SPCX is now Wall Street's most shorted new stock
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https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-07-16/sho...
Right now, SpaceX has provided 639 million shares to trade. People want more.
In a month, there will be 1,583 million shares to trade.
But right now, there are actually 820 million shares to trade: the 639 million provided by SpaceX, plus another 181 million provided by short sellers.This was just a bag drop on retail and trying to force it into retirement funds proves it.
The original owner doesn't hold the shares either, but they do have a contract for them to be returned.
As a practical matter, this effectively creates shares, just like a bank loaning money creates money.
If a short seller decides, today, that they no longer want to involved with this stock at all and, simultaneously, by pure coincidence, the person they borrowed the share from decides that they also don't want to be involved with this stock at all so they both close their positions and settle up. The third person out on the market keeps owning the share that they never knew was borrowed at all, and everything stays exactly stable. One 'long' dropped out of the market but it had no effect on anything because the 'short' also dropped out at the same time.
That's not what happens when someone takes their money out of the bank and converts them to Benjamins: there is less money available to lend which raises the interest rate somewhat. That's an actual effect!
IIUC the main difference with stock is the market prices the items by demand unlike where the treasury effectively prices the items by supply and banks work under that. So the stocks are expected to always be liquid potentially at a lower price while banks have to be bailed out by the government for liquidity if a bank run. This definitely feels different, though I guess the extreme case gets closer, if every single bank needs to be bailed out at once, the currency price will go down like stocks do.
every owner is potentially double selling pressure
while liquidity itself is variable
So guessing non investors in SpaceX are shorting for this event in expectation of a drop
The issue is that this creates a conflict of interest.
In the worst case scenario, as an employee, you can literally do a bad thing to cause the stock to go down. E.g. An engineer can make a bug which blows up a rocket.
So then you could short the stock, bug a rocket, and become super rich.
It's the same issue with athletes betting on their own team - it's trivial to throw the game.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BoA, ect are the ones who set the IPO lockup terms based on their risk and exposure post IPO.
Indexes, exchanges, underwriters, ect are all private institutions who mostly can and do set their own rules.
Something like 20% can be sold after the q2 results are released
It is also worth noting that typical lockup contracts can be waived early at the sole discretion of the underwriters.
So although Google, say, technically has a huge float on a percentage basis, because none of the big three holders (Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin) are selling any significant amount of their shares, the practical float is much lower.
SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933344
SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status
What a weird way for them to say "we don't know"! It's like saying this house has 0 to 100 bathrooms.
> "I think it could be half over the course of the year," Noble said, adding that he believes a fair value for the shares is around $30, implying a decline of roughly 78% from current levels.
Where it gets fun is that: (1) we have people selling $100 bills for more than $100 and, (2) we have people gladly buying $100 bills for more than $100.
My point don't listen to ANY stock analysts.
>J.P. Morgan analyst Rajat Gupta just took over the investment bank's coverage of Tesla's stock (TSLA), and in doing so, he lifted the firm's rating to neutral from underweight. The previous analyst, Ryan Brinkman, was a fairly vocal Tesla bear who warned just two months ago that investors should treat the stock with a "high degree of caution."Brinkman's previous price target of $145 implied 65% downside from Thursday's closing price of $418.45. But Gupta has now raised J.P. Morgan's Tesla target to $475 in conjunction with the upgrade.
https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20260605179/jp-...
(1) SpaceX has a huge number of restricted shares coming onto the market soon as this thread has discussed.
(2) SpaceX has incredible tech (reuse, internet, engines, scale, reliability), yet in the past week Japan demonstrated a rocket hovering and landing, and China launched a rocket to space and caught it/landed it. So SPCX tech is incredible, but China has basically done everything SpaceX has done except relaunch and launch reliably at scale.
