How does capital get allocated to the public stock markets? ?Through the following means:

• Initial Public Offerings [IPOs]
• Follow-on offerings of stock (including PIPEs, etc.)
• Employees who give up wage income?in exchange for stock, or contingent stock (options)
• Through rights offerings
• Company-issued warrants and convertible preferred stock, bonds, and bank debt (rare)
• Receiving equity in exchange for other claims in bankruptcy
• Issuing stock to pay for the purchase of a private company
• And other less common ways, such as promoted stocks giving cheap shares to vendors to pay for goods or services rendered. ?(spit, spit)

How does capital get allocated away from?the public stock markets? ?Through the following means:

• Companies getting acquired with payment fully or partially in?cash. ?(including going private)
• Buybacks, including tender offers
• Dividends
• Buying for cash?company-issued warrants and convertible preferred stock, bonds, and bank debt
• Going dark transactions are arguable — the company is still public, but no longer has to publish data publicly.

I’m sure there are more for each of the above categories, but I think I got the big ones. ?But note what largely does not matter:

• The stock price going up or down, and
• who owns the stock

Now, I have previously commented on how the stock price does have an effect on the actual business of the company, even if the effects are of the second order:

• The Stock Price Matters, Regardless, and
• Why Great CEOs Look at their Stock Price Every Now and Then

My initial main point is this: capital allocation to?public companies does not in any large way depend on what happens in secondary market stock trading, but on what happens in the primary market, where shares are traded for cash or something else in place of cash. ?When that happens, businessmen make decisions as to whether the cash is worth giving up in exchange for the new shares, or shares getting retired in exchange for cash.

In the secondary market, companies do not directly get any additional capital from?all the trading that goes on. ?Also, in the long run, stocks don’t care who owns them. ?The prices of the stocks will eventually reflect the value of the underlying claims on the business, with a lot of noise in the process.

My second main point is this: as a result, indexing, or any other secondary market investment management strategy does not affect capital allocation much at all. ?Companies going into an?index for the first time typically have been public for some time, and do not issue new shares as a direct consequence of going into the index. ?The price may jump, but that does not affect capital allocation unless the company does decide to issue new shares to take advantage of captive index buyers who can’t sell, which doesn’t happen often.

The same is true in reverse for companies that get kicked out of an index: they?do not buy back?and retire shares as a direct consequence of going into the index. ?They may buy back shares when the price falls, but not because there aren’t indexers in the stock anymore.

So why did I write about this this evening? ?I get an email each week from Evergreen Gavekal, and generally, I recommend it. ?Generally it is pretty erudite, so if you want to get it, email them and ask for it.

In their most recent email, Charles Gave (a genuinely bright guy that I usually agree with) argues that indexing is inherently socialist because you lose discipline in capital allocation, and allocate to companies in proportion to their market capitalization, which is inherently pro-momentum, and favors large companies that have few good opportunities to deploy capital.

I agree that indexing is slightly pro-momentum as a strategy, and maybe, that you can do better if you remove the biggest companies out of your portfolio. ?Where I don’t agree is that indexing changes capital allocation to companies all that much, because no cash gets allocated to or from companies as a result of being in an index. ?As a result, indexing is not an inherently socialistic strategy, as Gave states.

Rather, it is a free-market strategy, because no one is constrained to do it, and it shrinks the economic take of the fund management industry, which is good for outside passive minority investors. ?Let clever active managers earn their relatively high fees, but for most people who can’t identify those managers, let them index.

If indexing did lead to misallocation of capital, we would expect to see non-indexed assets?outperform indexed over the long haul. ?In general, we don’t see that, and so I would argue the indexing is beneficial to the investing public.

I write this as one who makes all of his money off of active value investing, so I have no interest in promoting indexing for its own sake. ?I just agree with Buffett that most people should index?unless they know a clever active manager.