SpaceX shares may see buying surge from Nasdaq rebalancing as index weight triples

SpaceX’s stock has had a rough couple of months since its post-IPO euphoria faded, dropping roughly 31-34% from its peak of $225.64 to trade in the $147-$153 range. But a wave of forced buying may be heading its way, and it has nothing to do with rockets. The Nasdaq-100’s quarterly rebalance, expected around September 21, is set to dramatically increase SpaceX’s weighting in the index. The company’s share could jump from about 1% to over 3.5%, a shift that would compel every fund tracking the index to mechanically load up on more stock. Why the weight is about to jump When SpaceX debuted on public markets with its June 12 IPO at $135 per share, the vast majority of its stock was locked up, restricted from trading. That limited public float kept its Nasdaq-100 weighting artificially low relative to its massive valuation, which landed somewhere between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion. Now those lockups are expiring in waves. The first tranche hit on August 6, releasing 911.5 million shares into the market. A second batch of approximately 378 million shares is set to unlock around September 9-10, just days before the rebalancing calculation takes place. J.P. Morgan estimated that Space...