The SpaceX IPO has come and gone. Now, the real fun begins. SPCX closed at $160.95, a 19.2% premium from its $135 IPO price. It hit $175.87 at its session highs.
The satellite sector, though, was walloped. Mr. Musk and his SpaceX cafeteria friends sucked up all the money that had been going to sector peers and proxies. Take a look at this carnage:
Huge day for traders that buy the rumor and sell the news. Tough scenes for the retail crowd that has been long on space.
The technical patterns on these names are mostly similar; peaks in May, pullbacks in June. They are also all still heavily shorted, and have worked off their overbought condition. Every name except one has a call skew in the options pits going back two weeks. Across the 50-day timeline, there’s not a single one. Seven of the 11 have a brokerage bunch that is bullish or at least neutral.
This isn’t the retail traders delight of early 2025, where it was a mostly undiscovered, heavily-shorted sector. The secret’s out, even if short sellers aren’t. That makes the next step forward for contrarian traders an important one; do you ride out the short squeeze potential and buy the dip? Or do you take your profits and move on to the next big vague thing (quantum computing, robotics, etc)?
Some individual whiparound thoughts:
Rocket Lab (RKLB): The 50-day moving average held! So did its 300% year-over-year level (shrugs.) That’s not nothin…
Iridium Communications (IRDM): Consolidation/bull flag pattern, anyone?
EchoStar (SATS) and Planet Labs (PL): both have broken below trendlines.
AST SpaceMobile (ASTS): Somehow, 4.8% from its 200-day moving average.
It all comes down to your belief in space, because right now, the money just ain’t there. If you believe that conceptually, the satellite and space market — as we just saw — is worth trillions, then load up on these dips.
If you’re chuckling at retail traders getting greedy and out over their skis, take a bow.
What Goes Up…
Last summer, I declared 2025 the year of the IPO (not really).
Excluding Special Purchase and Company (SPAC) volumes, traditional IPOs on the Nasdaq raised roughly $9 billion from 79 deals, while 15 IPOs on the NYSE raised about $7.8 billion. Last year during the same period, Nasdaq IPOs had raised about $6.1 billion, while shares worth $11.5 billion were sold from IPOs on the NYSE, according to data from Dealogic.
Now, nearly a year later, that table needs a facelift.
Medline (MDLN), Venture Global (VG), Klarna (KLAR), and Chyme Financial (CHYM) were all IPOs that debuted the latter half of 2025. Cerebras Systems (CRBS) was the largest IPO of 2026 until SpaceX.
The average return of those 13 names is 20.8%. Six positive returns, seven negative.
The biggest gainers from that table, CoreWeave (CRWV) and Circle Internet Group (CRCL), are sharply lower year-over-year ( 30.6% & 25.7%, respectively). In fact, eight of the 13 are in the red over the last 12 months.
Another similarity? The entire list has at least 4% of the stock’s total available float sold short.
I’m really hesitant to buy into the hype machine buzz of the space sector. Longtime skeptics of those insane valuations are looking at what SpaceX did to its sector and going:
But. Monitor the situation. AST SpaceMobile has a Bluebird launch coming up on June 17. The rest of the space sector isn’t going to suddenly pack it up and go home.
Beyond the satellite sector, these rather lackluster IPO returns should pour cold water on investors frothing over the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs looming. And its not just me being a hater, take it from Josh below:
