alt Hacker NewsBaseball rules exist to prevent cheating. The S&P rules exist so the index can accurately reflect the market. When S&P rules end up excluding a significant part of the market with trillions in real market cap, that means the rules are badly designed and broken by its own standard. You're trying to compare updating badly written S&P 500 rules to cheating, which makes no sense at all. They are completely different.
And calling out how the rules are being changed for new entrants into the market such as SpaceX on Nasdaq proves my point. Index providers are already quietly admitting their criteria are too rigid.
Even S&P adjusted their rules to allow SpaceX into the index, although only for the total market index.
https://press.spglobal.com/2026-06-04-S-P-Dow-Jones-Indices-...
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> accurately reflect the market. When S&P rules end up excluding a significant part of the market with trillions
Define what that means? The weights are based on the value of shares available publicly, not market cap. So even if included SpaceX wouldn't even be in the top 20 and have a lower weight than Johson & Johson.
A lot of what people are saying here seems to be based on a misconception of what S&P 500 is supposed to be. Maybe it became the most popular index because of those rigid rules?
> Baseball rules exist to prevent cheating.
> The S&P rules exist so the index can accurately reflect the market.
I personally believe that accurately reflecting a market involves not allowing cheating. I personally believe that getting to change the rules so that your IPO gets included before the general market can discern your value because of your connections to the benchmarks is cheating.
If you want to disagree with me on these points then please do so, but understand why I am claiming that this behavior is cheating.
"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.