If this truly is the end of the Jays Era, I am forever grateful that we got to see them reach the top of the mountain together.
One of the best homegrown duos and most successful eras in franchise history. Two of the greatest Celtics of all time and Celtics legends for the rest of time
It was a privilege to witness and experience it
The hardest working person in the world likely lives in poverty. Hard work almost never translates to wealth. But exploitation of labor often does. The hard work myth needs to dıė
Imagine you spent 40 years doing the boring, responsible thing.
You opened a 401k at 23. You contributed every paycheck. You ignored the noise. You bought the index because Bogle told you to, because Buffett told you to, because every honest piece of financial advice for 30 years told you the index was the safest, most diversified, most rules-based way to own America.
The whole point was the rules.
The rules said: a company must trade for 12 months before joining the S&P 500. The rules said: it must show four consecutive quarters of GAAP profitability. The rules existed because in 1999 the index quietly bought a lot of stocks at the top, and pensioners paid the bill.
After the dot-com crash, S&P tightened the rules. Nasdaq tightened the rules. FTSE Russell tightened the rules.
For 23 years, those rules held.
Then SpaceX filed for IPO.
And the rules changed.
The S&P 500 waived the profitability requirement. Nasdaq cut its trading-history window from 90 days to 15. FTSE Russell cut its to 5.
Bloomberg Intelligence estimates the major index funds will absorb between 19% and 24% of SpaceX's float within six months. That's over $30 trillion of passive 401k and retirement money, mechanically buying a single newly public company at IPO valuations, because the rules said they had to.
Except the rules used to say they didn't.
Here's the thought exercise:
If you spend 40 years building a system designed to protect ordinary savers from buying overpriced stocks, and then you waive the protections the moment a sufficiently large stock asks you to, what was the system actually protecting?
Most of investing is about understanding what's a rule and what's a guideline.
A rule binds the rule-maker.
A guideline binds the saver.
You're allowed to find out which is which only after the fact.
Funny. I thought it was morally wrong for Elon Musk, the wealthiest man alive worth more than $800 billion, to eliminate humanitarian aid that will cause 4.5 million of the poorest kids on the planet to die in the next 4 years.