Illegal Index Funds

Illegal Index Funds


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By Matthew Gutierrez and Shawn O'Malley · February 12, 2024


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??Congratulations to the Kanas City Chiefs for solidifying their NFL dynasty on Sunday with back-to-back Super Bowl wins. We were watching alongside 115 million others.

Another thing we’ve been watching? The dried-up IPO market. Over the past two years, the IPO market hadn’t been much more than tumbleweeds.

But the good news is that there have been 10 initial public offerings on U.S. exchanges this year.

We’re on pace to surpass IPO activity from 2022 and 2023 — an IPO resurgence, if you will.

Matthew & Shawn

Here’s today’s rundown:

Today, we'll discuss the three biggest stories in markets:

  • Should index funds be illegal?
  • Stocks are at a record, but are they expensive?
  • A Buffett disciple’s big bet on commercial real estate

All this, and more, in just 5 minutes to read.


POP QUIZ

?What’s the worst year for the U.S. IPO market over the past 50 years? (Scroll to the bottom to find out!)


Chart of the Day



In The News

?? New Research Published on Index Funds

Created by DALL-E via ChaGPT

Should index funds be illegal?

It’s more of an intellectual question than a serious one. For example, the U.S. stock market couldn’t really function if 100% of investors held all their money in S&P 500 index funds, at least not as any useful tool for allocating capital.

  • Yet, as index funds, particularly in ETF form, democratize access to stock investing and become increasingly popular, at what point does the share of “passive” investors become so high that it hinders market function?
  • In a now famous research note, one equity analyst declared that index investing is “worse than communism.”
  • Saying, "A supposedly capitalist economy where the only investment is passive is worse than either a centrally planned economy or an economy with active market-led capital management.”

Everything has a cost: Critics fear the masses automatically buying index funds in their personal or retirement accounts, blindly pushing prices higher and disrupting the market’s ability to value companies.

  • As index (or passive) investing goes more mainstream, the stock market itself becomes a public good, a tool we all rely on for retirement that is “too big to fail.”


Why it matters:

While we are far from the index-investing revolution smothering markets, some are noticing its impacts on “efficiency,” the market’s ability to react to and reflect new information quickly.

In the weeds: A new paper shows just this. Bloomberg’s Matt Levine explains its findings: “The basic idea is that there are some...



13 Feb 2024 'Too big to fail' was bad enough for the banks. Now we have 'too many to fail.' By Raghuram G. Rajan and Viral V. Acharya The danger of forgetting the 2023 banking crisis and SVB's collapse Almost a year after the mini banking crisis in the United States, it is worth revisiting the episode. Was it just a tempest in a teacup? Was there really a systemic threat, or was it just a problem with a few banks? Should the interventions by the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury worry or comfort us? It is convenient to think that these issues were confined to just a few rogue banks. But the problem was systemic. The Treasury essentially took bank runs off the table, while the Fed provided banks the funds to accommodate the continuing - though no longer panicked - depositor outflows. A potential banking crisis was converted into a slow-burning problem for banks as they recognized and absorbed the losses on their balance sheets. "Too big to fail" was bad enough, but now we have "too many to fail." The mini-crisis of March 2023 was much more than a footnote in banking history. We cannot afford to bury it. Please continue reading here: https://tinyurl.com/7djph2aj

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