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Posted by maltalex 16 hours ago

S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic(arstechnica.com)
1222 points | 422 commentspage 4
balls187 7 hours ago|
I left my comment saying it was a bad idea.
blobbers 13 hours ago||
Good. Financial grift needs to end. Passive investment has become slightly too passive. S&P saved us. We weren't so lucky when they were rating bonds before the GFC. Glad they seem to have grown some ethics and are not bending the knee to the rocketman.
trumpdong 11 hours ago|
As a rule, no one in the financial industry has ethics. They're doing this because they think it'll be more profitable.
groundzeros2015 7 hours ago||
Of course. And maintaining public trust in the quality of their top brand ETF is a good way to make money.
kburman 7 hours ago||
I wonder if Elon would now reconsider IPO.
IAmGraydon 6 hours ago|
The IPO is in less than a week. I believe it’s a bit too late for that.
paulsutter 3 hours ago||
Even as a SpaceX shareholder I have to say this the right decision, and it's what a person would expect.

NASDAQ has an incentive to offer early entry into the index (they want SpaceX to list on their exchange), whereas S&P has no incentive for early inclusion; it could only increase risk for them. Even if they /wanted/ to add SpaceX early, that could create a precedent with unpredictable consequences.

Since most shareholders I know plan to hold for another 20 years, waiting a year to get into the S&P average seems fine. Congratulations to S&P for sticking to principle.

everdrive 8 hours ago||
I'm quite relieved as the S&P should be stable and slow. But with that caveat said, is this why the S&P 500 dropped off a cliff on Friday? If so, why?
cascades42 7 hours ago||
The story being reported is that the unexpectedly strong US jobs report will push the Fed towards a rate hike, which often is correlated with a drop in stock prices.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/tech-stocks-sink-rc...

droidjj 8 hours ago|||
The general consensus is stocks nosedived after the strong jobs report, because strong labor market means its more likely Fed will hike interest rates to curb inflation.
oceansky 8 hours ago|||
Impossible to know for sure. But I would speculate a lot of investors are "bullish" on these three companies and would rather invest more on them.
steveBK123 8 hours ago|||
Quite the opposite.

It dropped because tech dropped and it still has a lot of tech.

This is why QQQ was down far more than SPY, as QQQ is more tech heavy and will be adding these companies.

throwawaycan 8 hours ago|||
No. All index dropped on Friday.
enraged_camel 7 hours ago||
Jobs numbers came way stronger than expected, and previous two months also got revised up.

Strong job numbers + increasing inflation = overheated economy = goodbye interest rate cuts. In fact, there's a significant chance that rates will go up this year. Perhaps even more than once.

That means cost of borrowing will increase, which is bad for business growth.

runfuyngunasdlj 6 hours ago||
The effective altruists* at Anthropic are not happy about this.

*People who justify stealing from others by lazily giving a small pittance away according to a list some other guy showed them and they thought about for 5 minutes.

blondie9x 5 hours ago||
Everyone watch out for other indices like CRSP US Total Market Index, which trade as the ETF VTI and mutual fund VTSAX.

There are countless other indices that are not well known to request seasoning time of these mega companies.

Shifting to S&P 500 seems prudent at the point. Besides S&P does anyone know which indices will be safe from these IPOs?

bluecalm 10 hours ago||
Fast entry rules are terrible. There is an old adage IPO - It's Probably Overpriced. Warren Buffet explained why: It's the issuer who chooses the price and time to enter the market. They will pick circumstances that suits them best. The chances that an IPO is a better deal than multiple other companies available in the auction market at that time which didn't get to choose the timing is close to 0 and it's not worth thinking about it - just don't buy IPOs ever.

I don't care about profitability, sustainability, ESG scores or anything like that. If the market is pricing unprofitable company at hundred of billions maybe there is a good reason for it. I do care about market having time to evaluate the company so index funds buy at fair prices. For this you need time and enough float and volume. Time being the main factor.

bwfan123 6 hours ago|
> Fast entry rules are terrible > just don't buy IPOs ever

Of late the markets have become a casino. There is a large retail population that bets on options. Betting on IPOs is just another opportunity for such folks. By bending the rules Elon and others are trying to make it a more favorable bet for retail ensuring a near-term pop.

