SPCX Bounces Off Its Post-IPO Low as Ark Invest Keeps Buying the Dip

What Turned the Tape

$SPCX is up 5.69% to about $127, and the buyer with a name attached to it is Cathie Wood's Ark Invest, which added 170,634 shares across ARKK, ARKQ, ARKX and ARKW as the stock printed a fresh 52-week low near $119.68 on July 20. Ark has bought SpaceX nearly every week since the June 12 IPO and hasn't sold a single share — so this isn't a new thesis, it's the same buyer leaning harder into the low. That's the honest read here: there's no fresh operational headline behind the move, just a persistent institutional bid meeting a washed-out tape.

The Hole It's Climbing Out Of

Context matters, because $127 is still a long way down. SPCX sits roughly 47% below its $225.64 post-IPO high and trades under the $135 IPO price. The overhang is structural: an IPO lockup of roughly 911.5 million shares begins unlocking in August, and the company's first quarterly report as a public entity lands in early August — two events that can reprice the stock regardless of what the tape does this week. Bears argue the valuation is still rich for the current business mix; the Street average target sits near $234, with Morgan Stanley at $300 and a fringe bull case running higher if the xAI and compute story scales.

Sentiment Is the Fuel

The setup underneath the bounce is more interesting than the bounce itself. Retail sentiment on Stocktwits flipped to 'extremely bearish' with message volume up 400% in a day, and the crowd is openly waiting for cheaper prices — 34% say they won't add until sub-$80, another 28% want sub-$100, and only 19% are willing at current levels. When a name is this hated near a psychological low and a known institution keeps buying, sharp bounces off the bottom are exactly what you'd expect. The perp confirms the interest: this HIP-3 market turned over more than $207M in the last 24 hours.

The Real Test Is Thursday

None of this resolves until Starship flies. SpaceX is targeting Flight 13 for July 23–24 from Starbase after the July 16 attempt aborted at T-0 when several Raptor engines failed to ignite. This is the second flight of Starship V3 and carries the first 20 Starlink V3 satellites — a real payload, not just a test article. A clean flight is the first genuine catalyst that can turn a dip-buy into a trend; another scrub or failure hands the tape straight back to the $120 sellers.