Future Finance

SpaceX went public yesterday in the biggest IPO in history, closing up 19% at a valuation of over $2 trillion. Here are 5 things to understand before the market reopens on Monday: 1. A day-one price measures demand, not value. At the roadshow, $250 billion in orders chased the $75 billion in stock SpaceX actually offered. When that much demand squeezes through that small an opening, the first print tells you how hard people pushed to get in. Never judge what a business is worth by where it trades on its opening day. 2. The pop was not money you missed. The run from $135 went to the people who were allocated shares Thursday night, before the stock ever opened. Buying at Monday's price is a different trade than the one that just paid off, and knowing which trade you are actually making is the whole game. Name the trade before you take it. 3. New supply is already on the calendar. People who own most of SpaceX are not allowed to sell their shares yet, and the IPO covered only about 4% of the company. The dates that the restriction expires (the lockup, the window after which insiders can finally sell) are published in the prospectus, and the float can multiply when those dates arrive. Before buying any IPO, find out when more shares hit the market: it is public, and almost nobody checks. 4. A loss-making company at $2 trillion is a story price. SpaceX reported a $4.3 billion net loss last quarter, and that alone does not make it a bad company. A price like that asks you to bet on a specific future, and the business, as it stands today, does not yet support that number. For any story price, ask what has to go right, and for how long, for the number to make sense. 5. When professionals disagree this much, the gap is in the information. Morningstar values SpaceX at $780 billion. The market paid over $2 trillion. A 2.5x disagreement among people who are paid to know tells you how wide the real range of outcomes is, and the wider that expert gap runs, the less anyone knows yet, including you. The last company to hold the title of largest IPO was Saudi Aramco. It rose 10% on day one, then sat below its offer price for months. Day one decided nothing then, and it decided nothing on Friday. Read the squeeze, name your trade, know the supply dates, question the story price, respect the gap.

US inflation accelerated across seven categories at once, from a 3.8% CPI to gasoline at 28.4%. Whether that's a threat to your portfolio depends entirely on whether the hottest categories hold or roll off. Read the report before you react to it:

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“Broken Money” by Lyn Alden is the clearest explanation of why money works the way it does - what it actually is, where it broke, and why it keeps losing value. We mapped the whole argument into one visual below.

This breakdown of how top quants find winning strategies has a more useful idea than the Sharpe math at its center. Here's the test, reframed from the trader's screen to the allocator's book:

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Everything you need to know about why the S&P 500 shed ~$2 trillion of market cap hours after a strong US jobs report.

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In 1980, gold fell 65% while every catalyst that built the trade was still in place. Here's what broke it, and what it means for every hedge you hold:

Capital Flows just posted a full breakdown of the credit-cycle melt-up, covering the two triggers that end it and why valuation never flags either. Breakdown below.

Before you put another dollar into stocks, bonds, gold, or crypto, ask yourself these 3 questions:

Here’s the framework Future Finance applies to every allocation decision: