QUICK SUMMARY: The SpaceX stock dip has now held below the $135 IPO price for eight consecutive sessions. Retail investors received 30 percent of the offering, three times the typical IPO allocation, and are sitting on a broken original thesis. Fifteen-year IPO data shows the average first-year decline from the first-day close is 52 percent. SpaceX reports first public earnings Aug. 4.
I bought exactly enough SpaceX at $147 to feel it. Not enough to hurt. Enough that I checked the chart at 9:30 a.m. ET every morning for two weeks. If you are reading this, I already know which side of the trade you are on.
The SpaceX stock dip has now sat below its $135 IPO price for eight consecutive sessions. Anyone who fought for allocation at the IPO price is watching their brokerage account tell them the trade was wrong. Anyone who bought at the $225.64 post-IPO peak in June is down roughly 50 percent. Every second Motley Fool piece running this week is telling you the SpaceX stock dip is a buying opportunity.
The 15-year dataset disagrees. I am going to walk you through what the data actually says and what a disciplined move looks like from here.
What Actually Happened in Six Weeks
SpaceX went public Jun. 12 at a $135 IPO price and opened at $150. Days later it peaked at $225.64. Market cap: roughly $2.68 trillion. Then the rocket came back down.
On Jul. 16, Starship aborted its 13th test flight at the last second before liftoff, erasing about $100 billion in market value on the day. Short sellers piled in aggressively. Bearish bets grew from about 40 million shares three weeks ago to roughly 185 million shares now. That is 29 percent of the tradable float and about $25 billion of positioning, according to S3 Partners data reported by CNBC.
At today’s close near $113, SpaceX has lost roughly $1.16 trillion in market cap from its June peak. It has sat below the $135 IPO price for eight straight sessions. The stock is pacing for its tenth negative session in twelve.
Retail owns about 30 percent of the outstanding float. Elon Musk deliberately structured the offering that way. That was three times the typical retail allocation in a large IPO, and it was pitched as democratizing the biggest offering in history. It also concentrated selling pressure in the hands of people who cannot absorb it. That is the setup we are working with.
The 15-Year Pattern That Says This Isn’t the Bottom
Creative Planning ran the numbers on the last 15 years of IPOs. The average one-year decline from the first-day closing price is 52 percent. Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi published the chart Monday morning.
SpaceX is 45 days into that clock and already down about 31 percent from its first-day close. That is not an anomaly. That is the pattern running on schedule.
Two structural factors make SpaceX’s version of the pattern potentially deeper, not shallower.
- First, retail concentration. When 30 percent of the float is held by people whose maximum position size is one purchase decision away from being reversed, selling pressure runs deeper than a typical institutional book. Institutions have mandates. Retail has feelings.
- Second, the lockup schedule. Only about 5 percent of SpaceX’s shares are currently free to trade. Most of the remaining float unlocks in staged waves starting in August. That is a supply overhang stacked on top of an earnings overhang. Anyone modeling the position needs to price both.
The current selling pressure is normal for a hyped IPO. The lockup expiry that begins in August is the risk most retail investors are not yet pricing in.
Why Buying the Dip Today Fails Every Discipline Test
I want to walk through the argument for buying the dip, because it looks strong on the surface, and then show you why it collapses on inspection.
The buy-the-dip argument goes like this: you already believed SpaceX at $135. It is now $113. That is cheaper than your original conviction. Adding lowers your cost basis. Data on general equity markets says buying consistently, even at all-time highs, outperforms waiting for dips roughly 70 percent of the time. Therefore add.
Here is where that logic breaks.
The data supporting consistent buying comes from an equity market with public earnings histories, decades of financial statements, and calculable intrinsic value ranges. SpaceX has none of that yet. Its first public earnings arrive Aug. 4. Its first guidance arrives Aug. 6. Until then, everything the market is doing to this stock is happening in an information vacuum.
There is no calculable safety margin on a company that has never publicly reported. There is a story. Stories are worth participating in with money you can lose. They are not investments in the technical sense.
Try this exercise. Before you add to any position, write down the failure case. Try it with SpaceX at $113. If you cannot articulate why the stock might trade at $80 by Christmas, you do not understand the position well enough to add to it. The financials required to model that failure case do not exist yet.
Miller Tabak’s chief market strategist Matthew Maley put it to Reuters directly: the stock is trading on “fluff, speculation, and froth, and not on real fundamentals.” That is not a bearish call on SpaceX the company. That is a technical description of the market’s current information state.
Adding to a position on story alone is speculation. It becomes investing when the numbers arrive.
The Retail Pain That Confirms the Setup
A Reddit user on r/wallstreetbets summed up the retail experience last week: “So my Roth IRA is down 25 percent, I went and made a few options trades in Robinhood that also went the other way.” They had bought SpaceX call options at $160 and $145 and watched them evaporate.
That is the trade retail is running, on aggregate. Options on IPO names inside tax-advantaged accounts. Retirement money used for FOMO exposure to a company that has never publicly reported. The r/wallstreetbets community has a long history of endorsing aggressive trades, and even they were shaking their heads on this one.
