Space-related stocks rally in tandem on SpaceX IPO debut as options trading volume surges
Taylor Wilson
SpaceX listed on Nasdaq at $135 a share — a $1.77 trillion valuation — and investors who couldn't buy in piled into proxy stocks and ETFs, sending options volume across the space sector soaring. The rally is a liquidity spillover, not a fundamentals story.
SpaceX is public — what did everyone else buy instead?
Investors locked out of SpaceX chased "proxy exposure." EchoStar (SATS), which holds roughly 3% of SpaceX, jumped 11% on Thursday with options volume hitting 11× its 30-day average, then rose another ~5% in Friday pre-market.
AST SpaceMobile (ASTS) surged 12% on Thursday; single-day options turnover approached $140 million. Its satellites are scheduled to ride a SpaceX rocket to orbit next week.
Even Virgin Galactic — down 99% from its peak — saw call buying run 3.5× put volume.
This means → the market treated anything adjacent to SpaceX as an entry ticket. The money followed the label, not the company.
What is the options market actually betting on?
Piper Sandler's head of options trading, Danny Kirsch, said: "There's been massive short-dated call buying in these names — essentially a proxy long on SpaceX."
In plain terms = if you can't buy SpaceX stock, you buy calls on stocks linked to it — a side-door bet that SpaceX keeps rallying and lifts the whole sector.
Implied volatility — a gauge of how big a move the market expects — sits at 97 for EchoStar and 129 for AST SpaceMobile, both elevated. Options pricing already reflects the possibility of a sharp move in either direction.
How did ETF inflows amplify the effect?
Space-themed ETFs "UFO" and "JEDI" have gained 119% and 35% over the past year; both hold AST SpaceMobile.
Epistrophy Capital's chief strategist Cory Johnson laid out the feedback loop: money that can't get into SpaceX floods space ETFs → the funds must buy constituent stocks — AST, EchoStar, Spire — on the open market → those share prices get pushed up passively.
Johnson was blunt: "This has nothing to do with the quality of these companies, their product demand, or their cash flow."
This reflects a textbook positive-feedback cycle — inflows push prices higher, higher prices attract more inflows — but the entire chain starts with one fact: investors couldn't buy SpaceX directly.
What happens when SpaceX options go live?
SpaceX options begin trading on Tuesday. Webull president Anthony Denier called SpaceX "potentially one of the most actively traded options names among retail investors."
This means → once investors can trade SpaceX options directly, the demand to use proxy stocks as a workaround may cool fast — the very logic propping up the substitutes gets undercut.
What macro tailwind landed at the same time?
The U.S. and Iran are reportedly nearing a peace deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz → oil prices fell → Dow futures rose 363 points (~0.7%) on Friday; S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 futures each gained about 0.6%.
In plain terms = the space-stock rally caught a broader market tailwind, but that tailwind came from geopolitics, not from the space industry itself.
How long this sympathy trade lasts depends on whether SpaceX's post-IPO performance can justify the $1.77 trillion valuation the market has priced in.
Content is for reference only, not financial advice.