CMC Invest said today (Monday) that 91% of its clients’ orders in SpaceX were buys during the first half of 2026. The rocket company became the fourth most traded US stock on the Australian platform within weeks of becoming available.
Buying has barely slowed since the shares dropped through their offer price. Between July 1 and July 22, 88% of client orders in SpaceX were still buys, the broker said in its half-year Inside Invest update.
Retail Buys Into a Broken IPO
SpaceX priced at $135 a share and began trading on Nasdaq on June 12 in the largest initial public offering on record. It closed below the offer price for the first time on July 16 and finished Friday at $115.07.
Analysts have turned cautious. HSBC’s Nicolas Cote-Colisson started coverage last week with a hold rating and a $115 price target, a level beneath what investors paid in the deal.
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Supply distorted the early trading. Only around 5% of SpaceX’s shares were available to buy and sell after listing, which left the price sensitive to small shifts in demand and helped drive a 32% drop from the June peak.
Henry Fisher, a market analyst at CMC Invest, said demand for newly accessible names such as SpaceX shows “investors remain keen to gain exposure to long-term structural growth themes.” He described market swings as a lasting condition of investing, not a passing phase.
How Rival Venues Sold the Same Trade
Brokers and exchanges spent the spring competing to put SpaceX in retail hands before it listed. CMC Markets, the FTSE 250 parent of CMC Invest, launched grey market spread bets and CFDs on the company in May, the same day Binance debuted a USDT-margined pre-IPO perpetual future.
Bitget listed a token branded preSPAX under its IPO Prime line in April, PU Prime opened a pre-IPO CFD under the symbol SPCXUSD on May 29, and Liechtenstein prop firm The Trading Pit marketed funded accounts for the stock’s first session.
Several of those products did not survive listing day. Binance, Bybit, Bitget Wallet and MEXC cancelled their tokenized SpaceX allocations on June 12 and refunded subscribers after xStocks could not source the underlying shares.
Synthetic trading carried on regardless. MEXC has logged $7.1 billion in SpaceX futures volume, and Pepperstone said this month it would extend its perpetual CFDs beyond the stock into metals, indices and energy. CMC Invest’s numbers cover orders in the physical shares, not derivatives.
Buying Into the ASX’s Worst Performers
The same behavior showed up closer to home. CSL, WiseTech Global and Xero all ranked among the platform’s most traded Australian names in the first half, CMC Invest said, despite share price falls of 33.7%, 51.7% and 36.6%.
Around 80% of client orders in those three were buys. All have been hit by earnings downgrades and a wider repricing of expensive growth stocks, with WiseTech also under pressure over governance and key-person risk.
Selling picked up elsewhere on the platform. Order flow in BHP and Woodside Energy became more evenly split as those shares rallied, which the broker said pointed to profit taking.
The buy skew is not new here. CMC Invest reported that around 75% of Australian client trades across the whole of 2025 were buy orders, with the four biggest exchange traded funds topping the list.
Other platforms have published comparable readings. eToro said in April that retail investors lifted exposure to energy, mining and software stocks in the first quarter, led by a 60% rise in the number of Chevron holders.
Share Supply Set to Expand
The IPO sold only a slice of SpaceX’s stock. The first lockup expirations, which allow longtime holders to start selling, are due within weeks and could roughly quadruple the number of tradable shares.
SpaceX is also expected to report its first quarterly results as a public company in the same stretch. The shares fell 2.7% on Friday to close at $115.07.
This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.
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