I have been the guy running that trade. I lost my second brokerage account learning that a “high-conviction” position on a hyped name is usually just a story you told yourself well. The market did not care about my story. It cared about the print.
If your Roth is down 25 percent because of SpaceX, do not add to fix it. Adding to fix a losing position is how the position becomes the entire account.
The Aug. 4 Reset
SpaceX reports first public earnings on Aug. 4. Guidance drops Aug. 6. That week is when the trade becomes possible to analyze instead of guess. Here is the specific list of numbers to watch when the report lands.
Q2 revenue against the $22 to $24 billion 2026 annual pace suggested by pre-IPO reporting. If the pace is off, the story bends. Free cash flow trajectory: SpaceX is losing billions per quarter, and the rate of loss matters more than the absolute number. The xAI compute unit economics: the AI infrastructure business SpaceX bought in February rents compute to Google, Anthropic, and Reflection, with the Pentagon reportedly in talks. Contract renewal rates and pricing are the whole game there. Starlink subscriber growth, which is the recurring revenue anchor for the entire structure. And Starship program spending: aborts cost money, retries cost more.
If Aug. 4 confirms the story and Aug. 6 guidance holds the pace, the argument for the position changes materially. If the numbers miss consensus meaningfully, the argument for waiting compounds. Either way, the decision moves from speculation to analysis.
Seven days. That is what disciplined investors are being asked to wait.
One Book That Would Have Saved Me the Second Account
One of the most useful books I have ever read on this exact pattern is John Kenneth Galbraith’s A Short History of Financial Euphoria. It runs about 100 pages. It is under $10. It walks the reader from Dutch tulip mania in the 1630s through Black Monday in 1987, and it lays out the pattern every hype cycle follows. New financial product, mass retail participation, sharp collapse when reality catches the price, followed by short financial memory and the cycle restarting.
If SpaceX has been doing things you feel it “shouldn’t” be doing, this book will explain why what it is doing is completely normal.
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The Three Positions That Actually Make Sense Right Now
I am going to commit to a verdict here, because “it depends on your risk tolerance” is a disclaimer, not analysis.
- If you do not own SpaceX, wait. Aug. 4 costs you nothing except the discomfort of watching FOMO. The information advantage of waiting seven days for actual financials is enormous. That is not being late. That is being disciplined.
- If you own SpaceX at $135 or below, hold. Do not add. Reassess against Aug. 4 earnings and Aug. 6 guidance. Size the position as a percentage of your net worth right now. If the position is above 5 percent, resize before any decision about adding, ever.
- If you own SpaceX at $180 or above, hold. Do not average down. Do not tell yourself the recovery is inevitable, because it might not be. Averaging down on a broken thesis is how a manageable loss becomes a career loss. The disciplined move is to leave the position at its current weighting, wait for Aug. 4, and accept that some trades were mistakes that need to be paid for, not fixed.
Two bull cases could change all of this before Aug. 4. The 29 percent short float creates real squeeze risk if sentiment shifts fast. ARK bought $21.3 million of SpaceX as it fell 45 percent from the peak, a specific vote for the long-duration story. Neither is investable ahead of the print. Both are watchable.
The One Thing to Remember
The SpaceX stock dip is not yet a buy. Aug. 4 will say whether it ever becomes one. If you own the position, hold and resize. If you do not own it, wait. Discipline is the only edge retail actually has over institutions. For an example of how retail conviction plus bad timing plays out in a different setup, our coverage of the Wendy’s stock short squeeze is worth reading before the print.
For educational purposes only. Not financial advice.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did SpaceX fall so hard from its IPO peak?
Three things stacked. Starship aborted its 13th test flight on Jul. 16, erasing about $100 billion in market cap on the day. Short sellers piled in, growing bearish bets from about 40 million to roughly 185 million shares, per S3 Partners. And retail investors who fought for allocations at $135 started taking profits as the stock rocketed to $226, then kept selling as it fell. The move is normal post-IPO digestion combined with execution risk.
When does the SpaceX lockup expiry begin?
Approximately 5 percent of SpaceX shares are currently free to trade. Most of the remaining float unlocks in staged waves starting in August. That schedule is the specific near-term supply risk on top of earnings uncertainty. Anyone underwriting the position needs to model additional supply hitting the market over the coming months, not just the earnings print.
What is Cathie Wood’s ARK doing with SpaceX?
ARK bought approximately $21.3 million of SpaceX stock as shares fell 45 percent from their record high. That is a vote for the long-duration story. Wall Street’s median analyst price target is $243.81, roughly 111 percent above the current close, but the analyst range is unusually wide. Institutional buyers are split, not aligned.
Should I buy SpaceX through ETFs instead of directly?
Multiple ETFs are loading up on SpaceX exposure, including ARK funds and space-sector wrappers. ETF ownership adds diversification but dilutes the trade. You get SpaceX plus 20 to 30 other names. If you are specifically betting on the SpaceX story, direct ownership is cleaner. If you are worried about single-stock concentration on an IPO with 45 days of trading history, the ETF wrapper mutes the volatility.
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