Kudos to S&P for standing up and sticking it to the man. And, woe to JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley etc for pushing overpriced paper, and on nasdaq etc for bending rules. This will be remembered later as the peak (my opinion).

outside1234 7 hours ago||
Great. When the market floats it down to a fair valuation of $70B it will be a great add to the S&P 500.
muadddib 16 hours ago|
Kudos to S&P 500. Vast majority of the world has no clue how trillions of $ from their pension funds is being funneled to the select few. Absolutely pathetic.
JumpCrisscross 15 hours ago||
> no clue how trillions of $ from their pension funds

Pension funds don't tend to follow the S&P 500, much less automatically. They're sophisticated institutional investors like CalPERS [1] who dabble in everything from public stocks to private equity.

It's other retirement assets, e.g. 401(k)s and IRAs, that tend to follow the S&P 500. But again, with substantial variation.

S&P including these companies would have driven a lot of money towards them. But there was a lot of misinformation around the magnitude of that drive, as well as the breadth of whom it would affect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalPERS

viceconsole 15 hours ago||
In the US at least, many pension funds are not sophisticated, they're small, underfunded, and getting taken for a ride by expensive advisors who promise fantastical returns that will help dig them out of their funding ratio hole. Many would be better off using an S&P 500 index fund for their equity component instead of getting wined and dined into an illiquid, opaque private equity investment.

Telling that among OECD countries, the US is an outlier in having a much lower average funding ratio, and this despite the fantastic performance of the US stock market over the last 15 years.

JumpCrisscross 14 hours ago||
> many pension funds are not sophisticated, they're small, underfunded, and getting taken for a ride by expensive advisors

Who tend to come up with bumfuck benchmarks other than the common ones. Sometimes for good reasons. Often to justify their own comp.

> Many would be better off using an S&P 500 index fund

Maybe. They would probably be better off with some total-market funds (instead of biasing towards large caps, especially if they're small). But my point stands: pension funds don't tend to automatically follow any major index, much less the S&P 500 proper.

kgwgk 14 hours ago||
It’s true that S&P 500 is not the most popular US equities benchmark for pension funds. Russell is the preferred provider - and they will include SpaceX 5 days after the IPO.
JumpCrisscross 13 hours ago||
> S&P 500 is not the most popular US equities benchmark for pension funds. Russell is the preferred provider

Where are you getting this from? Basically zero pension funds automatically track any single index. (There seems to be a misconception equating pension funds with retirement funds in general. Pension funds are, on the whole, remarkably sophisticated investors. Many pensions funds were private shareholders of these companies already.)

> Russell is the preferred provider - and they will include SpaceX 5 days after the IPO

Russell has loads of indices. Their total market index will quickly incorporate SpaceX. Same with S&P. There are also IPO indices that will incorporate it on day one, because that's what they're designed to represent.

kgwgk 10 hours ago|||
>> S&P 500 is not the most popular US equities benchmark for pension funds. Russell is the preferred provider

> Where are you getting this from?

At least it seems correct for a subset that may or may not be representative: “This report intends to provide insights into the overall and asset class benchmarks selected by the 50 largest U.S. public defined benefit plans. [.. ] the Russell 3000 index was most frequently cited to measure U.S. equity performance.”

https://www.nasra.org/Files/Topical%20Reports/Investment/P&I...

frikskit 10 hours ago|||
You’re right but this chain of reasoning is irrelevant/missing the important point.

You don’t need to track index X to be affected by changes in X. You only need to hold something related to X. Almost all pension funds, heck almost every investment account in the world holds something affected by some index.

joxdosba 15 hours ago||
[flagged]
lumost 15 hours ago|||
It's quite clear that there is an effort to engineer mega financial vehicles that index tracking funds are forced to buy. The incentive to do so is massive, and there is nothing illegal about it.

As a holder of index funds such as the S&P, I'd much prefer that these vehicles are excluded for at least some period of time to ensure that the greater fool isn't simply my index portfolio.

joxdosba 9 hours ago|||
> It's quite clear

In the same way 9/11 was quite clearly an inside job.

Alternatively, a crop of big companies with real, potentially world-changing technology are going public.

This isn’t exactly pets.com we’re talking about.

kortilla 14 hours ago|||
Are you happy to be invested in Tesla? It is not profitable quarter to quarter and is included in your fund.

Why do you tolerate that and not this?

muadddib 15 hours ago||||
I did, in fact, use words. Would you prefer heiroglyphics?
viccis 15 hours ago||||
All of those are real, natural, organic and, might I add, "actual" words.
3683826312819 15 hours ago||
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propagandist 15 hours ago|||
The comment above is perfectly clear, and if you have been living under a rock since the Reagan years, that's on you.

See Elon talking about Tesla finally joining the S&P 500 so index funds would finally have to buy its shares. See a hundred examples where socialism is reserved for the few, the jungle and legal constraints for the rest of us.

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