I mean, I feel bad for people who have entered the stock market out of desperation because the ordinary economy won't lead to them having a sustainable life.
There's a severe lack of knowledge around investing. If you know where to look, it's clear that investing in an IPO generally isn't good on the short or mid term. And any financial reports for $SPCX should've raised red flags.
And then there's the large group of people who likely don't even know whether their 401k is involved or not.
People buying the IPO should know better, but I don't think this situation is very funny either.
I've heard some online day traders say that the real winners amongst them were the people buying another stock (private equity firms owning $SPCX) in anticipation of people buying the IPO. Who'd just sell the moment the company went public.
I think there's definitely a cohort of investors who are essentially gamblers. The ones who expect that their career will never be anything other than poorly compensated drudgery with an insufficient pension in their 70s, if at all. At that point, hard word and discipline will get you a smidgen less drudgery and an iota more pension. So why not "chuck it all on black" (i.e. bitcoin, or spacex, or whatever meme stock is being hyped in that telegram or instagram or whatever this week)? Also, a lot of young people have grown up seeing only a fairly insane bullrun by world, and particularly US, markets. I've lost count of the number of times I've read threads by people in their 20s planning an early retirement on the assumption of 8%-10% annual gains on their savings.
I think there's definitely a cohort of investors who are essentially gamblers.
Which is the minority, considering all the people just passively buying an ETF through their pension account, but they're the ones retail brokers make the most money on, so the services try to push that stuff really actively.
I use a broker which has no investment fees at all, because they're able to make a shit ton of money from people gambling on CFDs. I only use like two buttons in the app to deposit money into an index fund, but the rest of the interface is clearly catered toward gamblers: built-in social media for discussing stocks, a huge card with the change in your balance in the last 24h, "popular stocks" feed, etc. Another broker I've used literally had "trading competitions" in their app where you got a cash prize if you made more money from your investments in a day than the other participants. Never used Robinhood because I'm not in the US, but I know they straight up have sports betting in the app now.
And, well, wallstreetbets is also a thing.
I dont have any statistics, but with how aggressively it's pushed, I'd assume a lot of people start with safe investments and then slowly move towards stock gambling.
401k's are a political tool to allow businesses to wield greater political power. Before 401ks existed people were more friendly to exercising political power that was good for the nation but not great for investors in the stock market. Easiest way to neuter the political will behind the cigarettes trials or legal action against monopolization or other anti-competive business practices is to make it seem like it will affect people through their holdings in a 401k. The auto investing aspect isn't much more than a pyramid scheme, the return continues as long as large amounts of new money feeds into the system, if fewer people feed money into the market, valuations turns back to inflation and rational investment for liquidity movements entering or exiting the system. Likewise funds require rational investors to drive the stocks into meeting the requirements to be included in the fund, if that rational investment loses strength through too much passive investment or gambling driving the market, you get this situation with SpaceX. Once SpaceX becomes a factor in 401ks it's going to be much harder politically to let it fail.
The entirety of all retirement programs could be replaced by scaling Social Security (and minimum wage) properly with inflation and funding with uncapped taxes. Any seperate retirement savings can be built up post-tax...frankly I'm coming around to the idea that the concept of pre-tax or deferred taxes shouldn't exist at all.
This of course, would drastically sever the power employers have over their employees. Only second to severing healthcare from employment.
Pension funds have their downsides too. Companies sometimes underfund them or they can make dubious investments like in private equity firms. They also shut out people who don’t qualify because they change jobs too often.
Investing is gambling. We’re so far down the road of normalizing it that it’s an extreme thing to point that out. Personally I view that as a sickness of this society… it’s distasteful to me that so much of the modern world is structured around it, that people have to depend on it for their futures, that not participating is considered financial illiteracy. The whole economy is structured around a cultlike belief in endless growth, the purpose of a corporation is said to be maximizing shareholder returns. Perverse incentives everywhere.
Of course I have a portfolio too. I hate it but you have to play the game. I’ve got mouths to feed. I still think it’s good to be clear-eyed about what we’re doing. Not “investment involves risk” like the legal disclaimers in Robinhood ads say, but “investing is actually a form of gambling.” I feel like the kid pointing out that the emperor’s naked when I type that.
