alt Hacker News> no clue how trillions of $ from their pension funds
Pension funds don't tend to follow the S&P 500, much less automatically. They're sophisticated institutional investors like CalPERS [1] who dabble in everything from public stocks to private equity.
It's other retirement assets, e.g. 401(k)s and IRAs, that tend to follow the S&P 500. But again, with substantial variation.
S&P including these companies would have driven a lot of money towards them. But there was a lot of misinformation around the magnitude of that drive, as well as the breadth of whom it would affect.
In the US at least, many pension funds are not sophisticated, they're small, underfunded, and getting taken for a ride by expensive advisors who promise fantastical returns that will help dig them out of their funding ratio hole. Many would be better off using an S&P 500 index fund for their equity component instead of getting wined and dined into an illiquid, opaque private equity investment.
Telling that among OECD countries, the US is an outlier in having a much lower average funding ratio, and this despite the fantastic performance of the US stock market over the last 15 years.