April 30 (Reuters) – S&P Dow Jones Indices said on Thursday it has kicked off a consultation that could result in major changes to rules governing the entry of companies into its indexes such as the S&P 500.
As high-profile names such as Elon Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX and AI heavyweights Anthropic and OpenAI prepare to go public, index operators are racing to address the long waiting time for newly listed large-cap companies to join flagship equity benchmarks.
Here are some details:
• S&P DJI is considering reducing the time a company needs to be public before being eligible for index inclusion to six months from 12 months.
• It is also mulling excluding the profitability requirements for large-cap companies.
• “These megacap companies may pose unique challenges for index methodologies within the relevant index families, which were originally designed for more conventional listing profiles,” S&P DJI said.
• Exchange heavyweight Nasdaq last month unveiled a new set of rules to speed up the entry of newly listed large-cap companies to its flagship equity benchmark Nasdaq-100.
• Other indexes such as the FTSE Russell are also racing to overhaul the rules governing their benchmark indexes.
• S&P’s market consultation is open until May 28, with potential changes, if adopted, likely to be tentatively implemented on June 8.
(Reporting by Arasu Kannagi Basil in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)
