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S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

arstechnica.com

181–190 of 524 posts

Re: S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal photography blogging business has a market cap of a trillion dollars too. I have 1 trillion shares, and I sold 1 to a mate for a dollar. Total company revenue is like 50 bucks a month and profits are nil. Can I be in the S&P 500 too?

Anthropic has raised $130B. It's a bit more than selling a share to your mate for $1.

Yes, it's like selling a share to a group of mates who hear from their mates that AI is hot so they want in. Still does nothing for the profit not being there to pay those investors back in any other way than via new investors (ie pension funds).

Re: S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Plenty is correct. Fidelity let's you buy SpaceX at IPO with only $2K in the bank. And there are other reasons to be cautious. Many passive funds don't license the SP500 and instead mirror it with their own synthetic index. They are not bound to respect this decision.

I think caution is most warranted, but I also think it's likely that SpaceX will become a real-life Weyland-Yutani Corporation (i.e. "The Company") of Alien and own space. But I'll be long dead before that plays out.

> But I'll be long dead before that plays out.

Given how that's played out in the movies, I'd be happy about that.

Re: S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

#183
Yesterday:

"SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P" (bloomberg.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405718

Ars used to do deep insightful articles a couple of days after the news but today it's just regurgitated blogspam that is 2 days old news. And way more political. It's sad.

Re: S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

#184

Yep!! Respect to them. I was planning to move to an equal weight index but this gives me a little more time to evaluate options.

I’ve moved my S&P 500 investments to the Equal Weight index to reduce my exposure to AI. Quite aside from SpaceX, I think the large-cap tech companies are making some uncomfortably large bets on AI and any major upset could cause a domino effect. But as so many ETFs have a significant stake in large-cap US tech stocks (the top 10 holdings of the iShares MSCI World ETF is entirely comprised US Big Tech, making up 20%…

I've been doing research on this subject for an article I'm writing, and the only way things end well if the government gets involved is if we pass legislation deprivatizing AI data centers. Like the dark fiber laid during the dotcom, the compute is the valuable thing here that will remain after the speculative bubble has burst. The deal isn't bad for the AI companies, they can depreciate on a short schedule while still getting a payout for the capex, and being able to offer tech companies compute subsidies puts the people in a stronger position than if we're subsidizing them directly.

Re: S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

#185

A bit tangent, as I never had a single thought about investing any of the few precious attention moment into financial theaters. if I get it this is an index to invest in common in distributed wallets chosen and managed by an organization named S&P? I'ld be interested in something similar, but aiming at growing cooperatives, non profits, externally checked for alignment organisations striving to benefit humanity as a…

> something similar, but aiming at growing cooperatives, non profits, externally checked for alignment organisations striving to benefit humanity as a whole

There are a lot of investment funds like this, usually called something like "ESG" (environmental, social, and governance) funds.

Re: S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI can still have a massive impact while these three companies go nowhere. Same as the dotcom and same as the railroads.

> AI can still have a massive impact while these three companies go nowhere These three companies can do great while their valuations go nowhere.

> These three companies can do great while their valuations go nowhere.

How? They're building out on debt. The investors need to offload at a profit otherwise the company can't sell more shares to acquire the cash needed (share price too low).

Sure, it's possible that a recent IPO does poorly but the company soldiers on regardless, but it's not likely.

Re: S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

#187

Yep!! Respect to them. I was planning to move to an equal weight index but this gives me a little more time to evaluate options.

I’ve moved my S&P 500 investments to the Equal Weight index to reduce my exposure to AI. Quite aside from SpaceX, I think the large-cap tech companies are making some uncomfortably large bets on AI and any major upset could cause a domino effect. But as so many ETFs have a significant stake in large-cap US tech stocks (the top 10 holdings of the iShares MSCI World ETF is entirely comprised US Big Tech, making up 20%…

> I found S&P 500 Equal Weight to be pretty attractive.

The rebalancing required to maintain equal weights means constantly selling your winners and buying more of your losers. That creates volatility drag. Stock returns are highly skewed: only about 4% of stocks outperform the market, and are responsible for most of its gains. By keeping your allocation to those stocks small through constant rebalancing, you are missing out on a large part of their gains. The vast majority of stocks underperform.

Maintaining the equal weighting also requires constant trading, which generally means higher fees. A market weighted fund, in contrast, naturally maintains its desired balance in response to price movements, without any trading.

Also, the equal weighting ignores the amount of outstanding float for each company. If the fact that NASDAQ has not (historically) been float-adjusted (a common anti-SpaceX talking point) gave you concern, this is even worse, due to the multiple orders of magnitude difference between the largest and smallest companies in the S&P. If enough money enters the equal-weight index, this can spark large amounts of buying in (relatively) small companies that is divorced from their economic performance.

The equal-weight index has outperformed the market-weighted index in some periods (not in recent memory), but with higher volatility (so worse risk-adjusted returns). That outperformance can mostly be explained by factor tilts implicit in the equal weighting (e.g., a higher allocation to mid-cap value stocks).

You would probably be better off with a mix of market-weighted funds explicitly designed to give you the factor tilts and risk exposure you want.

Re: S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

#188
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.

Re: S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

#189
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI can still have a massive impact while these three companies go nowhere These three companies can do great while their valuations go nowhere.

Which is unlikely considering their obligations. I'm a bit more optimistic about SpaceX (and anthropic to a lower degree), but if free models keep improving at the same rate as frontier models, their won't be any profit from AI.

What’s the time horizon do you think for free models matching today’s SOTA on average consumer hardware? I see people building 6k+ machines to run the best of them at the moment, which are behind SOTA by maybe 6 - 12 months or so right now.

Re: S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI can still have a massive impact while these three companies go nowhere These three companies can do great while their valuations go nowhere.

> These three companies can do great while their valuations go nowhere. How? They're building out on debt. The investors need to offload at a profit otherwise the company can't sell more shares to acquire the cash needed (share price too low). Sure, it's possible that a recent IPO does poorly but the company soldiers on regardless, but it's not likely.

> They're building out on debt

SpaceX sort of is. OpenAI almost certainly is. Anthropic doesn't appear to be.

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