure is the market. The sector-adjusted figure is what the picking added, and it is approximately nothing. The full analysis.
A fund tracking that strategy is, on this evidence, buying broad US equity exposure selected by an unusual filter, then charging a fee for the filter. That may still beat a savings account in a rising market. It is not the same claim as "following Congress works".
How to evaluate their marketed performance
Fund performance is typically presented as raw return, or against a broad index like the S&P 500. Neither answers the sector question.
The useful comparison is against what the fund's own holdings would have done by sector — because a portfolio that happened to be heavy in technology during a technology rally will beat the S&P and still represent no skill on anyone's part. That comparison is rarely published, for the same reason it is rarely published about individual politicians: it usually shrinks the number.
Three questions to ask of any figure either fund quotes:
- Over what window, ending when?
- Against which benchmark, and does it match the holdings' actual sector mix?
- Net of fees, or before them?
The honest position
Neither fund, nor this site, can tell you whether a specific politician is genuinely skilled or simply had market exposure during a rising period. Separating those two things is precisely what the excess-return figures throughout this site exist to do, and when we apply them the difference largely disappears.
That is a finding about the data, not advice about the funds. We hold no position in either and are not qualified to give you one — see Terms. What we can offer is the underlying dataset, so you can run the sector comparison on the strategy yourself rather than taking anyone's marketing at face value.