> a man convicted of fraud

Most practitioners in the field see that as a very strong signal of future fraud.

0.8% is substantial indeed, but if i understand correctly, it’s 0.8% on that one stock, so much less on the index itself.

Those funds that perform better probably take a higher management fee that might cancel out the gain. May be worth it to have a smoother return though.

There's a real desire out there to tell a narrative where SpaceX is a massively fraudulent piece of financial engineering, a pump and dump scam where the stock will "collapse within a year" and retail investors will be left holding the bag.

There's definitely some financial engineering at the margins, but as I see it the facts are:

- Musk is still going to own 40% of the company. If he's selling 4% of it, his incentives are aligned with keeping the rest of it high

- the index funds ultimately are fast tracking the big IPOs because their customers, in aggregate, want that. And the market structure really has changed since the days when the index inclusion rules were first written and companies went public smaller.

- People have been banging the same drum about short sellers with Tesla since at least 2017 - AFAIK it's still one of the most shorted stocks - and it's up 20x since then.

- Institutional investors with more sophisticated strategies than "buy the index" or "pump and dump lol sell to the index funds" will be participating in the IPO and in fact will be the main drivers of price. Everything I've seen suggests that if this is a "retail heavy" IPO, that means 20 or 30% of the shares ending up with retail instead of a more typical 10. These other institutions could be wrong, but they're not mechanical price takers.

I've shown above how one of the effects people make the most noise about - the index balancing arbitrage - is likely an effect of order of magnitude 1%. It's on the noisemakers to show how any of the other effects you mention can be massively more impactful.

> which is more than enough time for the market to find a price

The price markets find would still inevitably be influence by the knowledge that the demand would increase massively in a few months.

> inclusion criteria reward companies that prioritize profit over growth

Or stable and sustainable growth. Whatever else SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic valuations are price in extremely optimistic growth. But yeah, I do see a point that including adequately priced growth stocks could be a net benefit but of course accouting for the actual valuation would turn index funds into managed ones.

Thankfully its not an issue at all since there is Nasdaq 100.

> Under current rules, these fast-growing companies would be excluded from the S&P500 for potentially years, until they reach 12 months of profitability.

> And you are vastly overstating the effect of S&P500 fast tracking, the plan was to reduce it from 12 months to 6 months; which is more than enough time for the market to find a price.

They might never reach 6 months of profitability, let alone 12 months.

"Because the index needs accuracy.", and I would argue that include price accuracy not just inclusion accuracy. The S&P is a benchmark that is designed to reflect a subset of the market, and giving only some companies early access to the benchmark changes the benchmark. So if you want a benchmark that's designed to include all the big stocks regardless of age, profitability, etc then go make a new benchmark. The only thing you need to do is convince others to use your benchmark.

> Because the index needs accuracy

So you are saying that S&P 500 should be merged with Russell 2000 or rather just become a fully market index to be more "accurate". You do know that's something that exists already, having different indexes makes perfect sense and consumers can pick the ones they want based on their risk profile and preferences.

> most civilization changing companies from the benchmark

It took Google 2 years to get into S&P 500. For Microslop it was 8 years (!). So what's new?

There are indexes which explicitly try to capture the entire market- the Russell 3000 is most prominent, but the Wiltshire 5000 is another one, and Vanguard's Total Market Funds and ETF follow the CRSP US Total Market Index. I believe all of them plan to include SpaceX/OpenAI etc. within a few weeks of its listing, which is what I'd expect from their goal of tracking the total market. Other indexes follow just a few stocks- most famously, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (built during an era of when it had to be calculated by hand every night) looks at just 30 stocks in a weird way(1).

The S&P 500 isn't either of those. It has a list of criteria for inclusion, one of which is profitability. They are sticking with that criteria. If you don't like it, sell your VOO and buy VTI instead.

1: It is essentially impossible to build an index that tracks the DJIA because, since it was done on pencil and paper, it isn't actually market-cap weighted, but is share price weighted, with a correction factor for each stock to account for splits, one stock replacing another, etc. Because of that nature, the weights of the DJIA change minute by minute, so someone attempting to track it would be subject to enormous error.

> If a company is 1-2% of the total US market cap and not included in the index, then the index is wrong right now.

To be clear, S&P 500 relies on float, not total US Market Cap, and Space X will have a tiny float.

Even if it was included, SpaceX would not account for 1-2% of the S&P 500 (more like 0.1%), so even if we reason on the basis of a benchmark, it's not a meaningful difference.

But it is not 1-2% of the total US market cap, is it?

It aspires to be that way. The market decides, and it hasn’t decided yet.

Am I missing something?

> Because the index needs accuracy.

No, it doesn't. At least, not the way you are probably defining it.

This sounds to me like you may be trying to use the index for something it's not really meant to be used for.

> If a company is 1-2% of the total US market cap

Over what time horizon should that number be computed? Every day? Every second? Every month/quarter?

It is not as simple as it seems.

Maybe you know this already, but this reads like exactly the kind of reasoning that people looking back at irrational market euphorias point to as a sign things were about to go awry.

Because it's selective, the S&P by definition does not reflect the actual market. It reflects a subset of it.

If you're comfortable with this notion of what the S&P does, then you ought to be comfortable with S&P applying the same methodology they've always used. There are other indexes you can reference if this particular sampling of the market isn't to your personal liking.

> the S&P 500 no longer reflects the actual market

Well it was never intended to reflect the full "actual market".

> no longer an adequate benchmark

According to your definition it never was. However there were and are plenty of other index benchmarks which serve different purpose. Its just that S&P 500 managed to become the most popular one, why did it happen if it was always inherently flawed?

Like they didn't even add Microslop for 8 years...

> S&P rules are supposed to make the index reflect the market.

Where did you find that? Link?

I ask because common understanding is that the index is a stable tracker of the market, specifically to exclude volatility.

IOW, it reflects a smoothed market, not a point-in-time-with-daily-granularity market. I would really like to know where you read what you read.

What is it a benchmark for? All investable public stocks or the economy writ large?

> Rules against corked bats / steroids exist so people don't cheat at a sport and all players can compete equally.

> The profitability requirement is something made up by the S&P committee.

Those are both equally made up. In this case the rules are being changed for new entrants into the market such as SpaceX for the Nasdaq and other benchmarks that are allowing it for that none of the previous companies in said index were allowed to get in under.

And since it’s 15 days and I know most companies have lockout terms on the order of months for various levels of stock, I’m hesitant to believe this won’t modify the benchmarks beyond what has happened with previous inclusions.

`JumpCrisscross’s reply to one of my other comments on this thread in regards to the S&P being a committee based decision actually has had me pause to think, but your argument that the rules are arbitrary so it can’t be cheating like my baseball analogy fails to land.