Those aren't trivial things but I see within a couple of years there will be competitors doing what SpaceX has been doing. Matching the reliable launch will likely take longer. No one has anything like Starship and their fantastic engines, but that's not done yet. Let's not forget about upcoming space internet competitors. I put all this together and see they are crazily overvalued and still has potential to be do well too. I kept wanting to short it and short Tesla too, but Tesla has been stubbornly resisting me.
Tesla's PE is down to 357 at the moment. It has hovered around 400. Incredibly profitable and trustworthy (for non EVs) Toyota has a PE of 9.x. Nine! GM is 28, and Chinese companies are making the best EVs but more importantly have better battery and drivetrain tech in the field and faster charging. They are blocked from the US but apparently Canada will now allow them. Tesla doesn't have anything over them, including price. Tesla makes great cars, Musk is awful. I have an over 10 year old tesla and it is still a great car.
Tesla's future worth is because of meme stockness, optimus robots (which they still have been demoing with human remote control misleadingly), battery storage, xAI (eventually they'll do something worthwhile, right, more than illegal removing the clothes off people videos? at least they are making something off selling their extra inference capacity), and robotaxis.
robotaxi tech would cool if it worked, every few months Musk embarasses himself by announcing it's going nationwide by the end of the year or something similar that never happens. But is this going to make billions? Doubtful, and Waymo will be there to drive it down to not be that profitable. And waymo actually does 500k rides per week in 10 cities. Does tesla do 500 a week yet?
So Tesla is overvalued, and also, a miracle could occur and they could come up with software to make the robot do something useful - they are still overvalued even with that. They just don't have that great robot brain. Maybe LLMs will solve that eventually.
But tesla is at 350 PE, they need a reduction of about 15 times in stock price to get to a reasonable PE of 23. Their sales went up last quarter but they were behind their all time high sales and Musk destroyed their reputation. Let's say tesla is only 10x overpriced based on PE. So they should lose 90% of their stock price!? It's a meme stock but it should go down.
Particularly once it gets past the lockup period. If I had to guess I say a lot of folks are thinking a lot of people will sell post lock up and they’re timing their shorts around that date.
Basically an IPO is a bad bet for a five year position. But SPCX is especially bad.
However it's not going up and later this month the first lockup period ends and people who got stock options are allowed to sell some of their stocks. These people don't care if the price is $134 or $135, because they go in much much lower, down to $30, from what I can tell. So starting this month there's going to be new shares available to buy, and the sellers are less critical of the price your offering.
[1] ie are happy to be synthetically short the stock and see a demand for the calls
The failure of SpaceX might doom xAI and Mars colonisation, but it's very unlikely to wipe out American medium lift launch capabilities.
I mean wow, the Starship test flight today probably gave a lot of useful data during the countdown and fueling and preparations. I sort of had deja vu because there was recently another aborted launch (Electron? Rocket Lab?) where the engines ignited at T-00:00, and shut down immediately.
It was honestly majestic to watch that machine shut down gracefully and abort for the day. Nonetheless, it failed to influence my stock purchase decisions in the slightest.
> It's huge and impressive and has lots of development work left.
That's a "strong buy" signal
The stock market has been doing extremely dumb things for as far as I personally remember. It’s an aggregate of biased and dumb actors chasing trends, so that’s pretty much expected
I'd say 4-5 years. It's huge and impressive and has lots of development work left.
If you're going to short it, you better have a buffer big enough to cover it going up to $500 for a moment somewhere before Elon is free to sell next summer. Someone will do a short squeeze, and slowly sell into it.
They are supposed to verify that before they place the trade and generally do follow the rules. Because if they don’t, they will be not allowed to allow any short sales for that security.
SEC is clearly ignoring FTD’s and as a result allowing MM’s to reloan unlocated synthetic shares.
Which is exactly what happened in 2008 with mortgage backed securities and CDO’s.
That's why saying "most shorted stock" is saying something and "every seller has a buyer" is not.
No, there isn't, because the price breaks in the direction that there is more optimism or pessimism. When the pessimists run out of optimists at $135/share, they start digging for them at $134/share. The price ran out of optimists and had to move down to find more. Otherwise the price would lock at a single point.
