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Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

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961–970 of 1001 posts

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#961

The index fund thing seems to me to be an overhyped nothingburger. The seasoning period would just delay the inevitable when a company is launching with a trillion dollar valuation. The big story is that that is happening at all. It wasn’t that long ago when Facebook had to get special permission from the government to stay private until they got to $100 billion. The issue here is that public investors are missing ou…

>It wasn’t that long ago when Facebook had to get special permission from the government to stay private until they got to $100 billion.

is this true? There was the "Jumpstart Our Business Startups" (JOBS) Act, signed by Obama around that time that changed the maximum number of private investors or whatever, but was special permission given to Facebook?

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#962

The index fund thing seems to me to be an overhyped nothingburger. The seasoning period would just delay the inevitable when a company is launching with a trillion dollar valuation. The big story is that that is happening at all. It wasn’t that long ago when Facebook had to get special permission from the government to stay private until they got to $100 billion. The issue here is that public investors are missing ou…

>It wasn’t that long ago when Facebook had to get special permission from the government to stay private until they got to $100 billion. is this true? There was the "Jumpstart Our Business Startups" (JOBS) Act, signed by Obama around that time that changed the maximum number of private investors or whatever, but was special permission given to Facebook?

Oh I was wrong, they were forced to go public. At the time any company with $10 million in assets and 500 investors had to go public. Perhaps I misremember them trying to stay private and failing.

But the point remains, it would have been unheard of for a company 1/10 the market valuation of these companies to be private, so the public market is missing a lot of the growth phase now.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#963

For SpaceX (and possible the others): Yes it can, since they changed the rules to force over $30 trillion in passive 401k and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations. From https://x.com/Hedgeye/status/2060435253928604065 : "Rule changes for the SpaceX $SPCX IPO: Index providers waived the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to 5. This forces over $30 trillion in passive 401k a…

Now if you looked at it the other way around, you could say if they were trying to swallow the stock market they would probably want to start by taking some pretty much larger bites than most :|

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#965
post #475

From Matt Levine’s column today: > The index demand is not 100% of the stock available in the IPO, or 110%, or even 50%. But it’s plausibly more than 25%. It’s not a short squeeze, but it’s a lot. Add a reported 30% allocation to retail, and arguably a majority of the IPO is being sold to price-insensitive investors. That is one way to get a high IPO price.

Do the indexes have some capacity to defer / waive buying into new stocks if they judge it in the interests of investors?

No, arbitrary decisions would defeat the point of indexes.

But they can and do add systematic protections, like only buying based on the free float to avoid a short squeeze.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#966
post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I broadly agree. Though I'm less pessimistic: lots of people will pay lots of attention to SpaceX and friends, and with short selling in public markets being possible, an accurate price will be established very quickly. Remember also: index funds are some of the participants most keen to lend out their shares to short sellers. It's one of the rare ways they can boost returns above the raw index they follow.

> with short selling in public markets being possible, an accurate price will be established very quickly It'll be virtually impossible to short sell the stock within the first month due to lockups, and it'll take 180 days for all the pools to be available: then, we'll have a more-or-less "accurate" price, as you put it.

Whatever float is available on the market can be made available for short sellers to borrow. That can even happen multiple times: ie short interest can exceed 100% of the float. Or even 100% of the market capitalisation.

With stock futures, you don't even need to borrow the stock to (effectively) short it: anyone with enough collateral can write stock futures, whether they own the underlying stock or not.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#967
post #638
post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I broadly agree. Though I'm less pessimistic: lots of people will pay lots of attention to SpaceX and friends, and with short selling in public markets being possible, an accurate price will be established very quickly. Remember also: index funds are some of the participants most keen to lend out their shares to short sellers. It's one of the rare ways they can boost returns above the raw index they follow.

> and with short selling in public markets being possible, an accurate price will be established very quickly. I know very little about markets, but: aren't the short-sellers just going to provide liquidity for the big index funds? Like, if the funds HAVE to buy SpaceX, and the funds are enormous, wont every single stock sold short be immediately gobbled up, as well as pretty much anyone else wanting to sell? Even if…

Most index funds, and essentially all that matter economically, hold stock in proportion to the free float, and not the total market capitalisation. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_float

So if SpaceX only sells 1% of shares in the IPO, and the rest are locked up, then these index funds will only try to buy some fraction of this 1%.

