This seems a sensible thing to do. If you change the rules on how things end up on your index, you force everyone using that index to reevaluate it. Your index is now perceived as more volatile (and probably is), and all the finance people need to reevaluate the risk of their index funds and decide if it is now 'growth', 'high growth' or whatever bucket it belongs in based on the new risk profile. And then all the portfolios need to be rebalanced. Which all takes time, more time than was being proposed. The sensible thing to do is to create a new index with the new rules.
> sensible thing to do is to create a new index with the new rules
It depends. Indices aren’t funds. They aren’t meant to balance investor interests. They’re meant to communicate some metric about the market.
The S&P tells you how big companies are doing in an index optimized to balance representation against trading cost. So in 2005, float was taken into account for weighting (versus just market cap). This made sense. Also, since the start, the S&P 500 has been a committee-based index. Not rule based. This has made it successful; if you want stable and unchanging, you never went for the S&P 500.
The S&P 500 may not be a fund itself, but Standard & Poor's is a business whose ability to sell services is correlated with the continued relevance of the S&P 500. It absolutely does balance interests - namely, its own - beyond simply being an academic vehicle for communication of a stable thesis.
It seems entirely reasonable to say: "if we make a certain decision, we correlate both our reputation and a nontrivial portion of the U.S. economy with the whims of one of the most volatile personalities in industry, and we should likely pay attention to this trial balloon that shows such anticipatory fear of the decision that we might lose our reputation as an index altogether."
> absolutely does balance interests - namely, its own - beyond simply being an academic vehicle for communication of a stable thesis
As a business, sure. As a committee, it’s still a deeply technical process. I can say with a lot of confidence that optics weren’t considered in any of this, possibly to a fault.
> and a nontrivial portion of the U.S. economy
This vastly overstates the amount of assets tied to the S&P 500. It’s a lot. But it’s a strong minority of equity exposures.
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.
There's overlap between strong minority and nontrivial, so not sure how it can be vastly overstated. Do you have numbers you can add to this, or any explanation of equity exposure etc?
The market cap of the S&P 500 according to Google is ~$65T. Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX could well amount to $4T+ in market cap. That's ~6% of the entire index. It's like adding another NVidia. That's a big deal.
The rules around index inclusion exist for a reason. Too much control in one person's hands (which SpaceX has), too small a float (so you don't get price discovery), lack of a history of financial performance and minimal trading days just don't give investors confidence and, like it or not, investment decisions are made based on the index. If you want to argue against passive investment, well, good luck with that.
I think a lot of people have this weird idea that what we need is some theoretically unfettered market for "true" price discovery when it's actually regulations like this that create markets. It's like a libertarian brain worm.
I don't think anybody wants these mega-companies out of the index, specifically. They just don't see why rules that exist for a reason should be suspended when the net effect of that is that investors have less information and there is a lot of forced purchasing. If you have confidence in your IPO, let the market decide what it's worth without trying to fix the price because what they seem to want is for insider lock-ups to end about the time we'd otherwise be getting normal price discovery. Kinda weird.
Investor confidence needfs to be managed by creating a stable, regulated market.
> Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX could well amount to $4T+ in market cap. That's ~6% of the entire index. It's like adding another NVidia.
This is a common misconception. The S&P 500 weights allocation by float-adjusted market cap, not by total market cap. In the case of SpaceX, they are planning to float ~4% of shares at IPO. Even if SpaceX was added to the index, its index weight would be based on that tiny float, and at a $1.75T valuation it would be treated as roughly a $70 billion company.
SpaceX weight would be ~0.125% of the index, not ~2.5% as you imply.
Before the changes, the Nasdaq-100 index was total market cap-weighted not float-weighted. Once a company crossed 10% floated shares, the company was added to the index at full weight.
Nasdaq's new system is a hybrid of float-weighted and cap-weighted. If a company has below 33.3% float, its weighting is 3x float. Above that, it's cap weighted. This allows a gradual fade-in of the company into the index.
It's a better system than the previous one, and in Nasdaq's own words, more conservative.
For the Nasdaq-100, SpaceX at 4% float gets 3 x 4% = 12% of its market cap counted, which is $210B not $1.75T. Still <1% of the index.
Also, the multiplier is 3x, not 5x. Nasdaq proposed 5x, but after feedback, this was reduced to 3x. The new thresholds are 3x and 33%, not 5x and 20%.
The 409a has a lot of words and numbers to justify a particular valuation. It's not made up from the ether based on nothing. You can disagree with their reasoning and come to a different number, but you need to show your work if you want anyone to give a shit about your made up number. How many satellites have you launched this year? What's the going rate for a kilogram to LEO? Who are the competitors and what do they charge? Things like that which aren't magic made up numbers.
They have to be rebalanced every quarter regardless. And I'm not sure how many people would actually sell due to the inclusion of a single company. They're very loud about it, but no evidence that this is causing a significant amount of selling.
At a fundamental level, an index is supposed to reflect the market. If the current market is IPO-ing unprofitable companies at absurd multipliers, the index should reflect that. Because that is the market.
The longer major indexes exclude these companies, the further the index strays from representing the market, and the worse they do their core job of tracking it.