And abundance of pessimists indicates that a lot of "downward digging" is taking place, it's very relevant.
You're hyper focusing on the tree here and missing the forest.
It's still a hard fact that for every single trade, there is someone as fully optimistic, to perfectly match the pessimistic side. And people have to be pretty committed to a narrative to deny that fact.
Here's the simple way to know you're wrong. The stock price isn't zero. That means there people willing (at some price) to put their money where their mouth is, that the people betting against the stock at that price are wrong.
But at that point they're both just making bets.. all it says is that there are an equal number of dollars willing to gamble at that price point. It says nothing about which side of the gamble will win.
Shorts don't exist in a vacuum. They literally can't be made, unless there was someone in the market who thinks that at the short price, the stock is a good investment opportunity. Every trade is proof that the market thinks the stock is a good investment at that price. I don't know why you have such a hard time facing up to that fact, even after you admit it is one.
It seems the opposite is true here.
> [Shorts] literally can't be made, unless there was someone in the market who thinks that at the short price, the stock is a good investment opportunity. Every trade is proof that the market thinks the stock is a good investment at that price.
Again, this isn't true. The spot price has to decrease from the point where short-selling is happening for there to be a willing buyer, unless there is a new bid. Yes, transactions happen at one singular price, but if you're only saying that every seller has a buyer and every buyer has a seller, then the guy that you replied to is correct. What you're essentially saying is that "every gallon of milk is sold to a person". This is not useful information.
Only because you're ignoring the other option, that the gallon of milk DIDN'T sell. It tells you that there was demand for the milk you had to sell. If there was no customer, the milk would have spoiled. There are still people who want to drink milk. There are still people who believe you're not selling poison, that milk is a worthy thing to buy from you. That is useful information.
So you can focus on the pessimism if you want. But the point you're missing, is it's exactly offset by an equal amount of optimism (based on that price). One side is betting it will go down further, the other side is betting it will go up.
It turns out there's soon going to be a 20% to 30% increase in the number of stocks available to be traded, and people are betting that those holders will cash out now that they're vesting. So this is all more about market factors than intrinsic company fundamentals anyway.
But people want to always focus on the negative, and get too hung up on the fluctuations of a stock price like it's a message from God or something.
Anyway, it's been enjoyable talking with you and others, it seems we're not going to have a meeting of the minds on this one.
And every (short) sale is proof that the market thinks it's a bad investment at that price, which logically nullifies your point.
So to climb out of this nullification, we have to consider how many actors didn't get filled at the price they want. There isn't infinite liquidity at every price point.
No it doesn't. It's the flip side of the one you want to focus on, and all i've been saying is that it's not the ONLY side. If it nullifies my point, it also nullifies yours. They cancel EACH OTHER out.
> There isn't infinite liquidity at every price point.
Sure, but so what? That is true of literally every product sold. The price isn't zero, so there is enough liquidity to cover every short that was actually sold. You've already admitted to that. The fact that the price goes down, (and can sometimes move back up) is immaterial.
To make it clear to you,
>So to climb out of this [cancel each other out], we have to consider how many actors didn't get filled at the price they want. There isn't infinite liquidity at every price point.
And no, there is not enough liquidity, so the price has to move to provide it. That's why you cannot hand wave away price movement, it's intrinsically part of transactions being formed. And why a headline like "Heavily shorted" captures sentiment around a stock, especially one that is tanking.
> So there's as many people betting the stock will go up.
The first sentence is a useful reminder, but second has a error: A single person can have multiple bets, and not all bets are the same volume.
For example, Alice has a budget of $10 and believes the coin-flip will land Heads. Alice makes a $5 wager with Bob and a $3 wager with Carol and a $2 wager with Dan. The equilibrium is in money, rather than opinion-havers.
As index funds they were forced to buy. They are not taking any view.