MINIMAX Perp Round-Trips the STAR Market Pump Into a Lock-Up Wall

The Round-Trip

The perp is down 18.23% over six hours to $70.73, unwinding most of the spike it printed alongside MiniMax's Hong Kong shares. On June 22 the cash line (0100.HK) closed up 23.89% at HK$616.50, the final leg of a roughly 30% two-session run off HK$497.60 on June 18. That run was policy, not earnings: China's mid-June STAR Market rule change clearing loss-making large-model firms to list in Shanghai, plus MiniMax's filing toward a mainland dual listing. There is no fresh negative catalyst behind this drop — the spike simply ran out of buyers.

The HIP-3 perp matters here because it amplifies the round trip. With up to 10x leverage and only about $14.2M of 24h volume, the book is thin enough that MINIMAX traded at a clear premium to the cash-implied level into the spike and has now swung to a discount on the way out. The same leverage that exaggerated the move up is exaggerating the move down.

Why the Bounce Can't Hold: The July 8 Wall

Every rally in this name keeps dying at the same place: supply. MiniMax faces a cornerstone and early-investor lock-up expiry on July 8, 2026 that puts more than half of its shares back in play. That is why strength keeps getting sold — anyone front-running the unlock has every incentive to fade the spike rather than chase it.

HSBC moved to Hold with a HK$760 target, explicitly citing the impending unlock and a wave of peer AI IPOs eroding MiniMax's scarcity premium. JPMorgan had already cut the stock to neutral in mid-June. The structural seller — locked stock coming free in roughly two weeks — sits on the offer the entire way up, which is exactly why a +24% session converts so quickly into an 18% giveback on the leveraged perp.

Losing the Pair Trade to Zhipu

Step back and the bigger story is relative, not absolute. MiniMax and Zhipu both listed in Hong Kong in January, and at debut MiniMax was nearly twice Zhipu's size. That has flipped hard: SCMP now pegs MiniMax near HK$159 billion against Zhipu's roughly HK$586 billion, about a 2.7x gap.

Capital is rotating toward the name with state support and recurring enterprise revenue, and toward firms seen as more defensible against DeepSeek's pricing pressure. There is also a plumbing disadvantage: MiniMax's weighted-voting-rights structure delays its entry into Stock Connect southbound buying until around August, while Zhipu was already inside Hong Kong's benchmark tech gauge alongside it on June 8. So the mechanical mainland bid traders keep pricing into MINIMAX spikes is still weeks out — while the supply that clears the lock-up is not.