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Comment by sschueller

4 hours ago

Where will it be listed? I am considering selling all my index ETFs in those markets until the this blows over.

Time in market > timing the market.

  • It's this sort of mentality and the prolitferation of passive investing that gives these companies the opportunity to pass the bag.

    • > It's this sort of mentality and the prolitferation of passive investing that gives these companies the opportunity to pass the bag.

      As opposed to normal people trying to pick winning stocks?

      * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street

      Most stocks suck:

      > We study long-run shareholder outcomes for over 64,000 global common stocks during the January 1990 to December 2020 period. We document that the majority, 55.2% of U.S. stocks and 57.4% of non-U.S. stocks, underperform one-month U.S. Treasury bills in terms of compound returns over the full sample. Focusing on aggregate shareholder outcomes, we find that the top-performing 2.4% of firms account for all of the $US 75.7 trillion in net global stock market wealth creation from 1990 to December 2020. Outside the US, 1.41% of firms account for the $US 30.7 trillion in net wealth creation.

      * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3710251

      > Four out of every seven common stocks that have appeared in the CRSP database since 1926 have lifetime buy-and-hold returns less than one-month Treasuries. When stated in terms of lifetime dollar wealth creation, the best-performing four percent of listed companies explain the net gain for the entire U.S. stock market since 1926, as other stocks collectively matched Treasury bills. These results highlight the important role of positive skewness in the distribution of individual stock returns, attributable both to skewness in monthly returns and to the effects of compounding. The results help to explain why poorly-diversified active strategies most often underperform market averages.

      * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2900447

      Further, over ten years, most individual stocks under perform a market index (even more so if stock was initially a top performer):

      > […] Since 1926, the median ten-year return on individual U.S. stocks relative to the broad equity market is –7.9%, underperforming by 0.82% per year. For stocks that have been among the top 20% performers over the previous five years, the median ten-year market-adjusted return falls to –17.8%, underperforming by 1.94% per year. Since the end of World War II, the median ten-year market-adjusted return of recent winners has been negative for 93% of the time. The case for diversifying concentrated positions in individual stocks, particularly in recent market winners, is even stronger than most investors realize.

      * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4541122

      Even with all these shenanigans, most people are better off sticking with index funds.

    • “Passive investing” is not the same as “buying anything at any price”. Index funds follow transparent rules and weights. If the company is overvalued, that overvaluation is set by the wider market, not just passive investors.

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I've heard of the changes to the NASDAQ rules and I somewhat get how they make it so these stocks are included in index funds earlier than before. As far as I know, NYSE and others haven't done the same change so index funds there are "safe", i.e. will include the stocks only after a longer period, implying that it will have settled in value by then. Is that true at all? I'm sure the situation is much more complicated, but I do wonder how to figure out how much I'm affected.

  • > changes to the NASDAQ rules

    This rule change has clearly been a massive marketing win for the NASDAQ 100, because until now practically nobody followed it.

  • There is a huge amount of misinformation on this topic, including in this thread, at the minute.

    Some index funds have a very long horizon before they include them (e.g. a year). Others are "fast-tracked" (e.g. notably VTI). Most of those, however, are float-adjusted, so only the stock available for trade is considered part of the marketcap. So e.g. VTI / VTSAX will buy spacex relatively quickly after the IPO but at the float-adjusted weight of ~$75B because that's the % of stock available.

    If you care alot about this, now is the time to understand how your index fund treats IPOs wrt to delays + float adjustment.

    • Do you have any suggested reading references?

      Specifically, I do a typical 3FP and own VTSAX, but I don't read bogleheads or anything. True set-it-and-forget-it, but I do want to read more if things are shifting.

      1 reply →