This is not investment advice for your specific situation. Please consult a qualified professional before making investment decisions.

Hey Reader ♥,

I've been thinking about Elon Musk. Not by choice, really. But because it's hard to avoid him right now. SpaceX, the politics, the AI bubble, superconductors, the headlines. And somewhere in the middle of scrolling past another story, I had an uncomfortable realization.

I probably own a piece of his companies.

Not because I chose to. SpaceX merged with xAI, went public last month, and it's already being fast-tracked into the index my ETF tracks. My best estimate is that it now accounts for something like $5 to $6 out of every $10,000 I hold in XEQT in my TFSA. Small. Not zero.

Here's the part that actually stuck with me, and it's bigger than my own account. In May, Nasdaq quietly changed its own rules. The wait before a new listing can join the Nasdaq-100, the index behind funds like QQQ, used to be three months. Now, for anything landing in the top 40 by size, it's fifteen trading days.

Reuters reported SpaceX made fast index inclusion a condition of where it listed, and Nasdaq changed the rule to win the listing over the New York Stock Exchange. Nasdaq profits from both the listing fee and the index products built on top of it, so the incentive isn't exactly a mystery.

S&P Dow Jones considered the same change, for the S&P 500, and said no. Same idea, different rule-writers, different answer: SpaceX still needs a year and four straight profitable quarters before it can join funds like VFV or XSP.

The protection didn't vanish everywhere. It just depends entirely on which committee you're trusting, and whether you even know their names. Where it was fast-tracked, analysts estimate $22 to $27 billion in buying is now contractually required, no debate, no opt-out, including from pension funds whose own managers have publicly called the governance reckless. They're buying anyway. Not because they agree. Because the rule says they have to.

XEQT is my own version of "no choice." I didn't sit down and decide "yes, Elon Musk." It just came with the package, the one I picked for the diversification, the low fees, the advice everyone gives you when you don't have the time or appetite to pick stocks yourself.

Years ago it was a different version of the same discomfort: knowing that just participating in the stock market means participating in systems that produce real exclusion, real harm, for marginalized people. I'm still trying to make peace with that, so this once again caught me off guard.

Here's what I keep coming back to. Our parents' generation didn't have to have this argument with themselves. Some of them had defined-benefit pensions. Someone else decided the asset allocation, took the investment risk, managed the pension fund. The market had a relationship with their employer. They just had to show up to work.

That deal is mostly gone now. Most of us think we're the ones deciding the allocation, since we picked the fund, set up the auto-contribution, called it "set it and forget it." But somebody else is still making the calls inside that fund: which companies get in, how much weight they get, when the rules bend. We just don't know their names.

I used to think the question was "can I be against something and still invest in it?" I don't think that's the real question anymore. The real question is: who do I trust to make this call, now that it's not me, and it's not who I expected?

Our parents trusted a pension fund, or didn't. That trust lived outside of them, in an institution with a name. Mine still lives outside of me too, just further away and harder to see. It's not a pension manager anymore. It's an index provider, a rules committee, a formula for what counts as big enough to include. I didn't choose them, and I don't get a vote in what they decide. My only real choice is whether I keep watching what they do with it, or stop looking.

Not "do I trust myself." Do I trust the people writing the rules for what gets in, now that they've shown me those rules bend.

I don't have a clean answer for the Musk problem. But I noticed the feeling, and I wanted to say it out loud instead of scrolling past it.

If you want the plain-language version of what's actually happening, what an index fund is, why it works, and what a major IPO like this one means for what's sitting inside your ETF, I broke it down here.

​Read the full post →​

And if you have an answer, or something similar caught you off guard lately, hit reply and tell me. I read every reply.

With intention,

P.S. If you'd rather watch than read, I go deeper on this exact IPO on the Emotions + Math YouTube channel. Watch it here.​

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