[riv991]

I liked Matt Levine's take in his latest podcast. You buy an index because you want to own the market. If you want to own the market in 2026 you want to own SpaceX and Anthropic, and probably OpenAI too.

That said, if you think this is as bad as the article claims you'll obviously buy SpaceX at IPO, then sell it when Index funds are obligated to buy.

[ChadNauseam]

> That said, if you think this is as bad as the article claims you'll obviously buy SpaceX at IPO, then sell it when Index funds are obligated to buy.

The price at IPO will obviously be influenced by expectations of a future purchase by index funds... as an analogy, if it became public knowledge that next week, 1,000,000 people would all be required to buy gold, the price of gold would go up today, not next week

[andsoitis]

By making inclusion near-certain and fast, the rule changes may actually reduce the post-IPO inclusion pop (it gets priced in at IPO) while increasing the IPO price itself and the volatility on rebalance day due to the float constraint.

[400thecat]

yes! Michael Munger expressed it beautifully: "anything that is going to happen has already happened"

[simonjgreen]

This IPO marks and inflection point where a fund that tracks whole market value shifts in definition, because of the forced rush value nature of the rule changes.

If the fast entry rule changes hadn’t happened I would agree with you entirely.

[chii]

The rule change where nasdaq adds a weighting factor to spacex's float is what causes distortions - it artificially increases the size of spacex's cap weight without actually having more shares.

Fortunately, this only affects indices that follow nasdaq, and from what i know, no other index is following this. That means it's "safe" to purchase a globally diversified, cap weighted index fund (safe as in the float isn't manipulated).

People talk of the demise of passive investing due to this, but most of the commentary fail to mention it's a specific, nasdaq thing and not a general change.

[pjjpo]

I want to buy an index with generally fixed rules. I don't know enough of the topic to know how bad it is but if Nasdaq is literally manually tweaking SpaceX's weight, just because? Then it's not buying the market.

[jkman]

That'd be a valid response if NASDAQ hadn't changed the rules and let SpaceX sidestep previous index inclusion criteria.

[forgotTheLast]

If this is expected to be bad for ETF investors, what's stopping let's say Vanguard or Blackrock from creating their own index that tracks the NASDAQ but without the new inclusion rules, and then changing their ETFs' target indexes to that one. Vanguard is investor-owned so it would be in their best interest wouldn't it?

[zygology]

why would i want to take ownership in something that very clearly looks like a scam on paper.

this IPO is to pay debts for failing tech.