I essentially agree with your feeling. Our society is being designed in a way that gates financial prosperity behind specific knowledge, and in a way that makes it easy to be taken advantage of. (That’s always been true, but opting out of economic society is perhaps less realistic than it was 5,000 years ago.) Many people in developed countries actually are financially illiterate, but not because they don’t understand the stock market, more because they’re not numeric and can’t do basic math or read a chart. Better education would be valuable, but at a certain point we’re demanding too much. Optimizing for financial reasoning rewards a specific model of thought. That diminishes other forms of intuition and makes the human experience less fulfilling.
We probably shouldn’t be so reductive in our definitions, though. There’s a meaningful body of academic research on asset factors, exposure characteristics, and sequence of returns risk that substantially increases confidence in portfolios with careful asset allocations. There’s mathematics behind card games too, but the difference is that the probability of a positive alpha in investing is structurally higher than in an outright rigged system like a casino. The environments and outcomes are distinct. In the sense that you’re making a prediction and hoping for the best, it’s a gamble. Under that definition, taking employment at any given company is also a gamble—you’re guessing, based on available information, that the company will honor your contract, value/maintain your position, perform well enough against competitors, etc. Choosing to buy any given home is also a “gamble,” in this sense, that it won’t depreciate, that the municipality won’t excessively raise property taxes, that it won’t be hit by a 10,000-year flood, that you’ll continue to be able to find employment within a commuting distance, that your neighbors will adhere to the social contract and respect your property, etc.
We can’t know or control that stuff. We make educated guesses. There is no absolute certainty in the world. Investing according to empirical principles is more sound than random betting.
It doesn't help that accounting is not regular math. It's like voodoo to manipulate math to give the closest answer you want within shifting parameters.
When it's this disconnected from fundamentals, sure. But calling all investment "gambling" is missing the forest for the trees. Day trading random ass meme stocks is gambling not so different from pushing your paycheck on red.
Carefully picking a company that's likely to grow based on their market share, market cap, product, and growth isn't so much gambling as it is fostering growth in something you think is worthwhile.
Do I think the latter is what happens in the general stock market of 2026? Not necessarily. But I also don't think any form of risk immediately constitutes gambling. Especially not when you compare it to 10x leveraging Fart Coin.
Yeah, you're right of course. But there is still a pretty obvious difference between "I bet this stuff will grow in the next 30 years" and "I should day trade meme stocks". Maybe gambling is not the right word to only represent the second category, but then I don't know what is. I guess "degeneracy" comes to mind in the sense in which it's commonly used nowadays, but it sounds much more offensive.
I dont have any statistics, but with how aggressively it's pushed, I'd assume a lot of people start with safe investments and then slowly move towards stock gambling.
I have a friend who seems to be sort of going down this route. Though he basically has extremely low expenses compared to the average household, comes from a family that has a decent amount of money so he just got something like $20,000 as a gift from his grandmother that he put into Google stock. Originally when I met him, he was just doing index funds only. Then he started getting into Robinhood and buying individual stocks and he hit big with Nvidia, but he was only doing small amounts so he didn't get a lot but I think that boosted his interest in trying to go for individual stocks rather than index funds. He basically used to follow the boglehead type strategy originally, but then he got way more into constantly checking the market performance every day, which I don't believe is part of the boglehead strategy as usually that is more like, put money in, don't even bother thinking about it or looking at it except for along planned paths in life like setting up for retirement later etc., because then you're basically trying to play the market.
So over time this friend would then start asking me if I saw the market dropped 3% today or something like that, like why would I care if it dropped 3%. But that's around the time I think he started buying into individual stocks on Robinhood, and then he kept telling me I should buy SpaceX IPO (despite the fact that I don't have a grandmother who can just gift me $20k out of nowhere). I said SpaceX just seems like another Elon pump and dump scheme to me so even if I had money I wouldn't do it, and he kept insisting that IPOs are like a guaranteed deal, even if I believe it's a pump and dump I can sell on the first day and he said 90% chance I'd make money off it. I didn't bother to argue the point any further, but I had already told him that I wouldn't gamble on those those things and to him that 90% figure he gave me was disputing the idea that it was gambling. So I think he told me he tried to buy 7 shares of SpaceX IPO but it wasn't clear at the time how many he would actually get due to demand exceeding supply, haven't talked to him about it since so not sure how many he ended up getting. And yes, if I had bought and sold right away, sure I could have made money, but again, that's just gambling to me.
