It's really concerning given how the indexes are changing rules to fast-track SpaceX being forced into index funds. S&P is also working on updates to S&P 500 to force it down everyone's throats quickly and algorithmically.
I'm usually a Boglehead, with some exceptions, and one exception I'd love is some sort of trade that would eliminate my exposure to SpaceX for the next few years. I'm sure there's some combo of options that would do it.
Probably finding an ESG-focused ETF would do it. ESG basically meant "good governance, we follow laws" which translated into better governed public companies that therefore had better returns, as one would expect. Really weird how it was politicized into something entirely different...
There's an ETF for everything out there. (There are more ETF's than stocks). There'll be a large market for "S&P500 without SpaceX" et al, so it's seems likely somebody will fill it. It probably will have to use a worse name because of the S&P trademark.
> I'd love is some sort of trade that would eliminate my exposure to SpaceX
You can just short SpaceX of an amount equivalent to its share of your SP500 holdings. You will have to pay borrowing costs though, but on something that liquid it will be very small.
Yeah. For comparison, SpaceX will be maybe half the size of MSFT. MSFT is 7.4% of the SP500 index, so for a $1,000,000 portfolio if you were to short MSFT you'd pay 0.25% on the value of that 7.4%, or $185/year.
So eliminating SpaceX exposure will cost you $100 per million of your SP500 ETF per year, or so.
We aren’t talking about penny stocks we are talking about a tech giant. At the scales that any ordinary investor is operating at there will be no liquidity issues with shorting it and if it is in your index fund the short and long positions will directly offset if you size it correctly leading you to have net zero exposure to SpaceX.
Yeah you're not wrong. I didn't think about it that way because you can't really break something out of an ETF basket, and you also don't control the ETF basket, but if you think those risks are minimal it's probably fine to just compare dollars-to-dollars.
Personally I would still probably go with the long put strategy unless the price difference is exorbitant.
Short term gains are hype and fomo, but if you're holding index funds long like I am, then returns have a lot more to do with performance. And given the lack of hype around ESG, it seems like an exceptional time to buy in to it.
That's also the kind of thing that pension funds should be investing in. They shouldn't invest in hypes as they're by definition in for the long haul and eventually hypes always blow.
Sure you can make a lot of money but only if you know when to get out before the crash. And that's something that doesn't gel well with long term investment.
I don't understand the lingo in your comment but my best possible guess is that I disagree vehemently with it.
Long term dollar cost averaging is not about hype and fomo. Overall pricing in equities does vary according to alternative investment routes, which is why I'm diversified into those as well.
Stonks go up. Stonks go down. Averaging over decades, ownership is about owning a share of productive output of a large portion of our entire economy, an amazing restructuring of social relations that presents an amazing opportunity for the common person, unseen throughout the history of humanity.
Interestingly, these are the exact rules they're working to overturn: currently, no matter how many stupid accounting tricks you pull off, you need to actually be profitable to be included in the S&P 500.
You can sidestep this entirely with a total-market fund like VTSAX/VTI, which hold the entire market and should be more resistant to being gamed.
They’re free-float adjusted so entities like SpaceX are valued only by what’s available on public markets. And Vanguard (and its funds) are owned by its investors, which makes it seem implausible that the rules would be rewritten in a way that would damage investors.
It may list fast, but it covers many more securities from what I understand so it’s insulated. I think the fact is that any broad market ETF is gonna own at least some piece of a $1 trillion company.
The additional securities it includes are weighted by market cap though. So a total market fund ends up being 80% S&P 500, and even if they add thousands more companies those all fit in the 20% slot.
well that's the problem, right? There is no justification for a trillion dollar Elon Musk valuation. And he and his investors know this. That's why they're trying to change the rules to dump the stock while it's irrational on every investor in the world. If they really believed in the value of the company, would they be bribing people to scam the index funds?
Any of the direct indexing providers will let you blacklist individual stocks from the index. The intended use is to exclude stocks you hold elsewhere (or receive as stock grants) to avoid causing wash sales, but it can also be easily used to make a custom "S&P 499".
you can buy S&P 500, and short the component companies you don't like, but caution, this will achieve the solvency you want, but you will likely remain irrational
In addition to covering the IPO in general last week, Matt Levine also wrote about this specific question Tuesday[1]:
> Historically index providers were in the business of making these sorts of quality decisions, so that index funds were not forced to buy stocks they didn’t like.
> These rules create some tension between the idea that an index is a list of all the stocks and the idea that an index is a list of all the good stocks. Historically, it didn’t matter all that much: The point of the stock market is to tell you which stocks are good, so a company with a high stock valuation should be a very good company, so it should get a high weighting in both the Index of Good Companies and the Index of All the Companies.
> But SpaceX — and also maybe OpenAI and Anthropic in their coming IPOs — will probably break that link. SpaceX will probably (1) do all sorts of stuff that index funds hate and that index providers have specifically tried to exclude and also (2) be gigantic, because the market loves it.
The same rules are now affecting other big IPOs. I think Cerebras was confirmed as getting fast listing too even though they’re much smaller. It’s one big act of dumping on retail markets
Almost all of the YoY growth in the S&P500 is in a very small number of tech companies. If one of those fast-growing tech companies isn't in the S&P500, the index as a whole becomes obsolete.
Apparently, the index funds are based on free float and since the number of free floating shares is limited, the total exposure to the index will be very small.
They will only be added to those indexes if they are actually trading at a value that places them in the top 100 or 500 companies in the US. If they fall below that price then they will be kicked out of the index just like any other company.
What exactly is the risk to normal investors if that’s the case? If it’s all a big scam then they will trade lower and they’ll naturally be kicked out of the index.
This is a rule that will apply to all new companies. When Anthropic and OpenAI go public they will also benefit from the rule. Do you think the media/public will be just as outraged when they do it?
The goal of the S&P 500 is to keep the index representative of the US market. They have in fact changed rules in the past when market conditions have changed. These mega IPOs are an entirely new market condition, as private companies have never been this big before listing in history. So large that they immediately fall into the top 100 or 500 largest companies in the country.
There’s also the fact that Nasdaq is a private company and it now has competition from the new Texas exchange. SpaceX is actually dual-listing on TXSE and Nasdaq. Nasdaq needs to keep these giant IPO companies happy because if they don’t they will list on the competitor exchange which would be disastrous for Nasdaq (supercharging their competitor).
These things affect each other as well. Nasdaq wants to make sure they get the IPO on their exchange, so they include them in the Nasdaq 100. S&P 500 doesn’t want to be outdated by missing a trillion dollar company from their index, while other exchanges like the Nasdaq 100 include them.
There’s a real case to be made that this is just self interest on the part of the exchange and the other index providers.
Probably finding an ESG-focused ETF would do it. ESG basically meant "good governance, we follow laws" which translated into better governed public companies that therefore had better returns, as one would expect. Really weird how it was politicized into something entirely different...