The selling in SpaceX did not wait for tomorrow.
This afternoon the stock traded $109, down 13%. The rest of the market barely moved.
Tomorrow morning up to 911.5 million insider shares get the right to trade. That is more stock than the entire tradable float.
The lockup calendar came out in June. Every desk on the Street has had that date circled ever since.
Retail is the crowd holding this one. SpaceX put two to four times the usual retail slice into the deal at $135 a share. That stock is down 19% from there.
So the fear has a name now. Another rug pull, tomorrow at the bell.
Tomorrow's flood is smaller than the math everybody is running. Nobody had to sell a share to shrink it.
Tuesday the stock ran up 9.4% into the earnings print. Buyers were front-running a quarter nobody had seen yet.
It landed after the bell and it was the good version. Revenue up 92%, nearly a billion dollars more than Wall Street was looking for. The first set of books this company has ever shown the public.
The whole run-up was gone within hours.
That is the calendar beating the earnings.
And it did not start Tuesday. SpaceX is down 48% from the record close it set on June 16. That is seven weeks of bleeding into a supply date the whole Street had in the book.
Supply everyone sees coming gets sold early. That slide was the selling.
It also killed a piece of tomorrow.
Another 455.8 million shares were set to come free in the morning, on top of the 911.5 million. They came with one condition, and it was a price.
The stock had to close at $175.50 on five of the ten days ending Tuesday. That is 30% above where the IPO priced.
It never came close. Zero of ten.
A syndicate desk reads a lockup out of the prospectus, not off the wire. The price triggers live nowhere else.
So that collapse is why tomorrow got smaller. A stock that held up would have handed the market 455.8 million more shares.
Tomorrow is the small one.
By the cadence SpaceX just set, the third-quarter report lands in November. The day is not on the calendar yet. Two full trading days after it, up to 1.3 billion shares come free.
That is the biggest release on the schedule until Musk's stock in 2027.
And the block that missed its trigger was not destroyed. It rolled into December, and December more than doubled.
The overhang moved down the calendar and got heavier.
The panic is priced. The calendar is not.
For anyone looking to get in, on a bounce or for the long haul, the number is $100. Not $109.
SpaceX has never traded at $100. The lowest tick in its short life is $104.83, printed Monday.
Asking for $100 is asking the market to put in a brand new all-time low first. That is the whole idea. It is the price of everything still sitting on the calendar.
Facebook's biggest lockup day, in November 2012, closed up 12.6%. Its real low had come ten weeks earlier.
The dreaded day is rarely the low.
Belanger Trading is an investor in SpaceX. Every line above is written from inside that position.
$100 is where the desk takes its shot. For a bounce.
Tomorrow's volume against a normal day. A normal SpaceX session is 68 million shares. Tuesday's earnings print did 144 million. Monster volume with the price holding says real buyers took the other side of the supply. Monster volume with the price breaking says nobody did.
The line broke at the bell. SpaceX closed today at $108.27, its lowest close ever. It took out the $108.37 line set on July 31. That close says the market has stopped pricing tomorrow. It has started pricing November. Tomorrow's session either confirms the break or puts the stock back above the line.
When SpaceX puts its Q3 earnings date on the calendar. Companies post that date well before it arrives, and it sets the one that matters. Up to 1.3 billion shares come free two full trading days later.

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