I've lost count of the number of times I've read threads by people in their 20s planning an early retirement on the assumption of 8%-10% annual gains on their savings.
To be clear, these people aren't the gamblers. The number that has always been quoted is that the market averages 8-10%, so they see themselves as just playing the long game. The gamblers are hoping to retire early when they sell their options.
The Elon Musk and SpaceX bullshit aside, this is a good example of why IPOs in general are a bad investment. CEOs and companies go on a "road show" to try and make their company as pretty as possible to do a big initial raise of capital. Then, once cooler heads prevail the real valuation settles in. It's why respectable institutions let new stocks "season" before adding them to their indices and even then most IPOs are a bad investment compared to the broader market for their first couple of years.
The outlier here is the bullshit Elon managed to pull off with investors. Maybe he gets the gullible to juice his stock and it does better than most IPOs. Too bad AI companies only exist to set giant heaps of cash on fire. Regardless, another good example of why this is just gambling, though it seems like most of America is gambling these days, so I guess it's to be expected.
Shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX tech conglomerate plunged 16% Monday to close below their price on June 12, the date of its massive initial public offering.
The company itself — and holders of its previously privately held shares — made more than $85 billion in the initial public offering. And with a market cap of about $2 trillion, SpaceX remains more valuable than either Walmart or Facebook parent Meta.
SpaceX’s sell-off came amid a broader market drawdown Monday in which shares of Google parent, Alphabet, notched their worst one-day performance in over a year.
But that was little comfort to tech investors, who are concerned that short-term inflation will increase the debt burden of mega-cap companies that have borrowed large amounts of money to fund their artificial intelligence infrastructure.
I'm no economist, but doesn't inflation make debt less valuable, thus decreasing the debt burden?
I don't know for sure, but the fact that they're talking about "short term" inflation might mean that they're worried the borrowed money won't go as far. Like, if you borrowed a billion dollars to build a data center, but now the data center will actually cost 1.5 billion, or you'll need to build a smaller data center because you only have that billion dollars.
(I'm not the OP you're replying to) When these entities borrow, do they immediately borrow the money or sort of establish a credit line and just draw it down as and when they need it. It feels like having a credit facility that you draw down and then immediately spend would alleviate that problem (somewhat? maybe?). I'm glad I'm not architecting these deals, they must be fiendishly complicated with so much on the line.
It depends on what kind of debt. The Fed reacts to inflation by raising interest rates, so new borrowing is more expensive and short-term debt is more expensive because it has to be rolled over.
Also, higher interest rates result in the economy slowing down.
Their largest debt is a 20B bridge loan graded at SOFR + 1.75% - so the interest rate is going to fluctuate which will broadly follow inflation. Think of an adjustable rate mortgage and not a fixed rate mortgage as your point of comparison.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but isn't there a rule (particular to SpaceX) that mandates retail investors to hold the bag for a while longer? Meaning they can't sell their stock at the moment. I'm interested in when they'll be able to do so - but not interested enough to actually look it up.
I think there are limits on selling for insiders, i.e. those who have been awarded stocks as part of their compensation package. Retail investors that were allocated stock for the IPO might face guideline restrictions (but generally not actual legal blocks) on selling. See this Reddit thread where the Fidelity rep says:
"As with any investment, you are free to sell the securities obtained during an IPO whenever you determine it is appropriate for you. However, if you have been allocated shares of SpaceX and you sell within the first 15 calendar days from the start of trading in the secondary market, it will affect your ability to participate in future new issue equity public offerings through Fidelity for a defined period of time. The first day clients can sell without being labeled a flipper is the 16th calendar day after the stock trades on the secondary market. The defined period is as follows:
First Flip – Blocked for Six Months
Second Flip – Blocked for One Year
Third Flip – Permanently banned by your SSN"
Retail investors mean people like you and me. Retail investors are not required to hold the stock for 6 months at IPO. Often, insiders like employees of the IPO'd company are, but retail investors that bought at IPO can sell whenever.