For simplicity, let's assume about 25% of stocks by value are held by index funds. In our case, that would mean that index funds would buy 25% of 1% of SpaceX, or about 0.25% of SpaceX's market capitalisation. For simplicity, assume a SpaceX market capitalisation of 2 trillion USD, so that would be 5 billion USD. A big sum for you and me, but not all that much too worry about for the index fund industry and the stock market.

Later on, the lock ups will be lifted. That will increase SpaceX's weight in the relevant indices, but will also make sure that more stock is available to buy for them.

About the impact of short sellers: let me construct an exaggerated cartoon example. Suppose our index fund already has a 100 shares of SpaceX and wants to hold 300 more, but no else who holds SpaceX is currently allowed to sell for another three months.

Well, index funds are really, really keen on lending out shares to get a bit of extra revenue. So the index funds lends out 100 shares. They go to a short seller, who immediately sells them back on the exchange, where the index fund buys them. Now the index fund has exposure to 200 shares. 100 'real' shares it just bought, and 100 shares that the short sellers owes them. Well, the index fund can lend out the 100 real shares again, and repeat the cycle 2 more times, so that at the end they have 300 lend out shares and 100 real shares on their books.

In three months the lockups expire, and the short seller closes out their short position.

The above is an exaggerated stylised cartoon description, but it's not too far off what can happen in principle.

Well, the index fund would lend out the 100 'real' shares they have at the end, too, just to collect a bit of extra borrow fee on another 100 shares. So the index fund has an economic claim to 400 lend out shares, and doesn't currently hold any physical shares.

Other market participants can trade these 100 physical shares back and forth amongst each other (or loan them to each other, too) to help with price discovery.

There's also stock futures, where you trade the right/obligation to transact some shares at specific prices in the future. Economically, entering into a contract today to be obliged to sell shares in the future is equivalent to becoming a short-seller, but for regulatory reason you don't need to borrow the shares when selling futures.

So stock futures are another way to help with price discovery, even when there's scarcely any underlying shares available right now.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#968

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if someone thinks that the top 500 companies include too much risk then yes too bad, you need to move out of SPY. It isn't called the S&P495 because they kick out 5 of the biggest companies that some people consider to be risky. I personally think its super risky to want to be Diversified and NOT include any exposure to SpaceX. Yes, Elon is unique but that doesn't mean his companies are going to fail especially…

You are talking nonsense. The reason why I liked the SP500 is especially BECAUSE they had guardrails against unprofitable speculative companies that just got added on the stock market. On average those stocks are going down on their first public year. The SP500 made sure to have a cooldown period before adding them. Now you are trying to justify why we should have them anyways, even though I never chose that to start…

You misunderstood what you were buying if you thought that S&P500 could never change their processes.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#969

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if someone thinks that the top 500 companies include too much risk then yes too bad, you need to move out of SPY. It isn't called the S&P495 because they kick out 5 of the biggest companies that some people consider to be risky. I personally think its super risky to want to be Diversified and NOT include any exposure to SpaceX. Yes, Elon is unique but that doesn't mean his companies are going to fail especially…

It's not about the overall long term risk of the company, it's the inherent short term risk of the IPO that will potentially hurt retail investors. Why not have them trade for a while and go to business as usual so things settle down and the index can prevent wild fluctuations? The only ones who might benefit from this rule change are pump-and-dump types.

The goal of SP500 is to provide exposure to the 500 biggest companies, not protect shareholders. I think IBM might do poorly when AI destroys their overpriced IT outsourcing business, but that doesn't mean SP500 should kick them out.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#970

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like this either, but from the article: > Although Nasdaq has already shortened the “seasoning” period before index inclusion to 15 trading days and FTSE Russell has slashed its waiting time to five days (and S&P Dow Jones is reportedly considering something similar), most share indices weight firms in proportion to the value only of shares they have released for public trading (the “free float”). For SpaceX,…

> The NASDAQ 100 is an exception, and has changed its rules to weight companies at up to three times their free float, in an apparent effort to woo Mr Musk. im not a finance guy, can someone explain to me why the nasdaq would want to "woo" someone specifically? what benefit would nasdaq get? or, alternatively, what harm would befall nasdaq for not woo-ing musk?

Nasdaq earns money every time a stock is traded on their exchange (a very small amount per trade, but it adds up) in addition to other listing fees that the company pays. So it's definitely in their interest if Musk chooses to list SpaceX on Nasdaq instead of, say, NYSE.
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