Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 571 posts

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#21

Post by anm89 »

wp381640 wrote: post #6
ahelwer wrote: post #2

Wonder how the weighting will work. If you don't massively overweight smaller coins, you'd just end up holding like 80% Bitcoin & Ethereum with very little of anything else.

Probably the best strategy tbh, you only have to go to a few spots down to find some bad coins and the edge of the top 10 to find some outright scams

Bitcoin cash comes in at #7 on coinmarket cap and while I wouldn't call it a scam, it's not a respectable project IMO. And it quickly gets worse from there over the next 10.

Strongly agree that the best bucket is going to be composed of a vast majority of bitcoin and ethereum.

I don't believe crypto is on the whole in a bubble right now but the fact that Bitcoin Cash has a market cap of >$5B is one of the biggest things that makes me question that.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#23

Post by anm89 »

elevenoh wrote: post #12

No brainer considering to buy ETH on the stock market via grayscale you're paying a 104% premium. The demand (e.g. within registered & margin accounts) is there. https://ycharts.com/companies/ETHE/discount_or_premium_to_na... Aside: Seems covid is accelerating understanding & adoption of crypto. I remember when I couldn't perform a wire transfer for a full week back in March '20 - at one of the most reputable banks g…

When you say stock market, do you actually mean stock market or a crypto exchange? I'm not under the impression that there is any way to buy ETH via any stock market.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#24

Post by pmiller2 »

flixic wrote: post #15

Coinbase used to have an Index Fund weighted by market cap. Launced in 2018[0], it was shut down just a couple of months later[1]. From the articles at the time, it seems that the major reason for the shut down was that the market was going down, and all investors saw losses (because it was 2018 in crypto). Maybe they will resurrect this idea now that the market is going up. [0]: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-in…

That raises a good question: so, there are crypto indices now. How do you buy the index? In other words, who is going to securitize cryptocurrencies? Until there's a way for someone to login to a brokerage account and buy, say, ticker symbol CRYPT, I don't see where having an index maintained by a company is all that useful.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#25

Post by bluedevil2k »

SilasX wrote: post #14
Cd00d wrote: post #8

Tangent question: why do financial services pluralize index as 'indexes' rather than 'indices'? Throws me off every time, and seems to be an industry thing.

Why do they need a justification? English is under no obligation to imitate Latin plurals, and it adds no functional benefit. Edit: interestingly, the title of the article uses the English, while the body uses the Latin (although in one case that’s because it’s from a name). Edit2: Relatedly, I had a "shower thought" that even the most pedantic Latinophiles say "albums" instead of "alba". Although I also know a Latin…

I agree, it’s time we stop pushing words like “cacti” and just accept the inevitable English-ication of words and say “cactuses”.

This is a tangent to the article, but along these lines people love correcting “octopuses” as “octopi”, but “octopus” isn’t a Latin word, it’s Greek, so the “-i” ending isn’t correct.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#26

Post by pmiller2 »

chrisa wrote: post #11
Cd00d wrote: post #8

Tangent question: why do financial services pluralize index as 'indexes' rather than 'indices'? Throws me off every time, and seems to be an industry thing.

Looks like a super common question - nasdaq has an article about it: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/indexes-or-indices-whats-the...

I think I agree with that article. I'm used to seeing "indices" in a mathematical context, referring to an object that labels a particular subobject of another object.

It seems a lot like the difference between "vertices" and "nodes" in a graph. Go to the math department, and you'll hear people talking about vertices. Walk down the hall to the CS department, and it's all nodes, all the time.

I have no idea why this is, but I suspect some kind of cultural thing. Maybe the CS term and the math term originated independently? Kind of like how you talk about machine learning in CS, but a good portion of ML would actually be classified as statistics by the math and stats departments.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#27

Post by skyyler »

anm89 wrote: post #23
elevenoh wrote: post #12

No brainer considering to buy ETH on the stock market via grayscale you're paying a 104% premium. The demand (e.g. within registered & margin accounts) is there. https://ycharts.com/companies/ETHE/discount_or_premium_to_na... Aside: Seems covid is accelerating understanding & adoption of crypto. I remember when I couldn't perform a wire transfer for a full week back in March '20 - at one of the most reputable banks g…

When you say stock market, do you actually mean stock market or a crypto exchange? I'm not under the impression that there is any way to buy ETH via any stock market.

They linked an eth trust that can be traded on OTCQX.

Did you even read their comment?????

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#29

Post by johnwheeler »

ninly wrote: post #13
Cd00d wrote: post #8

Tangent question: why do financial services pluralize index as 'indexes' rather than 'indices'? Throws me off every time, and seems to be an industry thing.

'indexes' has been a just-fine variant of the plural for a very long time -- actually it's the first one listed in Merriam-Webster, so probably the more common variant, though I haven't dug into other references. That said, you're correct that the more common or preferred variant will depend somewhat on the culture/community/industry. The house style guides in finance probably tend toward 'indexes' -- in part because…

I dunno why, but I typically use “indexes” when I talk about a set of lookup tables (database indexes) and “indices” when talking about positions within indexes (indices of arrays)

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#30

Post by iamspoilt »

Someone please explain this to me:

How is any cryptocurrency even considered an investment vehicle? I would classify myself as Boglehead and I believe in the fundamentals of investing in stocks because in all it's technicality (and given the buy-and-hold strategy), you are investing in a business by owning a part of it which naturally means that you will and do get the returns on it, both in terms of profits (dividends) and and value growth (appreciation of the stock value). And conventional wisdom of lending also applies to bonds.

That being said, again, why would cryptocurrency ever be considered as a good investment vehicle? Isn't it analogous to me investing my money in buying USD or the British Pound (or a well diversified currency ETF), something I don't see a lot of value in as well.

Post reply on HN