If you bought into SpaceX in June and you’ve been avoiding your portfolio app, you’re not alone.
Six weeks ago, $SPCX was the hottest ticket on Wall Street, the strongest post-IPO rally of the year. Today, shares sit roughly 20% below their IPO price, and the company has shed something like $1.2 trillion in market value from its June peak.
That’s one of the fastest, largest wealth wipeouts a newly public company has ever posted. And in that very same stretch of 2026, five much smaller IPOs have quietly turned into some of the best-performing stocks of the year. That contrast is the whole story.
The SpaceX Price Drop
The reversal has been brutal and fast. SpaceX now trades about 50% below its June 16 closing high, after rallying as much as 50% above its IPO price in the euphoric days right after going public. At its peak, the stock was outperforming close to 80% of large Nasdaq IPOs at the same point in their trading history. That comparison has completely flipped, SpaceX is now underperforming roughly 80% of that same group.
Tuesday made it worse. Shares slid another 5%, landing around $108, 20% below the $135 IPO price and 47% below the June high, per Bloomberg. Roughly 30% of the available float is currently sold short, according to S3 Partners, and Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas has argued a $100 share price would imply “zero or even negative value” for the company’s entire AI segment. What makes this sting more is the timing: the drop came right after a largely successful Starship test flight. The rockets are working. It’s the stock’s plumbing that’s broken, not the hardware.
Why: It’s the Lockup Wall, Not the Business
Here’s the mechanic driving the whole move. Only about 639 million SpaceX shares currently trade freely. On August 6, as many as 911.5 million additional shares become eligible for sale under the staggered lockup schedule. By December, the total tradable count balloons to 5.33 billion. The stock everyone piled into in June has barely begun revealing how much supply is sitting behind it.
That hasn’t scared off retail. Traders poured $315 million into SpaceX in July alone, the largest single-stock allocation of the month by a wide margin, according to Vanda Research.
Retail is buying the dip. Institutions, largely, are not.
The Five IPOs Quietly Outperforming Everyone
While SpaceX absorbs its own size, five much smaller companies that priced in the same window are up sharply, proof this isn’t a broken 2026 IPO market, just one oversized debut struggling under its own float.
Veradermics, priced at $17 in early February, now trading near $118. Up roughly 594% from its offer price, making it the single best-performing US IPO of the year, in any industry.
Hemab Therapeutics Holdings, priced at $18 on May 1, now near $44. More than double its offer price, driven by strong clinical data on its blood-disorder therapies.
Avalyn Pharma, priced at $18 on April 30, has also nearly doubled since, per BioPharma Dive, notably without a single major stock-moving catalyst.
Parabilis Medicines, priced at $20 on June 10, just two days before SpaceX’s own debut. Popped 58% on day one and still holds around $31, roughly 55% above its offer price.
Kardigan, priced at $16 on June 18, less than a week after SpaceX went public. Has traded as high as $27, about 50% above its offer price.
None of these five raised anywhere close to the $75 billion SpaceX pulled in and that’s exactly the point. Smaller floats, smaller lockup walls, smaller waves of insider shares hitting the market at once. SpaceX didn’t lose to a bad IPO market. It lost to its own size.
Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any services. Follow us on X @nulltxnews
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