I think what's confusing is you keep saying 6 months, which is the typical period for insiders (e.g. employees of the IPO'd company), but not typical for retail investors. Even in your link, it says that the brokers that added their own restrictions did it for 15-30 days. Some brokers had no restrictions at all. The original statement that you wrote was
Retailers were mandated to hold for six months but it appears they're waiving that requirement.
Which from your link states there is no waiver. It's just that brokers are saying "it'd be really great if you don't sell IPO stock shortly after IPO, but if you do AND you do it multiple times, we won't let you partake in future IPOs through us anymore". Which is very different from a waiver. 1) There was no requirement to hold for 6 months for any retail investors, AFAICT. 2) There is no waiver for retail investors.
I had read that insiders were locked from selling and were being gradually unlocked in small cohorts, which is why this price tumble surprised me. I expected trickery to keep the price going up until a majority of the insiders got their chance to dump.
I recently learned that Chinese finance folks call retail investors 韭菜, literally meaning “chives.” Because they grow fast only to be cut and harvested, and then grow right back again with a little bit of hype water.
The IPO price was $130, the first price when it was available for trading was around $157, you are right in that it's still up from the IPO price (which itself is probably massively overvalued already) and not yet down from what it was initially trading from.
IPOs are always dangerous to invest in if you're not an institutional investor. IPOs are usually going to be done in a firm's strongest year in order to juice as much return for the managers and investors who own the firm pre-IPO. If you don't have the sophistication to model out the financials and long term value or you're not an institution, don't do invest in them.
babypuncher | 22 hours ago
I'm literally incapable of feeling bad for anyone who is losing money on SpaceX.
pete_the_paper_boat | 16 hours ago
I mean, I feel bad for people who have entered the stock market out of desperation because the ordinary economy won't lead to them having a sustainable life.
There's a severe lack of knowledge around investing. If you know where to look, it's clear that investing in an IPO generally isn't good on the short or mid term. And any financial reports for $SPCX should've raised red flags.
And then there's the large group of people who likely don't even know whether their 401k is involved or not.
People buying the IPO should know better, but I don't think this situation is very funny either.
I've heard some online day traders say that the real winners amongst them were the people buying another stock (private equity firms owning $SPCX) in anticipation of people buying the IPO. Who'd just sell the moment the company went public.
Nsutdwa | 14 hours ago
I think there's definitely a cohort of investors who are essentially gamblers. The ones who expect that their career will never be anything other than poorly compensated drudgery with an insufficient pension in their 70s, if at all. At that point, hard word and discipline will get you a smidgen less drudgery and an iota more pension. So why not "chuck it all on black" (i.e. bitcoin, or spacex, or whatever meme stock is being hyped in that telegram or instagram or whatever this week)? Also, a lot of young people have grown up seeing only a fairly insane bullrun by world, and particularly US, markets. I've lost count of the number of times I've read threads by people in their 20s planning an early retirement on the assumption of 8%-10% annual gains on their savings.
fxgn | 14 hours ago
Which is the minority, considering all the people just passively buying an ETF through their pension account, but they're the ones retail brokers make the most money on, so the services try to push that stuff really actively.
I use a broker which has no investment fees at all, because they're able to make a shit ton of money from people gambling on CFDs. I only use like two buttons in the app to deposit money into an index fund, but the rest of the interface is clearly catered toward gamblers: built-in social media for discussing stocks, a huge card with the change in your balance in the last 24h, "popular stocks" feed, etc. Another broker I've used literally had "trading competitions" in their app where you got a cash prize if you made more money from your investments in a day than the other participants. Never used Robinhood because I'm not in the US, but I know they straight up have sports betting in the app now.
And, well, wallstreetbets is also a thing.
