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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

#131
post #119

What is prompting SpaceX to IPO all of the sudden? I'm personally convinced that this is Musk trying to get out of debt from his Twitter purchase.

That already happened with the merger of X with XAI and then the merger of Xai and SpaceX.

But the reason is because SpaceX is trying to tool up for orbital datacenters. They're building a bunch of solar cell manufacturing plants and Starship launch pads.

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

#132
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can say with a lot of confidence that optics weren’t considered in any of this, possibly to a fault. How can you possibly know that? Do the people on that committee have a cast-iron tenure guarantee?

> How can you possibly know that? I know folks who have been on these. They don’t have tenure. But they’re basically emeritus. If S&P wanted to do something that would cause chaos, it would be fucking with those folks because they made a decision that looks bad.

It’s a public benchmark fund that has much of its value based on its decisions being publicly stable and publicly consistent.

Who would want to invest in a benchmark fund with arcane(the literal term as opposed to mundane) rules that were privately decided? If your statement is accurate it sounds like moving out of such a fund would be prudent. I feel like it’s not accurate since they are sticking to their guns and not changing the rules to benefit oligarchs like Musk such as Nasdaq is doing.

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

#134
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

shady debt offloading onto its sibling financing entity, which is run by Carvana CEO's father, a man convicted of fraud

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

#135
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can you possibly know that? I know folks who have been on these. They don’t have tenure. But they’re basically emeritus. If S&P wanted to do something that would cause chaos, it would be fucking with those folks because they made a decision that looks bad.

It’s a public benchmark fund that has much of its value based on its decisions being publicly stable and publicly consistent. Who would want to invest in a benchmark fund with arcane(the literal term as opposed to mundane) rules that were privately decided? If your statement is accurate it sounds like moving out of such a fund would be prudent. I feel like it’s not accurate since they are sticking to their guns and n…

> Who would want to invest in a benchmark fund with arcane(the literal term as opposed to mundane) rules that were privately decided?

There are lots of rules-based funds. S&P is transparently committee based. It’s why dual-class new entrants are banned, but Google and Berkshire are grandfathered in.

There is a genuine debate on rules versus committees in the index world. But S&P has stuck to its guns as a bastion of the latter. And it works. Everyone picking the S&P 500 over its competitors chooses that.

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have your history backwards. The S&P 500 was created in 1957 as a benchmark. The first investable index fund tracking it (Vanguard's) wasn't created created until 1976. Vanguard created their fund to track the benchmark, not the other way around.

And if you need a second, different index to function as the true market benchmark because the S&P 500 no longer reflects the actual market, then you just agreed the S&P 500 is no longer an adequate benchmark. You just agreed with my point.

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

#137

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 OP but I will weigh in. The numbers for SpaceX were not looking great, they are burning cash faster than Starship crashing into the Indian ocean. The idea was that with a fast indexing, this would be mostly irrelevant as retirement funds would automatically buy into the IPO after 15 days thus bolstering the company before any sanity would prevail on the markets.

Now that they have to wait a year for that point, that cash burn is going to work against them fairly heavily. There is also something like $20 billion of debt they have to pay back in the next 12 months that might not be covered over so easily now.

That said, SpaceX and a lot of Elons companies have had figures that look terrible for ages, and yet they keep manage to pull rabbits out of the hat. So who knows. Maybe they sell a bunch of assets, they have more than enough to cover the gap.

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

#138
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.

> 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.

So what's the reason for fast entry specifically? If it's a significant portion of the market and will remain so, it doesn't need an accelerated entry. A benchmark should be conservative about new entrants so that it doesn't turn from a market benchmark to a trend/fad benchmark.

If time validates the valuations the entry will come in time, just like for previous entries.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except $4T is a made up number, a complete fantasy not rooted in any reality. it us more like $750bn (this is also made up number) :)

All valuations are “made up” numbers.

Price discovery isn’t “making up” a number it’s discovering a number that meets a specific criteria.

Critically it’s not simply averaging a bunch of made up numbers. I may think gold is worth 1,000$/kg but if nobody is willing to sell me gold at that price then my “made up” number has zero effect on the market price.

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

#140
Important to note:

Nasdaq changed its rules recently so SpaceX can join the Nasdaq 100 Index, a cohort of the largest non-financial companies listed on its exchange, in just 15 trading days, down from a three-month minimum. FTSE Russell adopted a similar approach, shortening the waiting time to five trading days.

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