Week ended June 12, 2026: SpaceX finally blasts off

Markets zigged and zagged last week ahead of the SpaceX IPO, which began trading Friday.  The main driver of heightened volatility was ongoing sentiment shifts involving the future of A.I. on stock prices, although other things might have also been influencing this headline trade as investors: 

• Might have been clearing room in their portfolios to purchase shares in the $75 bln mega-IPO of SpaceX, which was reportedly three times oversubscribed (and traded up nicely on Friday).  As an anecdote, you can see what ARKK did on Thursday as far as its trades, likely clearing room for an allocation of SpaceX in its flagship fund:

• Might have been reacting to GOOG’s newly announced $80 billion secondary share offering to support its massive capex spend (mostly for A.I.) in 2026 of $180 bln to $190 bln (gulp!),

• Might have been anticipating that other hyper-scalers like META and AMZN will jump on the mega-stock secondary issuance train like GOOG, since they also have huge capex needs related to A.I. in 2026 and beyond,

• Further out, might be trying to get ahead of potential IPOs from Anthropic and OpenAI, both also expected to be very large and are slated for 2H2026, and/or

• More broadly, might believe that the A.I. trade is over-extended and are preferring to wait for consolidation in the broader tech sector, meaning cutting tech positions but certainly not buying the tech dip.

What investors seem to care little about is geopolitical or macroeconomic concerns like the Iran-US conflict, and the ongoing inflationary pressures due to sharply elevated oil prices.  I am “old school” because I am bothered by both of these issues more than the fickle tech sector.  This seemingly never-ending war coupled with ongoing inflationary pressures will likely affect the trajectory of earnings sooner and across a much broader mix of companies than the growth of A.I.  Productivity improvements form A.I. will be profound and will occur, but are difficult to quantify as far as amount and timing.  Of course, I have learnt by now that what I think matters little when you’re in the minority. 

I provided an update Thursday to my subscribers, available on my blog, in which you can find my thoughts about upcoming central bank meetings (FOMC, BoE and ECB this coming week), US inflation (highest in three years, and PPI came in hot on Thursday), the SpaceX IPO pre-launch (“pre-launch” since written on Thursday), and U.S. social security.  If you’re still interested in SpaceX, here is the roadshow presentation from the company’s website.  Also (covered in the mid-week update), the ECB raised its key policy rate by 25bps as expected on Thursday, with ECB President Lagarde saying in her commentary afterwards that a further 25bps increase was not out of the question at the next monetary policy meeting in July. 

As far as my portfolio, I missed the cut-off to get shares in SpaceX (SPCX) as I didn’t realise that the book closed on Wednesday rather than Thursday.  What a stupid move, because it was almost certainly going to perform initially, and it did.  The shares closed up nearly 20% at $160.95/share on its first day of trading.  I have friends (retail) who were in the IPO, and they all exited on the pop, adhering to the old adage “….here for a good time, not a long time.”  Otherwise, I sat tight in an environment in which sector diversity is valued, at least as far as reducing day-to-day volatility.

Markets last week

Risk markets struggled in the first part of the week, but seemed to gain a better foothold in the final two trading sessions once the SPCX IPO order book was cleared and allocations provided.  Investors also reacted to President Trump’s statement that the U.S. and Iran were about to sign an agreement to permanently end the war in the Middle East.  Oil prices fell over 6% WoW on hopes that eventually shipping would normalise in the Strait of Hormuz once the conflict ends.  Given that Europe has the most to gain from a peace deal, European stocks were in fact the best performers last week.  Bond yields were also generally better across the curve last week, although bonds gave back some gains on Friday.  Gold continued to drift lower towards $4,000/ounce, the greenback was a touch weaker, and BTC finally rediscovered its mojo heading back above $63,000 to close the week.

The section below has updated tables for the week ended June 12, 2026.

MARKET DATA AND TABLES

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