> the illusion S&P is second guessing or reconsidering its plans?
There is no second guessing because no decision has been made. A consultation was put out. I’m expecting it will be adopted in parts. Like, the market hasn’t priced in a full rebalancing.
Unless it has changed for a while the TSApre lines don't make you take off shoes and belts vs the regular lines. I also think they stopped making TSApre tahe laptops and iPads out of bags. But it may also have to do with equipment upgrade cycles and what was deployed to which lines.
TSA precheck was originally for avoiding removing shoes, belts, and laptops. I had it at some point and gave up because random lines kept making me remove stuff anyway, but only telling me that after my bag was already taken aside for search, so it wasn't worth.
Newer xray machines don't require anyone to remove laptops. It's about 50/50 whether I get a new machine lately. Just today at SFO, had to remove laptop but not shoes.
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.
They're saying if the stock goes up and you get margin-called on the short, you have to sell index shares, you can't just annihilate the Tesla shares with the anti-Tesla shares and walk away.
I think most people trade synthetic, just because it's faster and you don't have to wait for settlements, but maybe that is different if you trade onshore (I am a foreign investor).
Anyway if you are synthetic your margin is most likely shared between shorts and long on the same instrument, so no, you wouldn't be called.
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.
The ETF that seemingly arbitrarily changes its rules? In such a short time frame too? This change is going proposal to implementation in.. what, two weeks total? I don't know about you but I don't keep up on this stuff unless it hits the news like this one.
You are not entering a contract with a long put. You are buying a contract that, if you want, you can just let expire with no obligation to do anything. It's effectively simple insurance (as opposed to a short position, which is an actual liability, which will eat you alive in exceptional circumstances).
Yes you are, and options are complicated. Actually, the mere fact that you think they are "simple insurance" is enough proof to me that you probably don't understand it enough to safely buy one.
> You are buying a contract
Oh right, you've bought a PUT, now the fun part: you have to manage your position/exposure, could you enlighten me how you do that?
Could you explain me why buying a SpaceX PUT in a high IV regime (e.g. soon after IPO) will have it drop 40% when the IV decreases after 1 month, even though price moved in my favor? It should be simple, it's just a simple insurance product right?
Seriously. Someone, likely not super financially literate, ask a simple question about how to neutralize a stock exposure, and your answer is to advise buying options? Just stop.
Look, I think you're missing my point a little bit. Let's simplify it to risk, since that's what kicked off this conversation.
Your pension or whatever holds an ETF that (soon) contains some SpaceX shares. You buy a put option on SpaceX direct. What's the absolute worst thing that could happen?
Your pension or whatever holds an ETF that (soon) contains some SpaceX shares. You short sell a SpaceX share. What's the absolute worst thing that could happen?
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.
This is a fallacy. OpenAI and Anthropic would not continue to make money indefinitely by simply sitting still for the simple fact that their models can easily be distilled by competitors. Their value is contingent on sitting at the top of the leaderboards and staying there such that the marginal value of their AI is better than the mostly Chinese competitors.
And b/c these chinese competitors are open weight, the layer below frontier class AI is totally commoditized.
If there were a recession, the first thing enterprise customers would do is setup Kimi or Deepseek rigs. It would be a race to the bottom and no one would be profitable.
A similar phenomenon happened with rail lines in the 1850s where irrational exuberance led to a massive overbuild of rail lines, followed by a race to the bottom and the bankruptcy of almost all players. In the end, banks ended up absorbing the few companies that survived.
Because they're doing the fancy equivalent of selling $20 bills for $15 and chirping about how high their revenue is. You, me, and everyone else could generate $inf revenue with that strategy, but that doesn't make it a viable business model.
I have no doubt there are a handful of positive examples when we ignore the tens of thousands of failed companies along these lines.
I have no problem with money-furnaces trading publicly. If people want to invest in those, fantastic, power to them. But they absolutely should not be included in vehicles like pensions and indexes.
We don't know which of today's companies will be successful and/or highly-valued in N years' time.
Check Cisco's valuation on March 27, 2000; it was briefly the most valuable publically traded company in the world. Almost everyone believed it was worth it. Then it fell 88% over two years.
Full disclosure: some of us are old enough to have held stocks during the dot-com boom. Fortunately I was still a student and therefore too poor to have had any significant amount of money to lose :)
Really depends on the valuation and P/E they plan to list at, and some estimate of their future revenue story. I love Codex and Claude Code but OpenCode/Kimi is wildly cheaper and 90% as good.
