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Red Hat Is Now Part of the S&P 500
phantomfive writes "Red Hat has made it onto the S&P 500, an important measure of the stock market. It is replacing CIT, which is expected to go bankrupt after the government refused to bail them out. Red Hat is the first Linux company to make it on to the S&P 500. While this means little directly for the company, it is an indication of the importance Linux is taking on in the world."
Congratulations.
Could this be the Year of the Linux Stock Market?
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
There is a benefit to stockholders since being in the S&P 500 creates instant demand - it means that all the S&P 500 index funds need to buy your stock!
Inclusion in the S&P 500 could mean some index funds will have to acquire some shares. Inclusion in an index is usually seen as positive, and falling out of an index is seen as negative, when index funds have to sell.
Vaya con huevos, my darling.
Red Hat has made it onto the S&P 500, an important measure of the stock market.
First, the S&P members are selected by committee, not by merit alone. Companies are (usually) included because they have a high liquidity and are "representative" of their industry. Not that Red Hat being selected isn't good news, just understand they're not selecting it because of the "runaway success of Linux", but because Red Hat is representative of the overall health of this segment of the industry.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
2009 - the year of Linux on the stock market
Next milestone - the desktop!
"The" S&P 500 is a list of stocks published by Standard & Poor's, a division of McGraw-Hill.
I seem to recall that NYSE does. Then again, I'm old.
NYSE, AMEX, or NASDAQ might, but "The S&P 500" can't (except in the sense of "do the companies in the S&P 500 use Linux," in which case the answer is obviously "yes, some do").
Advice: on VPS providers
"Red Hat .. bully customers just as well as other non-Linux open source companies, so good for them"
Where, how, please provided verifiable citations.
Congrats on Red Hat reaching the big league. I've got a couple of mates who work for Red Hat, and they say business is booming in the downturn, because they're picking up a lot of business from people looking to save money through Red Hat's Open Source-plus-support way of doing things. I wish Red Hat luck.
Sadly, this doesn't seem to have been the case with CIT, whose criminally incompetent management decided that letting the Government bail them out, was a better business plan than running their business as a going concern.
Too bad Anglo-American culture is far too tolerant of failure, particularly in the business world. The fat cats need to be taken down a few pegs -- and serious repercussions for failure are needed.
The big problem with the government bailouts on both sides of the pond, is that the captains of industry are scum, by and large; and will find a way to be "too big to fail", and profit by bludging off people who pay their taxes and do the right thing. Thankfully, the chaps in charge in the US have let CIT fail. After all, private business are full of people who preach the benefits of free markets in the good times. The Obama administration are wise enough to allow them to be destroyed by the remorseless logic of the free market when they are too weak to survive.
A lot of mutual funds/index funds/etc. will now be buying and holding Red Hat stock, as well as other large institutional investors (i.e. large state pension funds/etc.). Same mentality as "no one ever got fired for buying IBM computers", it's not like fund managers are much good at this (witness the melt down in almost every mutual fund/hedge fund), most of them just follow the herd.
funny, my clients love Red Hat, most of them transitioned from Sun and it wasn't Red Hat who was the bully
How many of the companies you own stock in trade with/do business in red china (or Viet Nam for that matter)? Or put it another way, how many *don't*?
I believe by "commies" he was referring to actual communists. If there are any actual communists left in China these days, they're probably repressed by the Chinese government for advocating radical philosophies fundamentally opposed to that of the party. :p
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Look, see, It's sorta like this. Say I was to buy you a beer. And that beer would be free. To you. And then you could drink it. And get drunk, I suppose. And then, if I was drinking my beer that I had to pay for then I'd be drunk as well eventually, and then, well...
I just forgot what I was going on about, but I really could use a beer right now.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Back in the early days of RedHat, they used to be located in a non-descript office park in the Raleigh-Durham area. I remember working for an obscure Sales Automation company and our office was located upstairs, where if you turned to the left you'd head into our office and if you turned right you'd enter the small RedHat Software offices. I used to pop my head in occasionally to this company that was making this stuff called "Linux", and even asked for help when I was secretly setting up a Linux server at my company's office to replace our Windows NT 3.51 server.
If I had only turned right when heading into work instead of turning left when walking up those stairs, I'd today be a millionaire. :(
Don't sweat it too much. Red Hat's product line is the Red Hat Network, not linux. Microsoft could buy up Red Hat and destroy their support business but they would simply be replaced by another support vendor, either an up start or an existing vendor, i.e. Oracle, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Novell, etc.