alt Hacker News"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.
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ywvcbk • yesterday at 7:20 AM
You want to turn S&P 500 to a total market index. Why? That was never its purpose.
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> 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.