SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P

And calling out how the rules are being changed for new entrants into the market such as SpaceX on Nasdaq proves my point. Index providers are already quietly admitting their criteria are too rigid.

Even S&P adjusted their rules to allow SpaceX into the index, although only for the total market index.

https://press.spglobal.com/2026-06-04-S-P-Dow-Jones-Indices-...

Amongst other thing weights are based on the value of shares that are traded publicly, not market cap.

All three companies are in the top 10 largest companies in the US by market cap, based on their current valuations. If these companies maintain their valuations over the next year, they'd still be ineligible under current rules. Because none of them are GAAP, they're all heavily reinvesting cash-flow into growth. These companies may be excluded from the S&P500 for potentially years, until they reach 12 months of profitability.

A benchmark of the U.S. stock market that excludes multiple of the 10 largest U.S. companies cannot be taken seriously.

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/brochure/article/sp-500-br...

That's not true any more. Today we have multiple giga-caps (SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI) vying to IPO, all of which potentially in the top 20 largest companies in the US market, all ineligible for S&P 500 inclusion because of the 12-month profitability rule.

You claim S&P can "apply the same methodology they've always used" but this is just factually wrong. The inclusion criteria are not sacred rules set in stone and S&P has rewrote them multiple times. For example, they banned dual-class share structures in 2017 to stop SNAP from joining the index, but reversed it in 2023 because they excluded too many companies. The rules get rewritten when the market changes, and it's clear the current market environment has changed.

Meanwhile, Nasdaq changed their rules to handle this situation. And S&P changed the inclusion criteria for the S&P Total Market Index so SpaceX would be included.

It's clear these inclusion rules are changing.

Also the S&P criteria have been revised multiple times, it's not some sacred unchangeable document.

It's not S&P's fault this is happening.

I dispute this claim, because the (current) rules for S&P500 inclusion exclude companies like SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. All of these companies are planning to IPO this year, and even if these companies maintain their present valuation for a year, none are eligible for S&P 500. Due to profitability requirements.

Yet these are all U.S. large-cap companies, among the top 20 largest in the U.S., and by S&P's description of the index, should be included. Not including these companies makes the index inaccurate.

> [Google and Microsoft took years go get into the index], so what's new?

Because SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are $1T+ companies. Google and Microsoft were much smaller relative to the size of the index when they joined.

And even if it was added to the index immediately after IPO, index weighting in S&P is float weighted, SpaceX at IPO will have minimal float, and SpaceX would be ~0.125% of the index at IPO. Not much to matter.

How can S&P justify excluding these three companies from an index of large-cap US companies, which when combined together, consist of 5% of the total market capitalization of entire stock market of the United States?

If the rules are not changed, then the S&P 500 will exclude a significant part of the US stock large-cap market, which defeats the entire purpose of it being a benchmark index.

If the S&P 500 was only used as a benchmark as it is originally intended, there will be no debate to adjust the rules to include these companies.

Yet because today there's trillions of dollars tied up to this benchmark, inclusion and exclusion becomes a financial issue.

S&P is under immense political pressure to not adjust their index because asset managers and the general populous don't actually want passive investing.

Given these large-cap companies currently represent ~5% of the U.S. stock market capitalization, it's difficult to justify why these companies are excluded from a large-cap index.

In any case, it's been only in the last years that we have had an explosion of a huge variety of funds with low fees, so some of these product strategies need to be retro fitted for a time they did not exist.

With index funds you never have the strong winners to do this with, and so giving is far less tax-efficient.

Assuming you're in the US there are several competent brokers that sell fractional shares. Any broker will do lot tracking and cost basis calculatioms for you, they're required to.

Rebalancing might be a pain, yes. I'd bet the drift isn't too bad most of the time, but it's probably effort every time you add or remove money. You'd want to build a tool to tell you how to add and remove to get closer to the index. If you can get the index weights and your holdings in a machine readable format, it would seem pretty tractable, but it would take time to setup; there's a reason funds have expenses, but index fund expenses are small.

I'm 100% invested in funds because it's a lot less work, but if you felt strongly about excluding certain stocks, I think it's pretty doable for say S&P 500. Tracking a total market index, or an international index would be more challenging. Bond indexes are also challenging to track, even for bond funds.

If you don’t pick the right grocery company, you have a shot at picking the right telecommunications company. You pick fewer winners, but you’re also picking fewer losers.

The real reason to do this is because you want to avoid specific companies that are inside the index. You would only do this if you felt confident in your ability to avoid investing a lot of capital in losers. Even if you’re great at avoiding the telecommunications loser, you might be worse than average at avoiding the loser in other sectors.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings

90 in 2022 to about 1100 now:

* https://www.londonstockexchange.com/stock/RR./rolls-royce-ho...

