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Comment by qnpnpmqppnp | Hacker News Reader

While there's some truth in your point, I think you're being unfair in framing this story as passive investors betraying their own philosophy because they suddenly realize this passivity would cause some "overpriced turds" to be included in their portfolio.

Passive investors did not "backtrack", on the contrary their preference on this matter is that index rules should remain unchanged. Conversely, it seems fully consistent for a passive investor to criticize Nasdaq-100 for actively amending their rules to achieve a specific result.

So I find it rather unfair to conclude that "these people want active investing instead". As far as I know, these people are reacting to "active" decisions (such as Nasdaq-100's) and cheering actual passivity (such as S&P500's decision).

Now, one can argue that there are good and legitimate arguments for the inclusion rules to evolve, but by definition amending the rules is an active decision.

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The reasoning here is backwards, because the rules in their current form exclude all three of the major upcoming IPOs of civilization changing companies (spacex, anthropic, openai). These companies are all large-caps, are currently in the top 20 largest companies in the US, but the S&P 500 index which claims to be a measure of the 500 largest companies in the US will systematically exclude these. Very likely for 3-5 years and more.

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.

You're changing the discussion.

I was specifically not discussing whether S&P would be right to change the rules. As I said, there can be good and legitimate reasons for such change; I'm not disputing it.

The point of your previous comment was a critic against individual passive investors, accused of backtracking and betraying their own credo. This is what I was reacting to.

Not wanting to change the rules just because these three companies really really want in before prices settle and before they are profitable is the correct behaviour.

The unjustifiable thing is changing rules for them.

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