It's not the index's fault that market is pushing out overpriced and unprofitable companies.
Indices are supposed to reflect a part of the market. That's why you have all of S&P500, the Dow, NYSE Composite, and Nasdaq Composite (and several others) in the US — They each reflect different attributes of the market as a whole.
As it stands, it's clear that the users of S&P500 are not interested in the performance of the parts of the market made up of overpriced (and potentially highly volatile) IPOs.
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.
Nothing that you are saying here has any commitment to what to expect, is all heresay. It's 100% ad hominem, to the person. That's a fault whether the direction is complimentary or derogatory. I personally really don't want to see vacuous empty comments like this.
No, I'm saying they are hyping up some random podcast while saying sweet nothings. I really don't like empty hype. I want some actual content to posts that actually says something, not just links breathlessly encouraging me to go spend an hour listening.
This seems a sensible thing to do. If you change the rules on how things end up on your index, you force everyone using that index to reevaluate it. Your index is now perceived as more volatile (and probably is), and all the finance people need to reevaluate the risk of their index funds and decide if it is now 'growth', 'high growth' or whatever bucket it belongs in based on the new risk profile. And then all the portfolios need to be rebalanced. Which all takes time, more time than was being proposed. The sensible thing to do is to create a new index with the new rules.
> sensible thing to do is to create a new index with the new rules
It depends. Indices aren’t funds. They aren’t meant to balance investor interests. They’re meant to communicate some metric about the market.
The S&P tells you how big companies are doing in an index optimized to balance representation against trading cost. So in 2005, float was taken into account for weighting (versus just market cap). This made sense. Also, since the start, the S&P 500 has been a committee-based index. Not rule based. This has made it successful; if you want stable and unchanging, you never went for the S&P 500.
The S&P 500 may not be a fund itself, but Standard & Poor's is a business whose ability to sell services is correlated with the continued relevance of the S&P 500. It absolutely does balance interests - namely, its own - beyond simply being an academic vehicle for communication of a stable thesis.
It seems entirely reasonable to say: "if we make a certain decision, we correlate both our reputation and a nontrivial portion of the U.S. economy with the whims of one of the most volatile personalities in industry, and we should likely pay attention to this trial balloon that shows such anticipatory fear of the decision that we might lose our reputation as an index altogether."
> absolutely does balance interests - namely, its own - beyond simply being an academic vehicle for communication of a stable thesis
As a business, sure. As a committee, it’s still a deeply technical process. I can say with a lot of confidence that optics weren’t considered in any of this, possibly to a fault.
> and a nontrivial portion of the U.S. economy
This vastly overstates the amount of assets tied to the S&P 500. It’s a lot. But it’s a strong minority of equity exposures.
> 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.
There's overlap between strong minority and nontrivial, so not sure how it can be vastly overstated. Do you have numbers you can add to this, or any explanation of equity exposure etc?
> They’re meant to communicate some metric about the market.
Is that why people spend time, money and effort creating and maintaining them? They're just broadcasters? That seems dubious.
> Is that why people spend time, money and effort creating and maintaining them? They're just broadcasters?
Yes. There are more indices than there are stocks. Publishing an index is, business wise, a game of getting funds to license them.
The market cap of the S&P 500 according to Google is ~$65T. Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX could well amount to $4T+ in market cap. That's ~6% of the entire index. It's like adding another NVidia. That's a big deal.
The rules around index inclusion exist for a reason. Too much control in one person's hands (which SpaceX has), too small a float (so you don't get price discovery), lack of a history of financial performance and minimal trading days just don't give investors confidence and, like it or not, investment decisions are made based on the index. If you want to argue against passive investment, well, good luck with that.
I think a lot of people have this weird idea that what we need is some theoretically unfettered market for "true" price discovery when it's actually regulations like this that create markets. It's like a libertarian brain worm.
I don't think anybody wants these mega-companies out of the index, specifically. They just don't see why rules that exist for a reason should be suspended when the net effect of that is that investors have less information and there is a lot of forced purchasing. If you have confidence in your IPO, let the market decide what it's worth without trying to fix the price because what they seem to want is for insider lock-ups to end about the time we'd otherwise be getting normal price discovery. Kinda weird.
Investor confidence needfs to be managed by creating a stable, regulated market.
> Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX could well amount to $4T+ in market cap. That's ~6% of the entire index. It's like adding another NVidia.
This is a common misconception. The S&P 500 weights allocation by float-adjusted market cap, not by total market cap. In the case of SpaceX, they are planning to float ~4% of shares at IPO. Even if SpaceX was added to the index, its index weight would be based on that tiny float, and at a $1.75T valuation it would be treated as roughly a $70 billion company.
SpaceX weight would be ~0.125% of the index, not ~2.5% as you imply.
Nasdaq "solved" that problem by including a 5x float multiplier for stocks with less than 20% of shares available to the public...
That's misleading.
Before the changes, the Nasdaq-100 index was total market cap-weighted not float-weighted. Once a company crossed 10% floated shares, the company was added to the index at full weight.
