I’ll be honest: I caught more than a little heat for calling the Nasdaq-100 the Worst Index In The World, and I’m not just talking about my boss Jim Wiandt’s riposte in a blog called Why Dave Nadig Is An Idiot. (Thanks Jim; I’m sure that’ll roll off the top of Google any day now.)

No, most of the heat came in the form of notes from investors. There were two varieties:

1) You’re an idiot, because there are hundreds of billions of dollars tied to the “NDX,” and that can’t all be dumb money.

2) You’re an idiot, because as bad as the Nasdaq-100 is, the Dow—and maybe even the fiat-driven S&P 500—is worse.

Maybe both camps are right, but I do stand behind my assertion that indexes driven by caprice are bad for markets and bad for investors. If you have any doubts, pull up a lawn chair and watch the sun set on the old NDX today at the close. For those of you keeping score, here’s what has to happen by the end of the day in the NDX:

Those are the weight shifts of any meaningful size. How much this actually matters in terms of the performance of these stocks depends on a few things.

First off, there’s no hidden information here. If you believe in perfectly efficient markets, you would expect all of this to be priced in. Of course, Apple is now making more money and is larger than Microsoft in every measurement—sales, revenue, profits, market cap and ego—and the stock is still flirting with the $350-$360 range that’s defined its all-time highs. So it’s not like there’s been much negative priced in. The stock’s actually ramped up today, on the back of a good earnings announcement.

But what if it’s not priced in? What if the market is somehow “surprised” by the massive market-on-close activity? The impact would then depend on how much money you believe is actually going to mechanically rebalance along these lines.

At the low end of that estimate is about $50 billion. As of the close, I can account for just over $43 billion in global listed funds tracking the NDX. The PowerShares QQQ Trust (NasdaqGM: QQQ) makes up just over half of that, whereas other listed products account for the rest. If you assume I missed some products in my analysis and add in a bit of institutional money, you can round it to $50 billion.

To see what that means, I looked at the dollars to trade, the number of days’ volume that represents, how much of each stock’s market cap that is and a quick pass through an institutional market impact model—a kind of worst- case scenario.

Here’s the impact of that $50 billion rebalance today:

Honestly, this is no big deal. Stocks like these can absorb a double-volume day with just a bit of market move. The implied market-cap shift, all else being equal, is how much you’d expect the stock to move.

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