that's not really much of an argument, almost all reasonable libraries wrap the functionality.and if a provider doesn't want to support http3 then the library will fallback, and then the laggards should pay the slow tax.
The biggest slow down on MacOS compared to Linux is the default filesystem APFS (but hey HFS and HFS+ were also slow). But not just that, the Linux dirent cache is optimised to within an inch of its life (it's deliberately sized to match CPU cachelines among other optimisations). And one of the chunks of that slow down is upper / lower case checks (Mac filesystems be default treat upper and lower case as the same thing when it comes to matching a filename).
Because of that Linux works so much faster with small files, and text files are small compared to audio, video, etc.
I was never a huge fan of exceptions and their "come from" / "spooky behaviour at a distance" semantics, and now I see a group of other language features I never thought highly of all belong to a group of implementation / semantically similar behaviour.
"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." -- Churchill
This is a problem that banks deal with all the time.
It truly is a pain in the butt. But if access to (US banking | Fable) is worth it, you do the annoying work, and the customers accept the annoying limitations.
"The inclusion criteria prioritizes companies that extract their cashflow into profit", in almost all cases, yes. But if you want to buy into these newer stocks there are various high growth indices you can buy, no one is stopping you. If you want to buy into only one or two of those stocks then you can. It's a free market for stocks and it's a free market for indices. There's no regulation that says the S&P has to include certain stocks.
The issue is a contradiction with what S&P 500 claims to do vs what they actually do.
S&P 500 claims to be the "best single gauge of U.S. large-cap equities". But if they exclude high-growth no-profit large-cap equities such as (Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX) from their index, then S&P is doing a poor job at what they claim to benchmark.
It's not not an insignificant oversight. The valuations of (Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX) total to ~5% of the total US stock market.
> S&P 500 claims to be the "best single gauge of U.S. large-cap equities"
Right...
> But if they exclude high-growth no-profit large-cap equities such as (Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX) from their index, then S&P is doing a poor job at what they claim to benchmark.
So it comes down to a difference of opinion between Standard and Poor's and tristanj. Go make the Tristanj500, include these companies, and make the same claim - "the actual best single gauge of U.S. large-cap equities". No one's stopping you.
"The S&P rules exist so the index can accurately reflect the market", the rules exist to reflect a subset of the market, and the committee chooses that subset. It's their subset so they get to set the rules, you don't have to use it if you don't want to. If you don't like that subset then create your own index. Then you just need to convince others to use it.
Per the S&P 500 website, the claimed subset of the market is "U.S. large-cap equities". S&P claims their index is "best single gauge of U.S. large-cap equities". But, it's clear that given the current iteration of the rules, none of the major upcoming IPOs of Spacex, Anthropic, or OpenAI are eligible for S&P500 inclusion, and they likely will not be for years.
Claiming to have the "best single gauge of U.S. large-cap equities", yet having rules that exclude three of the top 20 largest U.S large-cap equities which make up ~5% of the total market cap of the U.S. stock market, means your benchmark is inaccurate by my book.
"means your benchmark is inaccurate by my book.", and like The Dude says "Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like uh, your opinion, man."
Create your own benchmark, and you can say it is a subset of "U.S. large-cap equities" and "best single gauge of U.S. large-cap equities" and let the market decide who does a better job.
"Because the index needs accuracy.", and I would argue that include price accuracy not just inclusion accuracy. The S&P is a benchmark that is designed to reflect a subset of the market, and giving only some companies early access to the benchmark changes the benchmark. So if you want a benchmark that's designed to include all the big stocks regardless of age, profitability, etc then go make a new benchmark. The only thing you need to do is convince others to use your benchmark.
"go make a new benchmark" completely ignores how this works in practice. Benchmarks are only useful because everyone uses the same one, you can't swap it out. The S&P 500 benchmark is used as a comparison for trillions of dollars of mutual funds, index funds, and institutional mandates. The further the S&P 500 strays from reflecting the actual market, the more useless it becomes.
Also the S&P criteria have been revised multiple times, it's not some sacred unchangeable document.
> The further the S&P 500 strays from reflecting the actual market, the more useless it becomes.
Here I once again agree with you in part, and disagree in part.
The S&P 500 should reflect the actual market. That is, the actual market of publicly-traded companies with legal requirements for transparent accounting and reasonable expectations of future positive cash flows.
As you wrote yourself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48408363), "These [mega-cap IPO] companies will likely never meet S&P profitability inclusion criteria for the next 5 years."
At this point in time, I don't think it's reasonable to expect future positive cash flows from SpaceX or Anthropic. There are indeed some reasons to suspect that there won't be future positive cash flows from them.
The purpose of the S&P 500 is to be the "best single gauge of U.S. large-cap equities". That's direct from their website. I never dispute this.
I dispute the fact they claim to be the best benchmark of large-cap U.S. equities, yet have rules that (currently) exclude large-cap equities like SpaceX, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
Sure, but then it comes down to your opinion vs the S&P board's opinion. I suspect (given that there's only been a few days of this getting into the public eye) that more people support the S&P's position vs their critics. But the trade flows will show if people get out of SPX (or SPY/VOO) in the coming days.