Nasdaq's new system is a hybrid of float-weighted and cap-weighted. If a company has below 33.3% float, its weighting is 3x float. Above that, it's cap weighted. This allows a gradual fade-in of the company into the index.
It's a better system than the previous one, and in Nasdaq's own words, more conservative.
For the Nasdaq-100, SpaceX at 4% float gets 3 x 4% = 12% of its market cap counted, which is $210B not $1.75T. Still <1% of the index.
Also, the multiplier is 3x, not 5x. Nasdaq proposed 5x, but after feedback, this was reduced to 3x. The new thresholds are 3x and 33%, not 5x and 20%.
https://www.nasdaq.com/newsroom/nasdaq100-index-methodology-...
I stand corrected, I was not aware of the full mechanism, and I was still stuck at the proposed multiplier and not the actual one.
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.
Some are more made up than others though!
The 409a has a lot of words and numbers to justify a particular valuation. It's not made up from the ether based on nothing. You can disagree with their reasoning and come to a different number, but you need to show your work if you want anyone to give a shit about your made up number. How many satellites have you launched this year? What's the going rate for a kilogram to LEO? Who are the competitors and what do they charge? Things like that which aren't magic made up numbers.
409As are absolutely made-up numbers. Management writes a number on a sheet and a 409A consultant signs it.
The valuation is actually mostly about AI. Satellites, like electric cars, don’t have quite the growth story (and I do mean “story”).
https://bsky.app/profile/patigallardo.bsky.social/post/3mnhc...
[delayed]
Oh come on. They absolutely have to target a valuation that's profitable for previous rounds, any reasoning is subservient to that imperative.
an etf that tracks the S&P 500 is what then?
This is a big win for many S&P 500 etf holders
Exactly. The S&P 500 isn't a fund, but let's not pretend that inclusion in the index doesn't mean real money is at stake.
They have to be rebalanced every quarter regardless. And I'm not sure how many people would actually sell due to the inclusion of a single company. They're very loud about it, but no evidence that this is causing a significant amount of selling.
Because it hasn't happened yet, and now, won't.
So by that metric the very loud people succeeded: these new IPOs will enter the index under the established rules and time-frames.
At a fundamental level, an index is supposed to reflect the market. If the current market is IPO-ing unprofitable companies at absurd multipliers, the index should reflect that. Because that is the market.
The longer major indexes exclude these companies, the further the index strays from representing the market, and the worse they do their core job of tracking it.
It's not the index's fault that market is pushing out overpriced and unprofitable companies.
Indices are supposed to reflect a part of the market. That's why you have all of S&P500, the Dow, NYSE Composite, and Nasdaq Composite (and several others) in the US — They each reflect different attributes of the market as a whole.
As it stands, it's clear that the users of S&P500 are not interested in the performance of the parts of the market made up of overpriced (and potentially highly volatile) IPOs.
Why do index inclusion rules exist in the first place….?
Go do a google search
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.
Good thing they're not dropping the profitability requirements. Ed Zitron would be proud.
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-rational-reminder-...
Long listen but a very thorough and nuanced discussion by a bunch of smart investment / finance guys in Canada. No click-bait-sky-is-falling content.
Nothing that you are saying here has any commitment to what to expect, is all heresay. It's 100% ad hominem, to the person. That's a fault whether the direction is complimentary or derogatory. I personally really don't want to see vacuous empty comments like this.
were you trying to reply to someone else?
No, I'm saying they are hyping up some random podcast while saying sweet nothings. I really don't like empty hype. I want some actual content to posts that actually says something, not just links breathlessly encouraging me to go spend an hour listening.
And where did the ad hominem part arise?
Glad there are some grown ups in US leadership
They’ll be gone by Monday and replaced by a fitness coach or something.
So relieved to see this!
* https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...
* https://archive.is/15pOn
For me, that only shows the first two paragraphs.
This lets you read the whole article: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/spacex-oth...
See also S&P press release, "S&P Dow Jones Indices Consultation on Treatment of MegaCap Companies - Results":
* https://press.spglobal.com/2026-06-04-S-P-Dow-Jones-Indices-...
This feels like massive news that general public won’t ever hear.
Basically nothing happened though. SpaceX asked them to change rules and they said no.
Note that Nasdaq and Russel did put in place fast entry rules. S&P is the only one that didn’t.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/new-fast-tracks-account-olde...
CRSP is changing the index VTI tracks
CRSP has had fast track rules for quite a while.
They changed their minimum float rule for these mega IPOs with low float.
I feel like you need at least one of the two rules (time, float)
Yea, this is great but I'm not sure how much this helps since it's just 1/3 keeping their wits about them.
Nasdaq clearly did it for the big bucks and getting the listing, why did Russell bend the knee?
Russell tries to represent what investors are actually buying and selling, a larger swath of the economy than S&P Dow and Nasdaq do
so they get a little bit of a pass for me, but Nasdaq doesn't
Huge relief. Thank God!
Paywalled.
Good.
Thank fucking g-d.
Good. I'm surprised, though, that the usual fanboys/stans aren't converging on this to protest how unfair the S&P is.
For all the people worried about spacex inclusion in nasdaq/qqq/etc
It won't matter for your portfolio. Your portfolio will keep growing.