It started off with a bang: SpaceX IPOed on June 12 with an opening price of $150 on their first day of trade, well above the offering price of $135, and within two days, enterprising traders were ravenously bidding up 380 calls (expiring in just days) in hopes of sending the stock soaring in hopes of orchestrating a gamma squeeze. They are going for it https://t.co/tT4cJns9nv pic.twitter.com/P6NTzq4tx2
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 16, 2026In a note out this morning, Canaccord described the "new level of optimism" that accompanied the SpaceX IPO as follows:SPCX dynamics indicate new level of frenzy: prior to this historic IPO, we felt AI optimism was robust and certainly at times overdone, but largely funded by rational (if not exuberant) institutions including large, well capitalized public companies and PE investors. In our view, SPCX has marked a new chapter in this saga, ushering in a greater level of retail involvement and driving the stock into the top 6 market cap companies in the world, and in its first week of trading, adding the equivalent of ~1/2 the value of META, with a market value much greater than sister company TSLA despite generating only ~20% of its revenue base. Despite the company name, revenues are skewed towards connectivity (Starlink contributing $11.39 billion), with launch services generating only $4.1 billion (AI compute was $3.2 billion in 2025). Vanda Track was even more effusive, and in a retrospective published earlier on Monday wrote that "SpaceX's first week of trading was one for the record books. Retail investors bought a net $405mn of SPCX during its first 5 trading sessions, comfortably the strongest retail IPO debut in recent history. Retail buying was extreme during the first few sessions before moderating later in the week. The flow profile increasingly resembles a retail investor that is building long-term positions rather than chasing a short-term meme stock."The scale of retail buying in SPCX last week becomes even more remarkable when put into context. Retail investors bought more SPCX last week than they bought across all other Mag 7 stocks combined (total activity of the last 5 days in NVDA, MSFT, AMZN, META, GOOGL and GOOG was $278mn combined). They also bought more SpaceX than the combined retail buying of SPY & QQQ over the past week ($352mn). For a stock that only started trading last week, SpaceX is already competing with the market's biggest stocks and ETFs for retail capital.