I dont have any statistics, but with how aggressively it's pushed, I'd assume a lot of people start with safe investments and then slowly move towards stock gambling.
quinsabe | 12 hours ago
401k's are a political tool to allow businesses to wield greater political power. Before 401ks existed people were more friendly to exercising political power that was good for the nation but not great for investors in the stock market. Easiest way to neuter the political will behind the cigarettes trials or legal action against monopolization or other anti-competive business practices is to make it seem like it will affect people through their holdings in a 401k. The auto investing aspect isn't much more than a pyramid scheme, the return continues as long as large amounts of new money feeds into the system, if fewer people feed money into the market, valuations turns back to inflation and rational investment for liquidity movements entering or exiting the system. Likewise funds require rational investors to drive the stocks into meeting the requirements to be included in the fund, if that rational investment loses strength through too much passive investment or gambling driving the market, you get this situation with SpaceX. Once SpaceX becomes a factor in 401ks it's going to be much harder politically to let it fail.
vord | 8 hours ago
The entirety of all retirement programs could be replaced by scaling Social Security (and minimum wage) properly with inflation and funding with uncapped taxes. Any seperate retirement savings can be built up post-tax...frankly I'm coming around to the idea that the concept of pre-tax or deferred taxes shouldn't exist at all.
This of course, would drastically sever the power employers have over their employees. Only second to severing healthcare from employment.
skybrian | 8 hours ago
Pension funds have their downsides too. Companies sometimes underfund them or they can make dubious investments like in private equity firms. They also shut out people who don’t qualify because they change jobs too often.
balooga | 12 hours ago
Investing is gambling. We’re so far down the road of normalizing it that it’s an extreme thing to point that out. Personally I view that as a sickness of this society… it’s distasteful to me that so much of the modern world is structured around it, that people have to depend on it for their futures, that not participating is considered financial illiteracy. The whole economy is structured around a cultlike belief in endless growth, the purpose of a corporation is said to be maximizing shareholder returns. Perverse incentives everywhere.
Of course I have a portfolio too. I hate it but you have to play the game. I’ve got mouths to feed. I still think it’s good to be clear-eyed about what we’re doing. Not “investment involves risk” like the legal disclaimers in Robinhood ads say, but “investing is actually a form of gambling.” I feel like the kid pointing out that the emperor’s naked when I type that.
Atvelonis | 10 hours ago
I essentially agree with your feeling. Our society is being designed in a way that gates financial prosperity behind specific knowledge, and in a way that makes it easy to be taken advantage of. (That’s always been true, but opting out of economic society is perhaps less realistic than it was 5,000 years ago.) Many people in developed countries actually are financially illiterate, but not because they don’t understand the stock market, more because they’re not numeric and can’t do basic math or read a chart. Better education would be valuable, but at a certain point we’re demanding too much. Optimizing for financial reasoning rewards a specific model of thought. That diminishes other forms of intuition and makes the human experience less fulfilling.
We probably shouldn’t be so reductive in our definitions, though. There’s a meaningful body of academic research on asset factors, exposure characteristics, and sequence of returns risk that substantially increases confidence in portfolios with careful asset allocations. There’s mathematics behind card games too, but the difference is that the probability of a positive alpha in investing is structurally higher than in an outright rigged system like a casino. The environments and outcomes are distinct. In the sense that you’re making a prediction and hoping for the best, it’s a gamble. Under that definition, taking employment at any given company is also a gamble—you’re guessing, based on available information, that the company will honor your contract, value/maintain your position, perform well enough against competitors, etc. Choosing to buy any given home is also a “gamble,” in this sense, that it won’t depreciate, that the municipality won’t excessively raise property taxes, that it won’t be hit by a 10,000-year flood, that you’ll continue to be able to find employment within a commuting distance, that your neighbors will adhere to the social contract and respect your property, etc.
We can’t know or control that stuff. We make educated guesses. There is no absolute certainty in the world. Investing according to empirical principles is more sound than random betting.
vord | 8 hours ago
It doesn't help that accounting is not regular math. It's like voodoo to manipulate math to give the closest answer you want within shifting parameters.
CptBluebear | 9 hours ago
When it's this disconnected from fundamentals, sure. But calling all investment "gambling" is missing the forest for the trees. Day trading random ass meme stocks is gambling not so different from pushing your paycheck on red.
Carefully picking a company that's likely to grow based on their market share, market cap, product, and growth isn't so much gambling as it is fostering growth in something you think is worthwhile.
Do I think the latter is what happens in the general stock market of 2026? Not necessarily. But I also don't think any form of risk immediately constitutes gambling. Especially not when you compare it to 10x leveraging Fart Coin.
fxgn | 12 hours ago
Yeah, you're right of course. But there is still a pretty obvious difference between "I bet this stuff will grow in the next 30 years" and "I should day trade meme stocks". Maybe gambling is not the right word to only represent the second category, but then I don't know what is. I guess "degeneracy" comes to mind in the sense in which it's commonly used nowadays, but it sounds much more offensive.
skybrian | 8 hours ago
Unlike normal gambling, the odds aren’t rigged against you. You can win on average by being sensible and patient about your investments.
