Cboe Options Launch Sends SPCX to $225 Before the Gamma Spike Round-Trips

The Options Switch Flips

The 24-hour tape only makes sense once you know what changed: Cboe listed equity options on SPCX for the first time Tuesday, and traders did not wait. Roughly 115,000 contracts printed in the opening ten minutes and around 500,000 in the first hour, instantly making SPCX one of the busiest single-name options books on the day.

That matters because of who was on the other side. With no positioning history, no implied-vol anchor, and a sub-5% tradable float, market makers were forced to hedge call buying into an illiquid stock — the textbook short-gamma setup where dealer hedging amplifies moves instead of dampening them. The bid carried SPCX to an intraday high of $225.64 before the spike fully round-tripped back toward the $200 handle, leaving the stock up 6.49% over 24h to $204.90. The net number badly understates the session: the intraday range ran from roughly $195 to $225, a swing north of 15%.

A $2.7 Trillion Stock With Almost No Shares

At the intraday peak SPCX briefly passed Amazon to become the world's fifth-largest public company, pushing market cap toward $2.7 trillion just four sessions after pricing its IPO at $135 and raising $75 billion, the largest listing ever. The driver here is the float, not the fundamentals: only about 4.9% of shares are tradable after the greenshoe, and retail made up 56% of first-day buy orders.

A multi-trillion-dollar cap riding on a sliver of stock is exactly why options dropped a match on dry grass. It also sets up a second leg of forced demand: index trackers. SPCX is slated for FTSE Russell inclusion later this month, with MSCI and the Nasdaq 100 expected to follow, which one estimate pegs at $22–27 billion of mechanical index buying over the coming weeks. That passive bid is a real reason the dips keep getting bought — but it is demand for a reason that has nothing to do with the business.

The Bear Case the Spike Ignored

The round-trip from $225.64 is the tell. Even with structural demand stacking up, the most aggressive longs couldn't hold the highs, and the valuation crowd thinks they know why. Jim Chanos pegs SPCX at roughly 110x revenue and warns that "you just never really make much money buying equities at over 100x revenues," comparing the frenzy to the Enron-era IPO boom. Starlink is a real, cash-generating business; most of the rest of the multiple is an AI bet riding on xAI.

The near-term wildcard is mechanical. Quarterly options expiration — quad witching — lands Thursday, two days after the listing, in a name with the thinnest gamma profile on the board. The same dealer hedging that powered Tuesday's spike can reverse just as hard when those contracts expire. For perps traders the read is simple: until the float deepens, SPCX trades like an option on an option, and the clean 24h candle hides intraday ranges that have already swung double digits in a single session.