Interesting interview with the CEO, Tufan Erginbilgiç:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYkBpzq5Sqw

The alternative funds are a little pricier, but not so much so as to negate the inherent performance advantage. Typical cost ratio is 0.1-0.5% depending on the niche (wide indexes are cheaper, more niche things like small cap value cost more)

Critically it’s not simply averaging a bunch of made up numbers. I may think gold is worth 1,000$/kg but if nobody is willing to sell me gold at that price then my “made up” number has zero effect on the market price.

https://bsky.app/profile/patigallardo.bsky.social/post/3mnhc...

Their S1 cites (by memory) a 370B addressable market for space stuff and a 27 trillion for AI.

And for AI they counted all Twitter accounts as grok users.

The Spaces eXploration company was a cool company, but it's not what's being sold to the market now.

That's tangential. The valuation is based on supply and demand, nothing else.

Amongst other things the supply part of the equation will be low because all these companies are only to make a very small proportion of their shares available on the public markets.

Wow, you should educate yourself on what 409A is and how it gets created before writing something like that, you'd find it in the dictionary under the definition for what my original comment was :)

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 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.

It's more than that. None of SpaceX, OpenAI, nor Anthropic will meet the criteria, and they will make up a significant part of the US stock market. Each of these companies is heavily investing their cashflow into growing the company and are unlikely to be profitable many years.

The inclusion criteria prioritizes companies that extract their cashflow into profit, and excludes companies that invest their cashflow into growing the company. For example, when Jeff Bezos ran Amazon he described his company as "famously unprofitable, And that is a conscious strategy and an investment decision." Amazon only joined the index in 2005, nearly 8 years after IPO, even though it was a significant member of the stock market at the time.

The S&P 500 index was created in 1957. It was created decades before the first index fund (by Vanguard), which copied the index in 1976.

The index is intended to follow the all of the largest large-cap U.S. equities, not pick and choose which ones to invest in. GP is arguing that many passive investors, who blindly follow the S&P500 index, don't want to invest in these upcoming unprofitable mega-caps. That's not how the index investing works, that's picking and choosing approved sectors of the market, which is active investing. If you want active investing, buy an active investing product, don't buy a fund that copies the benchmark index.

I still agree that the company is disastrously overvalued. Even if we consider Starlink to be just as valuable as a telecom like Verizon, that’s only a $190 billion dollar company.

Starling is indeed very good, but it alone doesn't get spacex to 1.75T

>I rely on the Center for Research in Securities Prices (CRSP) monthly stock return database, which contains all common stocks listed on the NYSE, Amex, and NASDAQ exchanges. Of all monthly common stock returns contained in the CRSP database from 1926 to 2016, only 47.8% are larger than the one-month Treasury rate in the same month. In fact, less than half of monthly CRSP common stock returns are positive. When focusing on stocks’ full lifetimes (from the beginning of the sample in 1926 or first appearance in CRSP through the 2016 end of the sample or delisting from CRSP), just 42.6% of common stocks, slightly less than three out of seven, have a buy-and-hold return (inclusive of reinvested dividends) that exceeds the return to holding one-month Treasury Bills over the matched horizon. More than half of CRSP common stocks deliver negative lifetime returns. The single most frequent outcome (when returns are rounded to the nearest 5%) observed for individual common stocks over their full lifetimes is a loss of 100%.

>Individual common stocks tend to have rather short lives. The median time that a stock is listed on the CRSP database between 1926 and 2016 is seven and a half years. To assess whether individual stocks generate positive returns over the full ninety years of available CRSP data, I conduct bootstrap simulations. In particular, I assess the likelihood that a strategy that holds one stock selected at random during each month from 1926 to 2016 would have generated an accumulated 90-year return (ignoring any transaction costs) that exceeds various benchmarks. In light of the well-documented small-firm effect (whereby smaller firms earn higher average returns than large, as originally documented by Banz, 1980) it might have been anticipated that individual stocks would tend to outperform the value-weighted market. In fact, repeating the random selection process many times, I find that the single stock strategy underperformed the value-weighted market over the full ninety years in ninety six percent of the simulations. The single-stock strategy underperformed the one-month Treasury bill over the 1926 to 2016 period in seventy three percent of the simulations.

>The fact that the overall stock market generates long term returns sufficiently large to be referred to as a puzzle, while the majority of individual stocks fail to even match Treasury bills, can be attributed to the fact that the distribution of stock returns is positively skewed. Simply put, large positive returns to a few stocks offset the modest or negative returns to more typical stocks.

https://obj.portfolioconstructionforum.edu.au/articles_persp...

Compare this to the blog post:

>The implication is devastating for index fund orthodoxy: When you own a broad market index, you’re mathematically forcing yourself to hold the 96.6% of stocks that create no value while simultaneously diluting your exposure to the 3.4% that generate all returns.

