Here's What You Thought

I want to talk about something that’s about to happen, but first, let me say something very clearly up front, and read this, because it’s important:

I AM NOT A FINANCIAL ADVISOR. THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE.
NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND IS EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED.
ANY ACTIONS YOU TAKE IN RESPONSE TO THIS POST ARE ENTIRELY TAKEN AT YOUR OWN RISK.

There. Now, let’s get into it.

For the last, oh… forty, fifty years, there has been a quiet bargain amongst Wall Street, the markets, and people who have 401(k)s and IRAs, and a common piece of advice that falls out of it.

That advice has been that if you don’t want to be an active investor, if you don’t want to have basically a whole ‘nother job researching companies, markets, and so on, you should put your money in some kind of index fund pinned to some segment of the stock market as a whole.

That might be a foreign assets fund. It might be a technology fund. It more likely might be a Dow Jones Industrial Average fund, or an S&P 500 fund, where the market manager keeps the fund invested in the set of stocks that make up the S&P 500. It might be a NASDAQ 100 fund, run the same way. They’ve called it “investing in the American economy,” or “investing in America,” or “set and forget” investing.

It’s been a simple and good bargain. “You give us your money, we’ll have averages that make sense, and have a lot of rules to them – no additions of new companies that haven’t proven themselves, legitimate valuations, corporations with a history of profit. Number will go up. Everyone wins.”

For the last several decades, it’s been real good advice. It’s been a real good deal. It’s paid off real well, and is a part of how Baby Boomers have so much money in retirement. If you had such a thing as a 401(k) and/or an IRA and you followed the advice, it’s been a real-life case of the rising tide lifting all boats. There have been some serious storms along the way, but they’ve been followed by serious recoveries.

Well, guess who’s noticed allll that money sitting there, with nobody paying too much attention.

That’s right; it’s the techbros! And they’re wedging themselves – starting with Elon Musk and SpaceX – into that system, and if that means breaking the bargain to do it, then that means breaking the bargain to do it. It’s just a bunch of NPC money, after all. NPCs, peons, ordinaries – not real people, like them. Who, you know. Actually need that money.

(That’s an interpretation, of course. An opinion, if you like. First amendment, for as long as we have one.)

As above, historically, when being added to a major index – and thus becoming part of index funds, the kinds of funds normal people with 401K and IRA accounts invest in – a company and stock have had to prove themselves first. Be in public trading for a year, so the market has worked out a base valuation. Show profit. Show competence at running a company. Steps like that.

But for Elon and the other tech bros with all these AI startups… they’ve changed the rules. At least, the NASDAQ and Russell 1000 have.

So all of that old-fashioned safety and security nonsense? Gone. Just gone. For the benefit of him, and of his friends.

SpaceX is going to start trading and then be added to the NASDAQ 100 index a whole 15 days later, with no profit, no history of profit, only one profitable division in the company as a whole – Starlink – and at a valuation a trillion dollars over what Morningstar thinks it’s worth.

For the Russell 1000, I’m seeing conflicting information – the waved rules seem to allow technical entry within five trading days, but not actual entry until September or even December, the normal index reconstitution months. I think it’s planned to be September, but it’s cloudy.

Regardless, the moment it rolls into these indexes, every 401K, every IRA, every investment fund that includes the NASDAQ-100 or Russell 1000 will automatically start buying his massively overpriced, massively overvalued stock…

…that he and his pre-IPO investors will be able to cash in early, because they’ve changed the rules around that, too.

The S&P 500, thankfully, have decided not to play along, at least for now. They were looking like they’ll allow an early entry as well – and it’s a damn good thing they have not, because they’re the largest and most important of these sorts of indexes.

Even without them, though, it’s billions and billions of dollars of forced buying by index funds – money being taken out of real companies that actually make money, and being put into the stock of Spaceboy Elon’s Clown Car Show.

The defence is that this is a “20 year buy,” that it’s a long-term investment and it’ll come good – but that’s not just what every company ever has said, it’s also horseshit. SpaceX’s rockets could possibly get to profitability, military contractors usually manage to do well, and that would be the likely route. (Tho’ others disagree, with validity.) X-twitter won’t; it’s only there to spread fascist propaganda and disinformation, not make money, so while pays back in other ways, those other ways don’t show up on balance sheets. xAI, best known as the maker of MechaHitler AI, will do far worse than average amongst so-called AI companies, particularly once Anthropic and OpenAI and who knows how many others repeat Elon’s stock trick. If his incompetent lawsuit against OpenAI showed anything, it’s that Elon and his company are very bad at making AI software.

You know what all this reminds me of, though?

There’s a famous rounding-error theft scheme, have you heard about it? It’s been used in a few movies. It’s the one where a programmer for a bank starts rounding interest payments to the nearest penny and then sending the rounded-off penny fractions to a separate, personal account because all the numbers still work. Nobody “loses” anything, but those fractions of cents round up real fast at scale.

Depending upon how the fraud is run, it’s either called Rounding Fraud or Salami Slicing. This isn’t quite that – to be clear, this is legal enough not to get investigated, particularly not by the Shitstain administration – but it’s real close to that.

Not the same. Just… real close.

It’s leveraging a trust to take advantage of people who have replied on that trust, abusing it and extracting small amounts of money and value from absolutely gobsmacking numbers of workers, all for the benefit of Mr. Musk. Elon will be scooping money out of retirement fund investments into long-term proven stocks and shovelling that money into his stock that absolutely does not have the value it’s being assigned so he can be Mister Champion of Capitalism, Mister Trillionaire.

And if it works, all his little fascist friends absolutely are going to do the same thing with their companies, too. This doesn’t stop with Elon.

Funny thing is, it may not even be noticed at first. See, the thing about forced purchases of stock is that it keeps demand up for that stock, which keeps the price of that stock up, regardless of any underlying value. If the Russell 1000 roll it in starting in September – more or less as NASDAQ-100 fund fulfillments would be petering out – that could keep the support going through the entire year, maybe.

They might get away with it for a while. On paper. While the right people cash out. It certainly won’t break the bank…

….until it does.

And that’s the trick, isn’t it? If this goes through, if this works even mostly as planned, then even without the S&P onboard it still eventually breaks the bank.

It breaks the bank because it breaks the trust. It breaks the bargain. Absolutely wrecks it, because literally everyone who can will follow suit, and do the same goddamn thing, over and over again.

And that is absolutely the kind of shift that destroys a market. It’s the dynamite that sets off a collapse.

But as long as they get to cash out first, who cares, right?

It’s a mass technically legal theft, a small sip taken each time but with oh so many portions and from so, so many people, a new kind of abuse that doesn’t yet have a name, but absolutely will; we’ll make one for it, in the aftermath.

Particularly if the S&P 500 change their mind again and decide to join in after all.

People have talked about neo-feudalism and techno-feudalism, but I don’t think that’s right. Early European feudalism – which was, people forget, under the Roman Empire – was arguably the western empire trying to keep its shit together and failing. Trying in the worst way possible, maybe, but hindsight is always 20/20.

These guys? They just want to loot it all.

They aren’t the feudal lords.

They’re the barbarians who have broken through the gates. Remember that even if this fails, they still tried, and they will try again.

Prepare accordingly.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.