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Index funds give investors steady, automatic exposure to the market's best companies. For most people, they work brilliantly.

But their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness.

By design, you cannot choose what goes into them. Your money is allocated automatically, mechanically, without opinion or judgment.

When a company is added to an index, every fund tracking that index must buy it… no questions asked. The bigger the company, the more of your money goes in.

That's fine when the system works as intended. It becomes a problem when someone figures out how to game it.

And someone has.

The village has 1,000 identical houses, all owned by one man: Elon Musk. One day, Elon decides to sell just one of them.

Word gets out. 10 buyers show up, elbowing each other on the doorstep, and the bidding war goes nuclear. By the end of the day, the lucky(?) winner hands over $50 million for a three-bedroom with a mountain view.

The next morning, every financial newspaper in the country runs the same headline:

"Elon's village valued at $50 BILLION."

The math checks out, right? $50 million × 1,000 houses = $50 billion. Simple arithmetic.

Except it's a mirage.

If Elon turned around and listed all 999 remaining homes the very next day, that $50 billion would evaporate before you'd finished your morning coffee.

Think about it: 20 buyers fought over one house. Now you need to find buyers for 999. The price wouldn't just dip, it would crater.

and it's either the most audacious financial move of the decade, or the greatest heist ever pulled on the investing public. Maybe both.

In case you've been living under a rock: SpaceX is the private rocket company that now handles roughly 80% of everything humanity launches into space.

Elon Musk built it from scratch and turned it into arguably the most strategically important company on the planet.

It has never been publicly traded. Until now.

But Elon isn't just planning a standard IPO. He's planning to hack the system itself, to engineer a situation where your automated investments are forced to buy a piece of SpaceX at a price that has almost nothing to do with reality.

And the most remarkable part? It's completely legal.

The Nasdaq 100 isn't just a list of tech stocks. It's a club: the 100 most powerful technology companies on the planet, the ones that sit inside virtually every index fund your retirement account has ever touched.

Getting in is a big deal. It means trillions of dollars in passive investment funds are obligated to buy your stock, automatically, no questions asked.

Naturally, there are bouncers at the door.

Bouncer #1: The Float Rule

"Float" is the portion of a company's shares that regular people (you, me, anyone with a brokerage app) can actually buy and sell on the open market. Most companies have >90% free float, meaning you can pretty much buy the entire company if you have the funds to do so.

Then you have family-controlled businesses. Take Hermès, the French luxury house, where the founding family holds about two-thirds of the company and has zero interest in selling. Only a third of the shares actually circulate on the open market… but that's still enough for big funds to trade in and out without throwing the price around.

The Nasdaq historically drew a hard line at 10% free float. Below that threshold, it becomes too easy for a single deep-pocketed player to manipulate the price of the stock.

Bouncer #2: The Time Rule

New public companies are, putting it politely, a circus. The first weeks after an IPO are a frenzy of speculation, media hype, and retail investors panic-buying and panic-selling based on vibes.

So Nasdaq historically required companies to spend at least 3 to 6 months listed on the exchange before they could even be considered for index inclusion. Let the dust settle before forcing every passive investor in the world to own a slice of it.

Tesla spent a full decade as a public company before it was allowed anywhere near the S&P 500. The reason? A rule requiring four consecutive profitable quarters before joining the index. Tesla kept missing it, and Elon watched billions in passive investments flow into other people’s companies while Tesla sat outside with its nose pressed against the glass.

He learned his lesson… And he won't be waiting a decade this time.

Thing is, the mythical Nasdaq also has a problem.

IPOs are dying. The great companies of the next decade (OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, SpaceX…) are staying private way, way longer. For Nasdaq, becoming a museum of old tech while the next generation of giants stays private is an existential threat.

So when SpaceX came knocking, Nasdaq decided to roll out the red carpet and changed the rules.

Rule change #1: No more waiting period. Historically, 3 to 6 months on the exchange before index eligibility. For SpaceX, Nasdaq has decided that 15 days is plenty.

Rule change #2: Scrap the float minimum. Remember the safeguard requiring at least 10% of shares to be freely tradeable, specifically to prevent price manipulation? Nasdaq is scrapping it for a new metric: total market cap.

Say Elon lists just 4% of SpaceX on the open market. A frenzy of buyers push that 4% to a valuation of $80 billion. Under the new rules, Nasdaq looks at that number and says: if 4% is worth $80 billion, the whole company must be worth $2 trillion.

Welcome to the index.

Overnight, SpaceX will become one of the largest companies on earth. Every ETF tracking the Nasdaq, every pension fund benchmarked to it, every passive investor on the planet will now be obligated to buy Elon’s company.

You'll hear a lot of noise about AI, data centres in space, robotics, the next frontier of human civilisation. Set all of that aside for a moment and look at the actual business.

At its expected $2 trillion valuation, SpaceX would be the fifth largest company in the Nasdaq. But rank the same index by revenue (by what companies actually sell), and SpaceX barely cracks the top 50. It sits down near Keurig Dr Pepper. Yes, the fizzy drink company.

But unlike Dr Pepper, SpaceX is not yet profitable. And probably won’t be anytime soon.

Run the numbers: for every $1,000 you invest in SpaceX at this valuation, you'd be losing roughly $8.50 a year on the underlying business. That's before you even get to the question of whether the stock goes up or down.

Now, there are two ways to look at what's happening here.

Version one: "Of course SpaceX should be in the index. It's the fifth largest company on earth. Are they waiting for it to go up another 100% before they add it?"

Version two: "The world's richest man just walked into the stock market and said: here's how things work now. My shareholders need an exit, and I need a group of suckers who can't say no."

But here's what's not really up for debate: of all the people who will automatically start buying SpaceX next month, a good number of them would never have chosen to invest in this company directly.

It's about what happens when you surrender control of your hard-earned savings to someone else and let them decide for you.

Think about every layer standing between you and your money. Your ETF provider, following rules it didn't write. The index itself, rewriting those rules when it suits the companies knocking at its door. These institutions have their own incentives.

You are the only person in this entire chain whose interests are completely aligned with your own financial future.

Believe it or not, that’s actually your biggest edge.

As Warren Buffett put it: "What could be more advantageous in an intellectual contest — whether it be chess, bridge, or stock selection — than to have opponents who have been taught that thinking is a waste of energy?"

In practice, thinking for yourself means one thing: learning to look at stocks as what they actually are: businesses. Real companies, with real revenues, real costs, real customers, and real competitive advantages or lack thereof.

The boring and time-consuming analytical work? RatedA does that for you, so that you can stay in the driver's seat with a clear view of the road.

The SpaceX IPO will be one of the most watched market events in years. Some people will get swept into it without ever knowing it happened. Others will understand exactly what's going on, weigh it up, and make a decision they're at peace with either way.

Be the second kind of investor.

The RatedA Portfolio is beating the market. You could too.

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