Yo Pit Crazies,
I hate to say I told you so, but I did. I called the SpaceX lockup a non-event, and Thursday the stock closed up 6.14 percent at $114.92.
That happened on one of the largest lockup expirations on record. A lockup keeps insiders and early backers from selling for a stretch after an IPO, and when it lifts, all that stock becomes tradable. About 911.5 million shares came free Thursday.
Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX) went from a 639 million share float to roughly 1.55 billion. The tradable slice of the company jumped from 4.9 percent of shares outstanding to 11.8 percent. Everybody braced for a flood and the buyers showed up instead.
The Borrow Just Got Cheap
Volume ran 252 million shares against a three-month average of 121 million. That's the scrum I expected, not a stampede.
The bigger change sits behind the tape. Firms can lend those newly free shares out, so the cost to borrow them drops, and short interest as a percent of float falls on its own when the float more than doubles. S3 Partners had shorts as high as 36 percent of the tradable float going in, so a chunk of Thursday's pop was covering.
Folks liked shorting this at $200. They like it a lot less at $110. I'll scale in buying every $10 starting at $100, because the easy downside money is over.
Implied volatility, which is the market's price on how much a stock will swing, sits near 90 on SPCX while Tesla Inc. (TSLA) trades 43. Both are nuts for a pair of companies worth $1.5 trillion and $1.3 trillion. I see those two numbers converging over time.
SPCX 5 day chart
Skew Is Where the Nerves Show
Below is the day two snapshot of the Option Pit Skew-o-later, which pulls real-time IV pricing off Livevol(™). Blue is the open, black is Wednesday's close, and orange is the current market.
Skew tells you what traders will pay for downside protection against what they'll pay for upside. IV in the 30-day cycle dropped a bunch again Thursday. Iran talks picked back up this week and folks are stepping out of the way, and with the big upside squeeze finished, vol is relaxing.
SPY Sep 04 SKEW for Aug 06
Why VIX Makes New Lows Friday
The jobs number hits Friday morning, and this week's data has been strong. Challenger counted 33,429 announced job cuts in July, down 27 percent from June and 46 percent below last July. Job openings held at 7.4 million.
Most of the hiring since 2025 has come out of the private sector while Washington sheds staff. The federal government has cut roughly 345,000 civilian jobs since January 2025, close to 12 percent of its headcount. Take that drag off and the employment picture three years out looks a lot better than the headline prints do now.
That likely pins VIX even lower into the weekend and puts new monthly lows in play Friday.
The lockup was the last big scheduled scare on the calendar, and the folks who wanted out got out. Go Capitalism!
Hopefully this was helpful,
Andrew Giovinazzi