My issue is that so many people have forgotten the purpose of the S&P 500 index (i.e. it's a benchmark to reflect the large-cap U.S. equity market), and instead treat it as a list of approved companies they should blindly invest their 401ks into. These people do not want to invest their retirement funds into the upcoming IPOs of the overpriced & unprofitable (SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI), and then are arguing the benchmark index should not include these companies.
But at a fundamental level, the S&P500 index exists to track the market. It was created decades before passive investing even existed. These companies are all large enough to qualify as major members of the index. If S&P started arbitrarily excluding parts of the market they find uninvestable, then that's compromising the integrity of the index, and defeats the purpose of the index entirely.
Reading this thread, there is so much confusion happening.
> If S&P started arbitrarily excluding parts of the market they find uninvestable, then that's compromising the integrity of the index, and defeats the purpose of the index entirely.
But they haven't started arbitrarily excluding parts of the market they find investable: on the contrary you are demanding they start arbitrarily change a long established and pretty basic rule to arbitrarily include pre-profit companies. Criteria on non market cap factors including positive earnings and liquidity are defined explicitly on their website along with the subjective "best gauge", which is entirely compatible with the idea it's a better gauge of large market cap company performance if it only includes companies whose market cap is supported by having given the bare minimum indication their business model can be financially sustained, not the ventures whose potential is most hyped[1]
[1]which obviously applies to OpenAI and Anthropic to a greater extent than SpaceX which actually achieved positive earnings as a private company before it pivoted to a model which bankrolls other Elon ventures and ambitions and needed to IPO as a result.
That's a fair point that the inclusion criteria are applied consistently, not arbitrarily. But I fundamentally disagree with their inclusion criteria. It was designed for traditional companies with low growth and high GAAP profitability, not high-growth companies rapidly reinvesting into the core business.
Amazon is infamous for having positive cash-flow yet running near-zero GAAP earnings for nearly two decades, because they reinvested absolutely all profits into the business. They were famously unprofitable, by choice of Jeff Bezos, and he created one of the most successful businesses ever. Under your logic, Amazon didn't belong in the index for most of its most important growth years. Only when it became GAAP profitable, it was allowed to enter.
SpaceX is cash-flow positive in its core launch business. OpenAI and Anthropic have tens of billions in revenue. These companies have found product-market-fit, and clearly demonstrate working business models. But neither of these companies satisfy one specific accounting metric that the S&P 500 requires for inclusion, so they get shafted.
The market has already priced these companies at giga-cap levels, these are some of the largest companies ever created, and that is a clear signal of something. The benchmark index should include these companies in some form, rather than gate them behind an antiquated metric.
I don't think earnings is an antiquated metric for valuing companies though. Other metrics exist to estimate future earnings and attract a different class of investor looking for different risk/return profiles than people wanting to index companies big enough to generate steady returns with fairly high confidence they'll be doing a similar thing tomorrow. If people want to invest in a different type of company from the companies the index was designed to capture they're entitled to do so: if their expected returns are that good you don't need to browbeat indices into changing their entire ethos to get funds involved in their IPO.
Sure, some companies which vastly outspent competitors on growth became very successful profitable midcaps and joined the relevant indices when they did, but everyone else waited their turn (including the ones that never became profitable midcaps because the money tap was their moat)
Thanks for entirely missing the point. My argument is for benchmark purity, and to not exclude significant parts of the market from the benchmark to accommodate the whims of passive investors.
The benchmark has much more use than just a list of stocks passive investors should blindly follow.
> But at a fundamental level, the S&P500 index exists to track the market
No, it exists to track a subset of the market based on specific criteria and weights. It's not even based on the market cap of included companies directly.
'S&P Total Market Index' exists to track the market.
> qualify as major members of the index
Not based on the inclusion criteria.
AND even if that were changed they wouldn't be near the top anyway, despite the trillion dollar valuations initially they wouldn't even be in the top 20 by weight.
> and defeats the purpose of the index entirely.
The index has operated based on specific rules defining inclusion criteria for a while. Can we just conclude that it did not become the most popular index despite never being designed to track the full market or be based directly on total market caps.
After all it's the people advocating the inclusion of these companies are advocating an arbitrary modification to the rules just to get them in.
The "total market index" point has been addressed twice now. Nobody ever claimed the S&P 500 tracks all equities. Only you keep bringing it up.
On your claim that these companies "wouldn't be in the top 20 by weight": as I addressed to you other times in this thread, SpaceX float 1 year after IPO would be 50%, giving it an index weight of $800 billion. That places it easily in the top 20 large-cap U.S. companies. The article linked has a chart of forecast free float. Your claim is false.
On "arbitrary modification" of rules: every criterion in the index was itself added or revised at some point. The profitability requirement, the float threshold, the dual-class share exclusion then reinclusion. All these rules were modified. If all rule changes are "arbitrary," so are the existing rules. The only meaningful standard for evaluating a rule change is whether it better serves the index's stated purpose.
The stated purpose of the S&P500 is to be the "best single gauge of U.S. large-cap equities." A company with a $1.75T market cap that ranks in the top 5 by size in the US is, by definition, large-cap. Excluding such a large company is contrary to the stated purpose of the index.
From my perspective it is a synthesis of "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." and "but npm is the source of all the shiny shiny!".
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