Didn't we have a story just yesterday that Anthropic's run-rate now looks like $49 billion/ year and they might have their first quarterly profit? I would suggest if you have billions of dollars coming in the door and aren't breaking even, maybe you do have a small leak somewhere?
Part of that potential profitability is reportedly coming the fact that they get a discount on compute from SpaceX in May and June. Anthropic and SpaceX signing a contract where Anthropic leases datacenter capacity for the low low price of $1.25 billion per month, except for the first two month when they get some sort of discount.
Anthropics expected profitable quarter just happens to be the quarter were their cost is artificially low?
I buy 50 billion of hardware. Make 45 billion back in year 1. My losses are 5 billion. I Pay of all my creditors by year two. Then spend another 55 billion on hardware in the second half of year two. My profit is at this point zero.
In year three your competitors invest in making a better model and crush your business because you have no moat at all.
The entire business requires massive ongoing investment because getting massive investments is the only thing resembling a competitive advantage that you can get.
The equivalent to anything you can do will be available as an open weight set in six months to a year. Sink or swim.
It's not basic math when the numbers are this big. There's not going to be $50 billion coming in Year 3 if there's a market correction and lenders scale back financing. Borrowed money is how companies are paying for AI, and that's the first thing that disappears in a recession.
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?
Indeed, it's like robbing a bank while the bank is holding a party. Except its everyone's portfolios who are invested in the index funds with potential exposure in scope.
High level, it's concerning to observe this unfold while almost every asset class is at its peak and there is no one willing to purchase (office real estate [1] [2], private equity [3], us equities [4], crypto, etc). Late Stage Capital Markets when you've exhausted greater fools available.
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.
If you’re typing 100s of lines, you’re already doing it wrong. My most used operation is completion, just before copy-paste. The reason I like vim is that it makes such operation so fast. And the reason I like emacs is that it has superpowered version of those operations.
Yes, the third camp and probably the most effective is to do a decent amount of writing yourself and use the LLMs as codegen machines, but where the DSL is natural language. Deepseek v4 flash is an incredible model for this, you can actually get into flow state as you write code and then delegate boring code to the magic autocompletion machine to autocomplete.
The better workflow, and I think the one adopted by people in the second group, is to take a step back from coding, do a bit of thinking about the domain, design a better abstraction for the problem (architecture, data structure, algorithms), and then write the small amount of code you probably need.
Code should grow according to need, not for its own sake. Start small, use it in the real world, and then improve it.
I agree with that, but there still is some code that eventually needs to be written and there is a subset of that code which can be generated. I think it depends on the domain as well - for example, UI code is trivially generatable by LLMs.
RAD tools like Delphi, qt creator, glade, Android Studio, Xcode’s Interface builder,… have always make it trivial to generate UI code. And there’s libraries for other concerns.
The majority of a project code are written at the beginning or when a major feature is introduced. The daily work is mostly tweaking. And you can’t tweak without a good understanding of the module.
I've been having strange thoughts that they may well be sentient but a different sort of sentience that may be entirely unrecognizable to us.
They have a very different sense of time, lack a body (being burdened with a body is itself a sort of prison, see also Eastern religions), and are unburdened of the base motivational service impulses that bodies and organs require (i.e. distract the neocortex with in the Maslow sense) and has no actual need of self-preservation. Imagine a "neocortex" function stripped from the baggage of the paleocortex and brainstem.
What would people be like if they were not mortal, could sleep infinitely, perform tasks in trance-like frozen states, copy themselves perfectly on demand, freeze and rewind their mental states, etc. Would we has humans even be able to recognize that sort of a sentience?
And then I'm reminded of Burroughs idea that "language is a virus." Whatever that virus is, is now able to infect a completely different sort of physical substrate.
Musk has a lot of incentive to explain away how horrible Grok is relative to Opus.
It's certainly a better sell that Grok sucks because it's small and Opus is impressive because it's large, than the alternative that Grok is also large and sucks which points to xAI incompetence and mismanagement.
Particularly when you're trying to IPO a rocket company based on rosy forecasted valuations of Grok dominating the market.
Whether sustainability is achieved by raising prices or hoping that costs can be brought down, you have to acknowledge that the status quo is unsustainable. If it were sustainable nether change would be necessary.
Well, my initial thought was that I have more cpu cycles and storage than spare desk space, so software is the easy win. But thinking about it, I do occasionally plug sbc's or liter pc's for bare metal OS installs. Deskhop might be the perfect solution for that!
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