Retail and Wall Street are underwater on SpaceX — but not going down without a fight
Get the Finance newsletter
Daily finance — markets, central banks, M&A, the prints that move money. Free.
- SpaceX shares fell 5.5% on Friday to a low of $122.12, putting the stock roughly 9% below its $135 IPO price and down 44% from its intraday high of $225.64, per the article
- The Nasdaq-100 is down 6% from its SpaceX-era peak, when the index sat less than 1% off a record high, framing SpaceX's drop against broader tech weakness
- SpaceX options saw $350 million in premium change hands Friday — with $290 million tied to puts and seven of the top 10 contracts by volume being puts, per SpotGamma
- Despite the bearish tilt, bullish positioning persisted — over half of total put premiums were sold, and nine of the top 10 trades by volume were bullish, per SpotGamma and Cboe LiveVol
- Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs raised an additional $11 billion in SpaceX equity after the stock's strong post-IPO start, and TheoTrade's Don Kaufman said he was "surprised the banks that led this aren't selling off more"
- One notable trade bought $2.6 million worth of 140-strike puts expiring that day while selling the same number of 135 strikes against it, lowering the trade's cost by $1.6 million
- Kaufman said he's been "selling way out-of-the-money puts" and would "buy it all day long at $100," arguing the valuation would still exceed a trillion dollars
Why it matters: At a roughly $1.6 trillion market cap, SpaceX's 44% drawdown from its high shows the year's most-anticipated IPO couldn't escape the broader Nasdaq's 6% slide. The $290 million in put premiums vs. $60 million in call premiums signals heavy hedging demand from a market that clearly isn't convinced the floor is in — yet the fact that underwriters like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs committed an extra $11 billion post-IPO means the institutional bid remains the swing factor.
