Dan Bortolotti

And if it's going to do that, then it needs to make some sort of accommodation for IPOs, even if historically their returns have been

lagging.

Somebody in the community posted a funny meme that said, if you're going to buy the haystack, you need to buy all of the hay.

And that's a reference, of course, to Bogle's comment that instead of looking for the needle in the haystack, just buy the haystack.

I think it's important

for us to just be careful before we go down the rabbit hole that anytime you deviate from the basic premise that an index fund is designed to replicate the entire market, you got to be really careful about imposing rules that deviate from that

fundamental philosophy.

And it's not to say that there can't be any rules.

All of the major indexes impose some rules for specific reasons, whether it's float or length of time being listed publicly, liquidity, all of those things.

And those are done for reasons to protect investors, but they're not done because they think certain companies will outperform other companies, which is just the forecast.

I think it's just really important to keep that in mind as we go forward.

In the old days, I guess when indexes were nothing but benchmarks...

then those considerations were less important.

But now that indexes are not just benchmarks for other funds or other managers, they are actually investment strategies as well, then they do need to be investable for all of those reasons.

Those rules are there for good reasons, but as you said, Ben, they're not there because the index providers think that they will enhance returns.

It's like the tail wagging the dog.

The index fund is created to mirror the market or represent the market, but the market is...

evolving to squeeze itself into the index fund.

So the idea here is that this is probably not an enormous obstacle for moderately sized IPOs.

The size of them relative to the index fund, the share that it takes in the index is likely to be so small