Sometimes in other ways, too. A rising stock market lets everyone think they’re a genius.
Grumble4681 | 4 hours ago
I have a friend who seems to be sort of going down this route. Though he basically has extremely low expenses compared to the average household, comes from a family that has a decent amount of money so he just got something like $20,000 as a gift from his grandmother that he put into Google stock. Originally when I met him, he was just doing index funds only. Then he started getting into Robinhood and buying individual stocks and he hit big with Nvidia, but he was only doing small amounts so he didn't get a lot but I think that boosted his interest in trying to go for individual stocks rather than index funds. He basically used to follow the boglehead type strategy originally, but then he got way more into constantly checking the market performance every day, which I don't believe is part of the boglehead strategy as usually that is more like, put money in, don't even bother thinking about it or looking at it except for along planned paths in life like setting up for retirement later etc., because then you're basically trying to play the market.
So over time this friend would then start asking me if I saw the market dropped 3% today or something like that, like why would I care if it dropped 3%. But that's around the time I think he started buying into individual stocks on Robinhood, and then he kept telling me I should buy SpaceX IPO (despite the fact that I don't have a grandmother who can just gift me $20k out of nowhere). I said SpaceX just seems like another Elon pump and dump scheme to me so even if I had money I wouldn't do it, and he kept insisting that IPOs are like a guaranteed deal, even if I believe it's a pump and dump I can sell on the first day and he said 90% chance I'd make money off it. I didn't bother to argue the point any further, but I had already told him that I wouldn't gamble on those those things and to him that 90% figure he gave me was disputing the idea that it was gambling. So I think he told me he tried to buy 7 shares of SpaceX IPO but it wasn't clear at the time how many he would actually get due to demand exceeding supply, haven't talked to him about it since so not sure how many he ended up getting. And yes, if I had bought and sold right away, sure I could have made money, but again, that's just gambling to me.
updawg | 10 hours ago
To be clear, these people aren't the gamblers. The number that has always been quoted is that the market averages 8-10%, so they see themselves as just playing the long game. The gamblers are hoping to retire early when they sell their options.
Wafik | 22 hours ago
The Elon Musk and SpaceX bullshit aside, this is a good example of why IPOs in general are a bad investment. CEOs and companies go on a "road show" to try and make their company as pretty as possible to do a big initial raise of capital. Then, once cooler heads prevail the real valuation settles in. It's why respectable institutions let new stocks "season" before adding them to their indices and even then most IPOs are a bad investment compared to the broader market for their first couple of years.
The outlier here is the bullshit Elon managed to pull off with investors. Maybe he gets the gullible to juice his stock and it does better than most IPOs. Too bad AI companies only exist to set giant heaps of cash on fire. Regardless, another good example of why this is just gambling, though it seems like most of America is gambling these days, so I guess it's to be expected.
FireTime | 21 hours ago
Just some noise but I find it humorous that if you Google search for SPCX and set the price history to max the price graph is a Cybertruck.
[OP] brews_hairy_cats | 22 hours ago
KapteinB | 17 hours ago
I'm no economist, but doesn't inflation make debt less valuable, thus decreasing the debt burden?
glesica | 16 hours ago
I don't know for sure, but the fact that they're talking about "short term" inflation might mean that they're worried the borrowed money won't go as far. Like, if you borrowed a billion dollars to build a data center, but now the data center will actually cost 1.5 billion, or you'll need to build a smaller data center because you only have that billion dollars.
Nsutdwa | 14 hours ago
(I'm not the OP you're replying to) When these entities borrow, do they immediately borrow the money or sort of establish a credit line and just draw it down as and when they need it. It feels like having a credit facility that you draw down and then immediately spend would alleviate that problem (somewhat? maybe?). I'm glad I'm not architecting these deals, they must be fiendishly complicated with so much on the line.
KapteinB | 13 hours ago
Good point!
skybrian | 8 hours ago
It depends on what kind of debt. The Fed reacts to inflation by raising interest rates, so new borrowing is more expensive and short-term debt is more expensive because it has to be rolled over.
