Comment by lovich

It currently would exclude all 3 companies because they aren’t publicly traded.

Post IPO they wouldn’t immediately be included. Every benchmark I am aware of doesn’t immediately include companies because there is a decent amount of volatility shortly after, especially due to all the internal stockholders who have restrictions on how quickly they can sell their stock and routinely dump their stock en masse the second those restrictions are lifted.

All the hubbub about benchmarks like Nasdaq right now is because they are altering their rules for these companies in particular and including them much earlier and before what are standard restrictions for employees to sell their stock.

The fear is that massive pension funds whose rules have them rebalance into these benchmarks will be buying up these stocks before that dump and the public’s retirement funds will be made into bagholders.

> Because none of them are GAAP, they're all heavily reinvesting cash-flow into growth. > A benchmark of the U.S. stock market that excludes multiple of the 10 largest U.S. companies cannot be taken seriously.

Ok, now I know not to take you seriously if you can recognize companies aren’t following GAAP but think it’s wrong to not treat them the same. I don’t even know if it’s true that they aren’t following GAAP, but everytime a company tries to argue why they aren’t following GAAP but instead their own magic formula that shows how successful they are, we get another Enron or Theranos.