Danish pension fund excludes SpaceX citing governance and valuation

I have AkademikerPension as my pension fund through work and this move suits me quite well. They've already excluded Tesla as well as a variety of companies that profit of weapon production, fossil fuel production or are suspected for human rights violations.

https://akademikerpension.dk/ansvarlighed/ekskluderede-selsk...

I wanted to see how well Akademikerpension has done wrt. returns. This graph shows average yearly return from the financial crisis 2009 until 2021 and they are actually the best performing among other Danish pension funds [1].

[1] https://www.finanshus.dk/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Pensions...

I really want a QQQ/VOO replacement that excludes these new rushed IPOs that are just exit liquidity. There are ETFs that exclude harmful industries like gambling, weapons and tobacco. How about an ETF that doesn't include IPOs for six months or until insider lock ups periods are over.

I think European countries need to get serious about investing money locally. The UK is a particularly egregious example but it’s taking begging and pleading with the mansion house accord to even convince pensions to try to invest in the UK economy. Every country should make a portion of local (at least within Europe) investment a prerequisite for whatever favourable tax treatment pensions and similar products get.

So much wealth is tied up in pensions and it’s folly to let it all go to supporting the U.S. and eschew local investment altogether.

The Financial Times' Unhedged Podcast covered the SpaceX IPO recently and highlighted the same issues that the Danish pension fund raised concerns about.

https://www.ft.com/content/a401b0c0-fcc0-4bae-9f57-e8d5c0957...

I am thinking of moving over my investments from S&P 500 to S&P 500 ESG, as they have excluded SpaceX and Tesla.

Apologies for the naivety, but, why is SpaceX valued so high? Starlink? Are rockets really a lucrative business? Don’t get me wrong, being able to send objects up into orbit is cool, but is it $1.8T cool?

I wish they didn’t manage to change the nasdaq rules, forcing a lot of index ETFs to buy spacex at IPO, whatever the price.

Edit: glad to see vanguard VT tracks FTSE which isn’t impacted. The amount of overvalued spacex stock in VT will be minimal down the line as they use the amount of publicly available shares to calculate the weight in the index, which is the more sensible way to do it, Musk’s scam not withstanding.

With schemes like SpaceX, and the general number of large-cap-but-negative-earnings companies trading on the market, I feel like the conventional wisdom of DCA and chill / just passively buy the index will turn into an underperforming strategy vs a slightly more active or opinionated approach.

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324097

(Apologies for the bad grammar, my son was born a little over 24 hours ago. I’m choosing not to use a LLM, so you are getting the real me)

Even sovereign funds (example Norway) are invested in American tech, funds, and indexes.

It is interesting to think about (from the perspective of an immigrant to Norway) how I moved my life’s savings from the US to Norway.

I’m now fully invested into Norway (real estate, savings, and retirement).

My understand is that Norwegians (and the nordics) have historically looked up to the US as a world leader.

I think that is no longer true and maybe this decision by Denmark is a data point of how the Nordics are changing?

It kind of feels like we all have been caught holding the bag (US reserve currency) and now we have to carefully unwind our position.

I’ve lost my point. Maybe my goal here is to just contribute to this discussion to distract from the exhaustion.

Presumably Musk will sue them.

We need Calpers (California pension fund) and others to do this as well.

The issue is raised a lot but there is less and less time and I don't think it will hit mainstream before IPO is done and pension funds/passive investors will be forced to buy it.

It really does look bad: low float multiplier rule (that will overweight SpaceX) introduced very recently, fast inclusion mechanism, insiders being allowed to sell faster than usual etc.

It all looks like an orchestrated dump into passive investors/pension funds/other ETF holders.

Investing in IPOs is a terrible strategy historically. Here we have several mega IPOs incoming with rules being re-designed just for them to be included faster in your "passive" portfolio.

For those commenting that this decision may have a political element: Greenland is a part of the Kingdom of Denmark.

Musk is a prominent Trump/MAGA supporter, and Trump has threatened to annex Greenland by force. SpaceX is part of Trump's Golden Dome project, and one of the reasons that Trump wants Greenland is to site ICBM detection and interceptor systems.

Good move.

Elon is rigging the stock market and getting index funds to invest in companies that are over-valued and thus not stable.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sYA-z0Y8WRQ

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324097

American gov is gonna invade Greenland for sure for not cooperating with american conmen

I've recently been thinking about pulling my money from all of the US funds that I currently have. I really don't want my investments to be in SpaceX, OpenAI or Anthropic.

I mean it isn't like it was automatically included.

I am waiting to see if the same outrage will be in place when Anthropic and OpenAI go public. This surely isn't just a dislike of a certain individual, is it?

hope my Danish pension fund PFA doesn't do the same

Oh this duplicate post again. SpaceX stock may as well be bonds on space flight. I'd buy them at a loss.

I don’t think this is politically motivated but posting this on HN (and the 2nd time reaching the front page) sure is

The criticism seems politically motivated. Considering what happened to Blue Origin, SpaceX's success is commendable. Although I agree $1.8T seems crazy.

If you do not like Elon, you can simply move your assets to a direct indexing fund, there are plenty of them at reasonable cost, including from the large brokerages.

If you believe SpaceX is overvalued or do not like the way it is being handled by the big index funds, again, use direct indexing.

akademikerpension is pretty decent fund, it is about 50/50 asset allocation, losing out by only .9% per year compare to a US equity/bond portfolio. Better than many active funds:

https://www.finanshus.dk/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Pensions... https://testfol.io/?s=h8azNZvMICk

You do not like the valuation ? What should a company that launches 98% of the world's non government tonnage to space (80% if you include the Chinese government) be valued at ? The only company that has figured out how to very reliably launch at a sustained and rapid pace ? Pioneered and is perfecting rocket reuseability ? The only thing we can can say with a degree of certainty is that $2T is either very overvalued or very undervalued. If you believe that space will become a huge part of our economy in the future, and believe that SpaceX will play a significant role, $2T is cheap. Dirt cheap. The only way to prosper is to be bold.

For all those who come here to say that they do not like Elon or that the valuation is ridiculous, or that SpaceX will not succeed, that is perfectly fine - you are just a few clicks away from making it happen. Sell your assets and buy a direct indexing product, simply buy the stocks you want, buy ex-US, or any other number of options you can do on your phone with a few clicks. Less clicks than it takes to virtue signal on this forum.