The professor just told you that investing in any individual stock is a terrible decision and that investing in more stocks means having greater exposure to the stocks that do net a return, creating a puzzle, where diversification doesn't reduce yields, in fact it did the opposite: it increases the yields.

There's also a general fallacy that any index (directly referred to as index orthodoxy) has to be a "broad market index", when in reality there are many competing indices. If someone came up with an index that would follow any investment strategy the blog post suggests and it turns out to work reliably, then people would switch part of their portfolio to that index. "Index othrodoxy" would prevail, because people just need a better index rather than abandoning the idea of an index altogether.

It's also difficult to reconcile with the fact that after fees, most active funds have failed to net higher returns to their investors. This random blog post is basically delivering an active investment strategy on a silver platter that will make fund managers and the people investing into it rich, is this believable? Consider that it's written in a "shocking" AI style, trying to sell you something.

Funnily enough, the ad in the middle of the blog post "The U.S. Treasury collapse is HERE!" is incompatible with the premise of the article, that 96% of stocks are worse than treasuries.

>But even if we use the more moderate 80/20 framing, the strategic implication is identical: If 80% of market returns come from 20% of stocks, why would you construct a portfolio that treats all five hundred stocks in the S&P 500 equally?

The thing is, you don't have to do that, like at all. There are indices like the S&P 500 Pure Value and S&P 500 Enhanced Value that are known to outperform the regular S&P 500. The problem is that they have done so over the long term and long term really means long term. There have been decades where they underperform.

Also, the article is three times as long as it needs to be, it's clearly AI generated.

Edit: Invesco renamed their ETF to S&P 500 Concentrated QVM.

This is not misinformation. Misinformation is saying the proposed rule change and their proximity to trillion dollar IPOs introduced no risk. Please do not spread such misinformation.

Yes, which is why the news that S&P isn't changing their rules is kind of notable. Vanguard's S&P 500, $VOO, just hit US$ 1 trillion AUM; the next biggest, $IVV, is just over $800B; $SPY is just under $800B.

* https://etfdb.com/compare/market-cap/

* https://www.tradingview.com/markets/etfs/funds-largest/

That's about USD 2.5T.

So why change? You're not building a case for why this change is needed. Is there even another Nasdaq 100 company like SpaceX? Probably not because it would be an obvious point of discussion. So now we need to add a new 'thing' to our definition of tech, then change our funds to adopt our new definition. To what end, with this haste?

> The NASDAQ 100 has seen practically no net outflows

Is it a fund or just an index? If an index, what are you monitoring when you cite 'no outflows'?

So you are happy with this outcome, but also so upset at the people that evangelized your preferred policy position that you think HN readers should cut them from the information diet?

Seems most likely that the public outcry actually influenced this outcome, so I don't see why the nuances of alarmism about it (imminent decision vs fait accomplit) should nix an entire information source.

Because this is how the rulemaking processes for these indices have always worked?

Why are you suddenly making this argument now, and weren't complaining about previous rule changes?

It seems crazy to me to make a comparison between a company being valued on it's current profit and then to say it's reasonable for another company to have the same market cap because it could eventually have the same profit.

The wildcard there is AI, and that seems especially dangerous to project long-term revenue from their current performance: xAI is barely in the market except renting capacity to Anthropic, so you’re gambling that they’ll continue to pay $1¼B/month for what is largely a commodity offering. Even if you’re bullish on Anthropic, that doesn’t mean xAI gets part of their profits, and given the way they blindsided the local authorities there’s a substantially greater than zero chance that they’ll get a major setback if the neighbors win their lawsuits. That doesn’t mean they’re doomed, but anyone estimating their future performance has to factor in some real risks.

All we have at the moment is just Elon saying "I think this is worth $1.5T, convincing a small subset of people to buy shares, and then because of this change, market following funds will be forced to pile in before the market has had time to discover the actual true fair price, thus artificially propping up the price until Elon has had time to unload a load more shares. The rule changes serve only Elon, not regular investors.

Historically, the share price falls sharply after an IPO in the vast majority of cases. In this case, with the asking price masssively over earnings, significantly more than any other company, it should be expected that the price will fall significantly in the weeks after IPO.

Shortening the window before it gets included in the index is a cheap trick to force passive investors to pile in at the inflated prices, in an attempt to artificially boost demand and prop up the share price.

If the company genuinely was worth the valuation being asked for in the IPO, they would have no problems with just waiting a few months before it would be included under the existing rules.

Did mom and pop invest..? No they did not. The investors who did knew the long time horizon they were committing to.

They could’ve gone public earlier - they chose not to and venture capitalists were happy to keep supplying the funding.

Also lol @ using that act to explain why people take longer to ipo. Lest we forget how deep venture capital has become. Hahahha