Australian Retail Keeps Buying SpaceX at 88% of Orders as Stock Sinks Below IPO Price

CMC Invest reported Monday that 91% of its clients' orders in SpaceX were buys during the first half of 2026, with the rocket company becoming 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, according to the broker's half-year Inside Invest update. 

SpaceX priced at $135 a share and began trading on Nasdaq on June 12 in the largest initial public offering on record, closing below the offer price for the first time on July 16 and finishing Friday at $115.07. Analysts have turned cautious, with HSBC's Nicolas Cote-Colisson starting coverage last week with a hold rating and a $115 price target. Supply distorted early trading, as only around 5% of SpaceX's shares were available after listing, driving 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," describing market swings as a lasting condition of investing. Brokers and exchanges spent the spring competing to offer SpaceX exposure before its listing, with CMC Markets launching grey market spread bets and CFDs in May, Binance debuting a USDT-margined pre-IPO perpetual future, and other venues including Bitget, PU Prime, and The Trading Pit offering pre-IPO products. Several tokenized products did not survive listing day; Binance, Bybit, Bitget Wallet and MEXC cancelled their SpaceX allocations on June 12 and refunded subscribers after the underlying shares could not be sourced. Synthetic trading continued, with MEXC logging $7.1 billion in SpaceX futures volume and Pepperstone announcing it would extend its perpetual CFDs into metals, indices and energy. The same buy bias appeared in Australian stocks, with CSL, WiseTech Global and Xero ranking among the platform's most traded names despite share price falls of 33.7%, 51.7% and 36.6%, and around 80% of client orders in those three being buys. Selling picked up in BHP and Woodside Energy as those shares rallied, pointing to profit taking. The buy skew is not new; CMC Invest reported that around 75% of Australian client trades in 2025 were buy orders. 

Other platforms published similar data, with eToro noting retail investors increased exposure to energy, mining and software stocks in the first quarter. The IPO sold only a slice of SpaceX's stock, and the first lockup expirations, due within weeks, 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 period; the shares fell 2.7% on Friday to close at $115.07.