History Says SpaceX Stock Will Do This in the Months After Its IPO

Johnny Rice, The Motley Fool Tue, June 30, 2026 at 4:35 PM GMT+7 4 min read SPCX NVDA The biggest initial public offering (IPO) is now history. The blockbuster public debut of Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX) earlier this month more than doubled the previous record, raising $85.7 billion. The stock has already been on quite a ride. Where does it go from here? Here's what history suggests the next year will look like. Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue » Let's start by looking closely at the biggest IPOs in history before SpaceX. The data is somewhat mixed, but the first year is rocky for three of the five. If, instead, we look at not just the largest stocks, but some of the most hyped in recent memory -- stocks that had a strong narrative driving hefty valuations at launch -- we see an even bleaker picture: Jay Ritter of the University of Florida has tracked IPOs for decades, and his data set is considered the gold standard. His foundational 1991 paper is still relevant today. It showed that IPOs reliably pop on day one, then underperform comparable companies during the following one to five years on average. However, if you look closely, that underperformance doesn't hold for big companies. For larger businesses, he found little difference. That's something to keep in mind, but I think things have shifted somewhat significantly over time. A more recent Truist study of the past 30 major IPOs found that returns skew negative at both the six-month and 12-month marks, with the average for each sitting around -9%. Here's why: Companies go public at very different points in their lifecycles today than they did 25 years ago. There is so much private capital available from VC firms and private equity that companies today don't need to lean on the public market until they're much more mature. And that often means the serious, exponential growth public investors are hoping for has already happened -- or at least a much larger share of it -- while the business was still privately held. I think that's more or less the situation here. SpaceX was valued at roughly $500 billion just one year ago (that includes the $113 billion valuation of xAi, which was a separate entity at the time). It was less than a 10th of that a decade prior. Its current $2.2 trillion valuation has already baked in an enormous amount of revenue growth. So, even if the company delivers strong double-digit percentage returns for years and manages to turn a profit, it's got plenty of road to cover before its earned its valuation. And more immediately, you have a pretty major issue to contend with: dilution. Despite the dollar value of the SpaceX IPO, the company only sold an unusually small portion of itself to public investors -- about 4%. During the next year, the shares of company insiders and early investors will be unlocked and available for sale. These will outnumber the current available shares many times over. The first unlock alone, which comes in August, will double the supply of shares available for sale. Of course, there's no way to know how many will actually be sold, but even a small portion of the total during the next year would be a serious drag on the stock price. Before you buy stock in Space Exploration Technologies, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Space Exploration Technologies wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut are built for long-term growth and could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $398,052!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,181,688!* That performance is why people listen. With a track record of beating the S&P 500 by 4x, Stock Advisor offers a distinct advantage. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built for the long haul. *Stock Advisor returns as of June 30, 2026. Johnny Rice has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms, Snowflake, and Visa. The Motley Fool recommends Alibaba Group. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. History Says SpaceX Stock Will Do This in the Months After Its IPO was originally published by The Motley Fool

History Says SpaceX Stock Will Do This in the Months After Its IPO

Key takeaways

More in business