The most SHAMELESS structural manipulation of a index I've ever seen | Hacker News Reader

The most SHAMELESS structural manipulation of a index I've ever seen

substack.com

67 pointsZigurd8 comments

Patrick Boyle also has a recent youtube on the "SpaceX IPO Scandal" https://youtu.be/8rS3fTbC7TE and discusses the post briefly (28m)

Very scary. Even European funds are gonna be affected if they invest into an index.

Is there a way to invest in an index fund minus certain companies?

I haven't heard of such a thing. I guess you could roll your own by buying derivatives that would effectively remove the influence of a particular stock from your index fund investment. Seems like a fintech opportunity doesn't it?

Yes, this is a thing that can be done. No "derivatives" are necessary. You just figure out how many dollars worth of that particular stock your portion of the fund holds, and "sell short" that same amount of that same stock. This leaves you neutral to that stock.

Note that this is probably a terrible strategy here, though. The most likely effect of adding SpaceX to the index in the manner described is that the price of SpaceX is likely to go artificially high as the index funds fight for the very few available shares.

If you are actually going to do this, you'd probably want to sell out of the ETF before it's added, wait for SpaceX to be fully added to all the index funds, and only then simultaneously buy into the ETF and short SpaceX.

$1.75T / 25,000 employees = $70M/employee. That's pretty impressive.

You would think even the lowest paid employees performing routine labor at the company would be pulling in multiple 6-figure salaries. I wonder if that's the case?

> You would think even the lowest paid employees performing routine labor at the company would be pulling in multiple 6-figure salaries.

Why would you think that? Because of Musk's reputation for magnificence and generosity? Because rich gigantic companies don't care about keeping operating costs low? Or because janitors at SpaceX require special skills that can only be obtained by paying many multiples of the market rates for standard janitors?

It was a general statement about any company with a value to employee ration that high. It's about sharing gains of a team as a whole.

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