The Nasdaq 100 and FTSE Russell made a rule change that allows SpaceX to enter index without mormal time for price discovery. Most index funds have rebalance day just 5 days after IPO. S&P also made rule change for S&P Total Market Index and Dow Jones US Total Stock Market Index, but left SP500 intact.
Nothing wrong with SpaceX or Anthropic getting into indexes with fair rules, this rule change is pure creed+corruption.
I mean these rule changes have been a long time coming. SpaceX was just the straw that broke the camels back here. These major index's want to stay relevant and cutting out some of the biggest companies in the market just opens the way for a "true" NASDAQ 100 that is actually market cap weighted rather then some arbitrary rules cutting somethings out.
Musk is highly unpopular, and some conspiracy theorists linked financial arcanity to him in a way that sounds compelling and hidden. If you push back on the corruption claim, you’re in Musk’s pocket. The same folks who became armchair bank experts in 2023 now confidently make statements that middle 401(k)s and pensions, or the NASDAQ 100 (for whom this has probably been the most brilliant marketing move in their history, nobody talked about that index before) and the S&P 500.
At the end of the day, some RIAs in the Bay Area made bank on folks churning their retirement accounts. Some influencers got clicks. Otherwise, this is a nothing burger.
Ok, now we are getting somewhere. There is no guarantee that they will be a big part of the stock market. It is not "absolutely" sure, for them or for any new public stock. That's why the indices have/had the the rules they (used) to have, to wait and see if a newly IPOed stock actually becomes a big part of the market before it becomes part of the index.
Why did they change the rules for these companies? That's what people want an explanation for. That's what is fishy about all this. I'm not asking you to explain something that seems normal. I'm asking you to explain something that doesn't make sense
Because the fundamental purpose of an index is to track the stock market. The S&P 500 benchmark was created in 1957 to benchmark the US stock market, decades before the first investment funds that copy it (by Vanguard, in 1976).
The primary purpose of an index is to track the market. If an index excludes a significant part of the market it claims to track, then the index no longer accurately reflects the market, and fails at achieving its purpose.
The S&P 500 tracks the 500 largest large-cap US stocks. All three of the major upcoming IPOs (SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic) are large-cap US stocks. Together these companies comprise ~5% of the total US stock market.
In previous decades, this was not an issue, since companies IPOed much earlier when valued at <0.1% of the market. It was fine to exclude these companies from the index for some time, since they were an insignificant part of the market.
Today we have companies raising enormous amounts of private equity, and going public as significant members of the market. All of (SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI) are within the top 20 largest companies in the US.
This is why many are arguing for fast-track inclusion, so the index can add these companies quickly, and retain its ability to accurately track the market.
> This is why many are arguing for fast-track inclusion...
History will be the judge.
But using nothing more than Occum's Razor and recent corporate history as a guide the reason that "...many are arguing for fast-track inclusion" is that they are crooked.
> There is no guarantee that they will be a big part of the stock market. It is not "absolutely" sure, for them or for any new public stock
It's really hard to believe that you'd be writing this in good faith.
In reality, even without being publicly listed(!), these companies have already managed to become an absolutely massive part of the market. After the IPO? Hah.
The Nasdaq 100 and FTSE Russell made a rule change that allows SpaceX to enter index without mormal time for price discovery. Most index funds have rebalance day just 5 days after IPO. S&P also made rule change for S&P Total Market Index and Dow Jones US Total Stock Market Index, but left SP500 intact.
Nothing wrong with SpaceX or Anthropic getting into indexes with fair rules, this rule change is pure creed+corruption.