SpaceX kept climbing after its June 12 debut, closing around $161 on the first full day of trading and lifting the stock roughly 19% above its $135 offer price. For Allen Tran, that was the kind of move that turns a quick profit into a nagging regret.
Tran bought SpaceX shares on the Friday they started trading and sold them that same afternoon. The 28-year-old says he walked away with one small five-figure gain, but figures he left about $60,000 on the table as the stock kept rising after he was out.
That is why why is SpaceX stock dropping is showing up in search now: the shares did not begin with weakness, they opened with a rush higher that caught even early buyers off guard. By Tuesday, the stock was nearly 50% above its offer price, and a 4.8% pop that day pushed SpaceX past Amazon to become the world’s fifth-largest public company by market value.
Tran said he did not expect the move to keep going. “I don’t think anyone expected SpaceX to rally like this,” he said, adding that he would “much rather have done nothing and made more.” He said people in trading group chats ended up sounding the same note of regret, with some wishing they had bought at $135 instead of taking profits too soon.
Another early seller, Aaron Cook, described his own exit as a defense rather than a missed windfall. “It was just me cutting my risk,” he said. But even he wondered who could have planned for three straight days of gains, saying, “Who expects 20% [gains] three days in a row?”
The backdrop is a frenzy that helped SpaceX raise about $86 billion in the IPO and made it one of the best three-day starts on record among offerings that raised more than $10 billion. Regular investors had been able to request shares before the debut through brokerages like Fidelity and Robinhood, but some of the fastest sellers now face a longer penalty: Fidelity will not let investors who sell within the first 15 trading days join future offerings.
That leaves the sharper question for anyone watching the stock now: whether the move has been a first-day sprint or the start of something still being repriced. The immediate answer is simple enough for Tran, who sold too early to benefit from the rally and now has the math to prove it.