Also, higher interest rates result in the economy slowing down.
CptBluebear | 3 hours ago
Take a shot anytime a fed chair says "dual mandate" during a quarterly and you'll stumble away thinking all your problems are solved.
D_E_Solomon | 12 hours ago
Their largest debt is a 20B bridge loan graded at SOFR + 1.75% - so the interest rate is going to fluctuate which will broadly follow inflation. Think of an adjustable rate mortgage and not a fixed rate mortgage as your point of comparison.
Lia | 17 hours ago
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but isn't there a rule (particular to SpaceX) that mandates retail investors to hold the bag for a while longer? Meaning they can't sell their stock at the moment. I'm interested in when they'll be able to do so - but not interested enough to actually look it up.
Nsutdwa | 14 hours ago
I think there are limits on selling for insiders, i.e. those who have been awarded stocks as part of their compensation package. Retail investors that were allocated stock for the IPO might face guideline restrictions (but generally not actual legal blocks) on selling. See this Reddit thread where the Fidelity rep says:
"As with any investment, you are free to sell the securities obtained during an IPO whenever you determine it is appropriate for you. However, if you have been allocated shares of SpaceX and you sell within the first 15 calendar days from the start of trading in the secondary market, it will affect your ability to participate in future new issue equity public offerings through Fidelity for a defined period of time. The first day clients can sell without being labeled a flipper is the 16th calendar day after the stock trades on the secondary market. The defined period is as follows:
First Flip – Blocked for Six Months
Second Flip – Blocked for One Year
Third Flip – Permanently banned by your SSN"
CptBluebear | 14 hours ago
I thought so too. Retailers were mandated to hold for six months but it appears they're waiving that requirement. I can't find a source either way.
Regardless, people should make sure to remove SpaceX from their 401ks.
gary | 9 hours ago
Retail investors mean people like you and me. Retail investors are not required to hold the stock for 6 months at IPO. Often, insiders like employees of the IPO'd company are, but retail investors that bought at IPO can sell whenever.
CptBluebear | 5 hours ago
No I know, that was the point. Retail investors that were allowed to buy the IPO were mandated to hold for six months. That seems to have been set to a firm 30 days instead https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/retail-investors-face-tighter-limits-than-funds-spacex-ipo-flipping-2026-06-15/
The brokers will, however, ban you from participating in any other IPOs for months if you violate the rule.
gary | 3 hours ago
I think what's confusing is you keep saying 6 months, which is the typical period for insiders (e.g. employees of the IPO'd company), but not typical for retail investors. Even in your link, it says that the brokers that added their own restrictions did it for 15-30 days. Some brokers had no restrictions at all. The original statement that you wrote was
Which from your link states there is no waiver. It's just that brokers are saying "it'd be really great if you don't sell IPO stock shortly after IPO, but if you do AND you do it multiple times, we won't let you partake in future IPOs through us anymore". Which is very different from a waiver. 1) There was no requirement to hold for 6 months for any retail investors, AFAICT. 2) There is no waiver for retail investors.
Fiachra | 9 hours ago
I had read that insiders were locked from selling and were being gradually unlocked in small cohorts, which is why this price tumble surprised me. I expected trickery to keep the price going up until a majority of the insiders got their chance to dump.
NaraVara | 10 hours ago
I recently learned that Chinese finance folks call retail investors 韭菜, literally meaning “chives.” Because they grow fast only to be cut and harvested, and then grow right back again with a little bit of
hypewater.d32 | 14 hours ago
It's still 15% up from the IPO price, isn't it?
Though I don't know what the actual retail price was available to common investors - how much higher than those $135 it was.
an_angry_tiger | 9 hours ago
The IPO price was $130, the first price when it was available for trading was around $157, you are right in that it's still up from the IPO price (which itself is probably massively overvalued already) and not yet down from what it was initially trading from.
D_E_Solomon | 12 hours ago
IPOs are always dangerous to invest in if you're not an institutional investor. IPOs are usually going to be done in a firm's strongest year in order to juice as much return for the managers and investors who own the firm pre-IPO. If you don't have the sophistication to model out the financials and long term value or you're not an institution, don't do invest in them.