For SpaceX (SPCX), which came public in a storm of enthusiasm just five weeks ago, the $135 mark means everything.
With the stock dripping below that mark this week, America’s heroic IPO is falling like a rocket returning to earth.
More Yield, Less Trap: Sign up free to get Barchart’s daily Dividend Investor newsletter straight to your inbox.
www.barchart.com The initial public offering market was supposed to find its ultimate savior in SpaecX. When Elon Musk aggressively tore up the traditional Wall Street playbook and fixed the company’s landmark IPO price at exactly $135 per share, it was designed to be a historic victory lap. Raising a record-shattering $75 billion at an astronomical $1.75 trillion valuation, the offering was pitched to investors of all types as an elite, dual-threat bet on satellite dominance and space-based AI infrastructure. I cannot ever recall an IPO that had social media ads promoting it before an official filing.
Now, just weeks into public trading, that $135 price tag is looking less like a launchpad and more like a psychological ceiling.
After staging a brief initial pop and peaking at $225 shortly after its debut, the stock has relentlessly drifted right back down, closing Wednesday a clean $90 under that all-time high.
www.barchart.com The problem with $135 isn’t a failure of rocket telemetry or a slowdown in Starlink subscriptions. The problem is the staggering valuation multiple built into that specific dollar figure.
At $135 a share, SpaceX trades at a whopping 94x times its trailing price-revenue ratio. To be clear, this is a late-cycle tech tape, where corporate spending shifts are suddenly inducing massive air pockets — as we just witnessed firsthand with International Business Machine’s (IBM) historic collapse — Wall Street portfolio managers are showing more signs daily that they’re too shy to hold assets priced for perfection. The appetite for risk is shrinking.
Furthermore, because early index inclusion rules forced automated Nasdaq index funds to programmatically buy billions of dollars of the float right after the debut, that initial demand is completely exhausted. This decline in SPCX stock is despite that artificial temporary demand.
With no new passive buying waves on the horizon, and lockup periods ending later this summer, $135 has become a big time challenge for SPCX bulls. If the stock breaks cleanly below this original IPO floor, it could prompt an avalanche of retail stop-loss liquidations.
However, this being Wall Street and the ETF market in 2026, if you want to try to launch some profits when SPCX heads toward splashdown, there are some new choices.
www.barchart.com Above you see a couple of them. Remember, these move not at the speed of light, but at 2x the reverse speed of SPCX, on a daily basis. That means a strong bounce in the underlying SPCX stock can blow these out quickly. They are trading tools.
But in a market where an IPO can deliver this much intensity of demand, only to go “poof” within a month, inverse ETFs of all types carry a strong message. As I see it, if the market is going to be this nuts, we might as well have some ways to profit when the hype fades.
Rob Isbitts is a semi-retired CIO, former fiduciary investment advisor, and Barchart columnist. Check out his other work at ETFYourself.com (featuring the Fresh Charts weekly trading post), and ROAR.PiTrade.com, helping investors to better-manage their own portfolios.
On the date of publication, Rob Isbitts did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.
More news from Barchart
SpaceX’s Magic Number Is $135. Here’s How to Profit Now as SPCX Stock Breaks Below It. The Nasdaq-100 Squeeze is On. Here Are the Technical Signals to Watch Now. Here’s the ‘Baby Buffett’ Investing Story I Meant to Write Before BlackRock Distracted Me. Wall Street Bankers Promised Us Life-Changing IPOs. What We Got Instead Was Wealth Destruction.