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SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P

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Re: SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P

#121
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indices are supposed to reflect a part of the market. That's why you have all of S&P500, the Dow, NYSE Composite, and Nasdaq Composite (and several others) in the US — They each reflect different attributes of the market as a whole. As it stands, it's clear that the users of S&P500 are not interested in the performance of the parts of the market made up of overpriced (and potentially highly volatile) IPOs.

The problem with your framing of "users of S&P500 are not interested overpriced IPOs" is that it conflates two fundamentally different things: what an index describes vs what investors prefer . The moment you start filtering out parts of the market based on investor appetite vs market reality, you stop building an index and instead start creating an actively managed product. That's active investing. It's no longer an…

An index is an index. It works fine as an index if it excludes one or two stocks. People seem to forget as well that this is a question of waiting a single year before it including the stock. It is literally just long enough to make sure the price settles, it's not some catastrophic thing.

Re: SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P

#122

Those mega IPOs are the latest grift to unload overpriced shares before the whole AI tulip bubble explodes in everyone's face. The insiders know it, which is precisely why those IPOs are happening right now. Employees and VCs don't want to be holding the bag. small-time investors will be. Also, SpaceX is going to unlock more and more on their float at around the same time most indexes will have to buy it. It has been…

They are happening now because the entire space narrative is dependent on SDI, sorry Golden Dome, as a massive heist of taxpayer money for the militarization of space (nobody believes in economic civilian space compute). Like SDI it’s bullshit but like SDI it works at robbing everyone blind.

That relies on Trump in power.

Re: SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P

#123

The market is more unpredictable than it’s been in a long, long time so I hesitate to make a firm prediction but to me the odds that SpaceX will be a successful IPO over a 3-6 month window are significantly lower now. S&P inclusion basically requires funds to hold a position by default, and per their own estimates $20tn of assets are indexed/benchmarked to the S&P.

Not to say I have an opinion one way or another, but why do you think that SpaceX odds to have a successful IPO is lower now?

Re: SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P

#124
post #112

Good. Indexes are supposed to be slow-moving, precisely due to their entry requirement of sustained profitability that skews towards mature companies. All that an inclusion of these new companies would accomplish is a bailout of their stockholders by pension funds and ETFs where millions of regular people shoulder all the downside risk. SpaceX and OAI stock will be available through Robinhood, Questrade and all the o…

>All that an inclusion of these new companies would accomplish is a bailout of their stockholders by pension funds and ETFs where millions of regular people shoulder all the downside risk.

Carvana is the poster child for this. It's astonishing that a company with a history of shady practices, and that has yet to offer a convincing explanation for why it is not a scam, is part of the S&P 500.

Re: SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with your framing of "users of S&P500 are not interested overpriced IPOs" is that it conflates two fundamentally different things: what an index describes vs what investors prefer . The moment you start filtering out parts of the market based on investor appetite vs market reality, you stop building an index and instead start creating an actively managed product. That's active investing. It's no longer an…

An index is an index. It works fine as an index if it excludes one or two stocks. People seem to forget as well that this is a question of waiting a single year before it including the stock. It is literally just long enough to make sure the price settles, it's not some catastrophic thing.

> it excludes one or two stocks.

It's more than that. None of SpaceX, OpenAI, nor Anthropic will meet the criteria, and they will make up a significant part of the US stock market. Each of these companies is heavily investing their cashflow into growing the company and are unlikely to be profitable many years.

The inclusion criteria prioritizes companies that extract their cashflow into profit, and excludes companies that invest their cashflow into growing the company. For example, when Jeff Bezos ran Amazon he described his company as "famously unprofitable, And that is a conscious strategy and an investment decision." Amazon only joined the index in 2005, nearly 8 years after IPO, even though it was a significant member of the stock market at the time.

Re: SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P

#127

The market is more unpredictable than it’s been in a long, long time so I hesitate to make a firm prediction but to me the odds that SpaceX will be a successful IPO over a 3-6 month window are significantly lower now. S&P inclusion basically requires funds to hold a position by default, and per their own estimates $20tn of assets are indexed/benchmarked to the S&P.

Not to say I have an opinion one way or another, but why do you think that SpaceX odds to have a successful IPO is lower now?

Not to whom you're replying...

Depends what you mean by successful. If you mean "the IPO goes ahead" then I don't think this makes a difference (unless Elon cracks the shits at this decision and pulls out, which I'm not sure is an option).

If "successful" equates to number-go-up, then my understanding is that Fast Index Entry would have resulted in, effectively, forced purchase of shares by various funds.

When Fast Index Entry (FIE) was a chance of being introduced, the odds of number go up were higher. Now that FIE has been ruled out, there's a lower chance of number go up because there's no "forced blind purchase" group.

Re: SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P

#128
post #112

Good. Indexes are supposed to be slow-moving, precisely due to their entry requirement of sustained profitability that skews towards mature companies. All that an inclusion of these new companies would accomplish is a bailout of their stockholders by pension funds and ETFs where millions of regular people shoulder all the downside risk. SpaceX and OAI stock will be available through Robinhood, Questrade and all the o…

On a fundamental level, the S&P 500 index is meant to be a benchmark of the market. Journalists, policymakers, investment managers, politicians, regular investors, everyone I know all use the S&P 500 as the benchmark of the US stock market. If a significant percentage of the market is excluded from the index because they don't meet index inclusion criteria, then then index stops being a useful benchmark.

It’s a benchmark of the market under certain rules, like having multiple quarters of earnings for the market to value them at.

These companies want special exceptions. If you are an exception why should you be included in a benchmark? At best they should have an asterisk against their name like Sammy Sosa or Mark McGuire if they are not following the same rules.

Re: SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P

#129
post #112

Good. Indexes are supposed to be slow-moving, precisely due to their entry requirement of sustained profitability that skews towards mature companies. All that an inclusion of these new companies would accomplish is a bailout of their stockholders by pension funds and ETFs where millions of regular people shoulder all the downside risk. SpaceX and OAI stock will be available through Robinhood, Questrade and all the o…

On a fundamental level, the S&P 500 index is meant to be a benchmark of the market. Journalists, policymakers, investment managers, politicians, regular investors, everyone I know all use the S&P 500 as the benchmark of the US stock market. If a significant percentage of the market is excluded from the index because they don't meet index inclusion criteria, then then index stops being a useful benchmark.

It may be used as a benchmark, but that’s not actually the purpose of it. The purpose is to serve as a way for people to invest in a representative sample of the market. It can still be a representative sample with safeguards. If you want a benchmark without safeguards, you can calculate one without risking millions of people’s life savings.

Re: SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P

#130
post #112

Good. Indexes are supposed to be slow-moving, precisely due to their entry requirement of sustained profitability that skews towards mature companies. All that an inclusion of these new companies would accomplish is a bailout of their stockholders by pension funds and ETFs where millions of regular people shoulder all the downside risk. SpaceX and OAI stock will be available through Robinhood, Questrade and all the o…

>All that an inclusion of these new companies would accomplish is a bailout of their stockholders by pension funds and ETFs where millions of regular people shoulder all the downside risk. Carvana is the poster child for this. It's astonishing that a company with a history of shady practices, and that has yet to offer a convincing explanation for why it is not a scam, is part of the S&P 500.

what's the argument for it being a scam?
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