Warner Bros. shares will be removed from the Nasdaq 100 and the S&P 500. Who will take their place?

Next week, on October 6, Paramount Skydance is expected to complete its $81 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), according to Barron’s. The combined company will change its name to Skydance, Paramount CEO David Ellison announced; Warner Bros. Discovery shares will cease trading and be removed from major stock indices. The day before, on October 1, Nasdaq and S&P Dow Jones Indices announced which securities would take their place.

— Warner Bros. shares will replace those of the pharmaceutical company Moderna in the Nasdaq 100. They will be added to the index before the market opens on October 9.

Moderna’s inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 comes on the heels of an impressive surge in its stock price: by the close of trading on Thursday, the stock had risen nearly 540% since the start of the year. This success was driven by the release of positive trial results for an experimental cancer vaccine developed by Moderna and Merck, called intismeran autogen.

Moderna's stock is down slightly in trading on October 2. Wall Street is taking a cautious approach to the pharmaceutical company's stock: 16 analysts recommend holding it, six recommend buying it, and five recommend selling it.

— According to Barron’s, the cloud platform Twilio will take WBD’s place in the S&P 500 before the start of trading on October 6.

Twilio, with a market capitalization of about $45 billion, develops various technologies that enable companies to communicate with customers, according to MarketWatch. The company offers voice calls, chat, email, and other options. Twilio is positioning itself as a player in the artificial intelligence space at an intriguing moment: as more and more customers allow AI assistants to negotiate with customer service representatives on their behalf, the publication notes.

Twilio shares are down about 2% in Friday's trading. Since the start of the year, they have gained more than 106%. Nevertheless, Wall Street remains optimistic about the company’s prospects: 26 analysts recommend buying the stock, five recommend holding, and two recommend selling. “AI agents are capable of significantly increasing the volume of communications, creating additional demand,” wrote TD Cowen analyst Derrick Wood in a note to clients last week (as quoted by MarketWatch). He added that “when people delegate tasks to agents, the volume of calls and text messages may increase, as human attention and time are no longer limiting factors.” “Twilio’s technology can help manage this influx of customer interactions, and customers will likely need more control tools from Twilio to ensure that AI agents’ communications comply with regulatory requirements.”

Ahead of their inclusion in major indices, stocks typically rise in price: this is due to the popularity of passive funds, which are required to buy these securities to match the composition of their benchmark, notes Barron’s.

The spot held by the agrochemical conglomerate Corteva in the S&P 500, a broad U.S. stock index, was taken by its division—Vylor—which was spun off into a separate company. Corteva spun off this division into an independent business as part of a deal closed on Wednesday, September 30. Vylor focuses on agriculture, advanced breeding technologies, and genetics, and was already included in the index following the completion of the spin-off, notes MarketWatch.

Corteva itself spun off from DowDuPont in 2019. Now, due to the reduction in the scale of its business, its shares have been moved to the S&P MidCap 400 index, the publication explains. In September, Oppenheimer analyst Kristen Owen wrote that Corteva had recently “presented a compelling investment case as a standalone company, supported by the diversity and balance of its portfolio and pipeline of innovative developments.” According to her, spinning off the business into a separate entity “provides more freedom to work with other companies in the seed technology sector,” while maintaining close ties between Corteva and Vylor.

In trading on October 2, Vylor shares are up 1.52%, while Corteva shares, on the other hand, are down about 4%. Corteva shares have 17 “buy” recommendations on Wall Street and eight “hold” recommendations.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor