SPCX Perp Runs 24% Rich to the Cash as Forced Index Buying Hits a 4% Float

Days Into the Largest IPO Ever

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share and began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX on June 12, selling roughly 555.6 million Class A shares to raise about $75 billion — the largest IPO on record. At a ~$1.77 trillion valuation, the company opened day one larger than Tesla and seventh among U.S. public companies.

Shares opened at $150, ran past $176 intraday, and closed their debut at $160.95, up 19%. By the end of the week the cash stock was changing hands around $172-178. The Hyperliquid SPCX perp has gone further: it sits at $217.00, up 29.66% over the last 24 hours on $959 million of volume. This is raw momentum on a name that has traded for only a handful of sessions and has almost no shares to go around.

A Wall of Forced Buyers Against a 4% Float

The reason SPCX can move like this is structural, not narrative. Only 3-5% of the company actually floats — roughly $45-100 billion of tradable stock against a ~$1.75 trillion cap — with the rest locked up by insiders and pre-IPO holders. Into that thin supply comes a wave of price-insensitive demand: SpotGamma estimates $22-27 billion of mechanical Nasdaq-100 and Russell buying in the weeks after listing, with QQQ alone running ~$500 billion in assets and total Nasdaq-100 trackers north of $1.4 trillion.

MSCI and FTSE Russell fast-tracked SPCX into their indexes after the debut, so index funds have to buy regardless of price to keep tracking their benchmarks. When forced buyers meet a borrow-constrained 4% float, small flows move the tape hard — which is exactly what the chart is showing.

Why the Perp Trades Rich to the Cash

Here is the part that matters for perps traders: the SPCX perp at $217.00 is running roughly 24% above a cash stock near $175. That basis is not a glitch — it is the price of leveraged long access to an asset you can barely get long anywhere else. The underlying is nearly impossible to borrow and has a microscopic float, so there is no easy way to short the perp and buy the cash to arbitrage the gap shut.

Normally index inclusion or a deeper float would eventually pull the two prices together. But S&P Dow Jones rejected fast-tracking SPCX into the S&P 500 on profitability and seasoning grounds, pushing that inclusion out to no sooner than mid-2027. With the cleanest liquidity mechanism off the table for a year-plus, the premium can persist — and funding longs are the ones paying to hold it.

What Sets the Next Leg

Three dates frame the trade. Options on SPCX begin June 16, giving the cash market its first real hedging and dealer-flow layer, which could either dampen or amplify the swings. The bulk of index inclusion lands late June into early July — that is when the forced bid peaks and also when it ends, so the supply-demand imbalance is front-loaded rather than ongoing.

The other side is the 180-day insider lockup that expires in December, when locked shares can finally reach the market and fatten the float. Until then this is a supply-starved stock with a wall of mandatory buyers, and the perp is the high-beta expression of that imbalance. The thing that turns the basis the other way is a fading index bid with no fresh buyers to replace it.