Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
Yeah, this is correct. There are so many large multi-trillion dollar companies coming to IPO, which if your are passive index holder and you are trying to track the market it is correct for these companies to be included. And besides SPY has chosen not to fast track where QQQ has. It is a free market, and folks are free to NOT buy QQQ. So I'm not sure why this is a point of debate.
"People" in this instance aren't always informed buyers. Sometimes they're buying an index fund because they don't have the time to research individual stocks and sometimes it's their pension investing.

The normal seasoning period is there for a reason. There is a massive downside to premature inclusion of a stock that is initially overvalued and then settles to a reasonable/sustainable value.

> There is a massive downside to premature inclusion of a stock that is initially overvalued

Define “massive”. SpaceX is only 1.2% of QQQ.

Can I please have 1.2% of your total net worth
loading story #48925203
> Sometimes they're buying an index fund because they don't have the time to research individual stocks and sometimes it's their pension investing

Then they should buy a broad-market fund. The kinds in which new issues are a tiny fraction or, if it’s following something like the S&P 500, not included at all. Following the Nasdaq 100 and then complaining it has too many risky tech plays is a bit silly.

Then they should buy a broad-market fund.

Like a Russell 1000 fund? Oh wait...

loading story #48925450
My (non-motivated, don't have NASDAQ or SpaceX) take is that isn't this how these funds are supposed to behave? You buy NASDAQ if you can take risk, S&P otherwise. If you check out what companies are in the NASDAQ, it's not like it's not majority tech, of which a lot of them are AI-based, so adding SpaceX to that mix is reasonable - and if they waited a year or so for price discovery, and had SpaceX been a popular choice (still can turn out like that), then investors would've missed out on those gains.
Yes, and there are tiers of risk. What people are complaining about is that with the recent behavior, NASDAQ has arguably increased the level of risk involved. If it's as simple as "buy NASDAQ if you can take risk" then that would imply it should pull in meme stocks when the WSB crowd are doing their diamond hand thing.
Well this is not how Nastaq's index worked until Elon twisted their arm. I would assume Nastaq had good reasons for the old rules.