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Teslas market value soars to $500bn ahead of S&P 500 debut

Teslas market value has surged over $500bn after a fresh wave of buying ahead of the electric carmakers debut on the blue-chip S&P 500 stock index next month.

Shares in the company founded by Elon Musk have risen more than six-fold this year, hitting $555 on Tuesday. S&P Dow Jones Indices last week said it would include the group on the US stocks benchmark, which has stoked the price rise as institutions and index-tracking funds adding the shares. The stock has jumped a third in the past eight days.

Mr. Musks net worth has climbed in tandem with the stock, swelling by$100bn since the end of last year to $127.9bn, according to Bloomberg data.

Tesla shares have been one of the remarkable stories of 2020, said David Kostin, Goldman Sachs chief US equity strategist in a research note, adding investors had been focused on its hefty rise in market capitalisation this year.

Teslas gains came amid a broad rally in global equities that propelled theDow Jones Industrial Average to 30,000 for the first time. The rise has been driven by optimism about the development of coronavirus vaccines and Donald Trump allowing the formal transfer of power to Joe Biden to begin.

Teslas debut on the S&P 500 next month will be the biggest on record, instantly making the company one of the largest weights on the index.

A boom in passive investing in which funds seek to reflect the performance of an index has magnified the effect the move will have on the broader market, traders said.

Passive funds with $4.59tn in assets, such as those run by Vanguard and Fidelity, track the S&P 500, according to data compiled by Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices. Teslas inclusion on the index would create some $51bn of demand for shares from these investment vehicles, he said.

Another $6.7tn in actively managed funds use the S&P 500 as their benchmark. Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimated that of the 189 large-cap funds they tracked, 157 with $500bn of total assets did not own Tesla at the start of the fourth quarter.

Teslas sheer size means the normally pedestrian index rebalancing process has become more complicated. Almost $400bn of Tesla shares are available for trading, dwarfing shares in Berkshire Hathaway and Facebook when they were added to the index, at $127bn and $90bn respectively, according to S&PDow Jones Indices.

Tesla is the largest company we have considered for inclusion in the S&P500, said Mr Silverblatt. The carmaker qualified for inclusion in July after it announced its fourth consecutive quarter of profits.

Trading houses, market makers, and fund managers said they were expecting extraordinary volumes on December 18, the last trading day before Teslaformally joins the S&P 500. The date is typically busy for markets even without the Tesla addition since it is one of the last days for making big trades before markets slow down ahead of the winter holidays.

S&P is debating how to add Tesla to the index, given that the stocks large weighting will also reduce the influence of the other 504 constituents. It may end up adding Tesla in two steps to slow down the process, it has said.

Market makers, which hold inventories of stocks in order to facilitate trading, are also pondering when to add to their holdings of Tesla shares as they balance expectations that the stock will be highly volatile against what they see as assured demand. For big trading houses and brokers, it means large trading gains or losses are on the line.

There is a long lag between [the] announcement and December 18, said Chris Johnson, head of ETF markets at Charles Schwab, referring to S&Psdecision last week to add Tesla to the index. Thats a long time to try to preposition on a very volatile stock like this.

Complicating matters for market makers and passive fund managers is how other investors are getting ahead of the impending inclusion, which has pushed the stock price higher. Tesla is up 540 percent this year. For market makers, hedging the risk of any decline in the carmakers price before its inclusion in the S&P 500 next month may prove tricky, traders said.

The composition of leading equity benchmarks has become increasingly important in the past decade as investors have ploughed ever greater sums into passive funds. When companies are added or removed from a benchmark, exchange traded funds adjust their holdings in tandem, seeking to mirror the index as closely as possible at the lowest cost possible. They are judged on that basis by a metric known as tracking error and minimizing itis a top priority of passive fund managers.

As an index provider were surgically focused on tracking error, said LukeOliver, head of index investing in the Americas at DWS, adding, it will be all hands on deck for the entire market ecosystem around this.

Typically when a stock is added to an index like the S&P 500, passive funds seek to buy as many shares as they can at the close of trading on the day before the addition to avoid tracking error. Market makers will often agree to guaranteed end-of-day trades. But Teslas size has complicated that plan. Some money managers are now debating buying Tesla stock before the 4pmNew York close or on the following trading day, even though it could increase their tracking error.

Greg Sutton, head of equity portfolio trading at Citadel Securities, said the possibility of a two-step addition could address fears of excess impact inTesla as well as in some of the underlying S&P constituents.

ETF providers had until last week to give feedback to S&P on the move, with a decision from the index provider on how to proceed expected by November 30. Whether it was split or done in a single shot, they said they did not expect any hiccups, regardless of what could shape up as a hectic close to the trading day.

This is the largest trade for the S&P 500, but not the largest trade we have handled as a firm, said Matthew Bartolini, head of SPDR Americas Research at SSGA.

Tesla's market value surges to half-a-trillion dollars $bn 300 200 100 Q1 20 Q2 20 Q3 20 Q4 20 Tesla exceeds past S&P 500 entrants Size of major S&P additions since 1999 Float mkt cap ($bn) AOL Yahoo Qwest Comm JDS Uniphase Goldman Sachs UPS Google Berkshire Hathaway Facebook Tesla 50 100 150 200 250 300 Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices OFT Tesla's market value surges to half-a-trillion dollars $bn 300 200 100 Q1 20 Q2 20 Q3 20 Q4 20 Tesla exceeds past S&P 500 entrants Size of major S&P additions since 1999 Float mkt cap ($bn) AOL Yahoo Qwest Comm JDS Uniphase Goldman Sachs UPS Google Berkshire Hathaway Facebook Tesla 50 100 150 200 250 300 Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices OFT