bcressey

Disclosure: I work for Amazon. I’m also the principal engineer for Bottlerocket.

FIPS support continues to be the top customer ask by a wide margin. Unfortunately the timing here is not kind for a new distro with no previous FIPS offering. New FIPS 140-2 certifications are no longer available, and new FIPS 140-3 certifications have to make it through a lengthy queue as the entire industry switches over.

If this were something the dev team could just power through, I assure you it would have happened by now. I apologize for giving the impression that it’s not important. It is, but that doesn’t help the timeline in this case.

Since many indexes are weighted by price, I find myself wondering if index fund investing has an element of "buy high, sell low" to it.

Only if you buy shares of the fund when they are high, and sell when they are low.

An index fund that buys a set of stocks in proportion to market price at one point in time will automatically capture the relative gains and losses within that set.

If Apple's share price doubles, then the market value of its shares that the fund owns will also double, and it will occupy a relatively greater percentage of the fund's portfolio. Companies with a flat or declining share price will account for a relatively lesser percentage over time.

Some buying and selling needs to happen, to accommodate new investors and to handle turnover within the target index, but the point of passive index funds is that you don't need trades to capture market performance.