Nasdaq changed its index rules in February.
Consultation opened, comment period closed February 27, rules came into effect May 1.
Three months, soup to nuts.
Fastest index overhaul in years.
(checking notes)
SpaceX announced it was listing on Nasdaq shortly after.
(re-checking notes)
Right. So. The Nasdaq-100 used to require a seasoning period - newly listed companies waited anywhere from three months to a year before getting swept into the index. The idea being: let the price actually get discovered. Let float build. Don’t force $527 billion in ETF assets to mechanically pile into something that went public last Tuesday.
That rule? *poof* Gone with the wind.
Effective May 1, any newly listed company in the top 40 by market cap enters the Nasdaq-100 after a grueling delay of 15 trading days.
But there’s a difference between “the old rules had costs” and “we rewrote the rules in February, they took effect in May, and the company that needed them listed in June”.
The sequence is what it is.
Nasdaq gets the listing fees, gets the trading volume, gets the prestige.
SpaceX gets a wave of forced buyers the moment the lockup math gets interesting.
And we - the ultimate bagholders - will be forced through our 401Ks to buy into an artificially weighted offloading operation.
Somewhere, Al Capone is looking up at all this and wondering why he ever bothered with organized crime.
