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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: Is there some ETF that is "Index of S&P500 minus anything that smells like Musk"?

If you have $100k, you can do it with direct indexing at Schwab. The management fee is 0.40%.

I looked into it, but there are gotchas with wash sale rules and taxes. You really need $500k-$1M to avoid tracking errors. End of the day, the overhead seemed more problematic than the problem, so I ended up increasing my global allocation instead.

Could you emulate this by instead shorting thr stock in question? I suppose it would be hard to limit the risk of a short squeeze?

Not for this kind of investment. If I was going to actively manage, I’d tilt the portfolio differently than S&P500.

Yes, kinda. Goldman Sachs launched that under the symbol SPXXAI last month. I'm not totally sure how to actually invest in it yet though.

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/ai-goldman-sachs-stocks-ind...

  SPXXAI, which lets you invest in the S&P 500 benchmark index minus all things AI

That isn't non-Musk. I also wonder where Google and Microsoft and Facebook fit in to the index (each isn't AI but have AI correlated exposure?)

If you have a big enough portfolio, direct indexing (using something like Frec or Wealthfront) could be an interesting option, and weighting the companies that you don't want at 0.

Wealthfront offers the ability to blacklist stocks in your account (the feature is meant for people legally prohibited from investing in certain tickers).

It won’t exclude from regular indexes, but it will exclude from the direct indexing. I’ve been using it to exclude NVDA ever since it peaked (or at least reached the peak valuation I’m comfortable with)

Wealthfront’s portfolio minimum used to be $100k, but I think they have a new direct indexing product with a $5k minimum.

The cheapest option might be to buy the index and sell short the appropriate amount of Musk companies.

There is XMAG, but beware the expense ratio is much higher than the mainstream indices.

Direct indexing is pretty easy these days.

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