Should Investors Ignore SpaceX’s Recent Stock Swings?

On the Aug. 10, 2026, episode of The Morning Filter podcast, hosts Susan Dziubinski and Morningstar Chief US Market Strategist Dave Sekera discuss SpaceX’s SPCX first earnings report as a public company. Here is an excerpt from the show.

SPCX Pulls Back After Earnings

Susan Dziubinski: SpaceX SPCX reported earnings last week for the first time as a public company. The stock pulled back after. Dave, how did earnings look, and did Morningstar make any changes to its fair value estimate on the stock?

David Sekera: With SpaceX, it should be a surprise to no one just how much revenue is growing. If you look at the second quarter, revenue is up 92% year over year, and that was really led by its AI solutions group. I think the revenue there grew by about sevenfold. Taking a look at some of the other divisions like Launch and Starlink, those were up 29% and 67%, respectively. However, a lot of that was offset by higher research and development spending in order to be able to support that kind of growth. The company’s still registering operating losses. There are a lot of details in the stock analyst note written by Nicolas Owens. I’d say if you have an interest in SpaceX, go to the note and take a read through. But net-net, there was really no change to our forecast. Nicolas reaffirmed our $62 fair value per share.

I’d say the takeaway here, when you think about this company overall, is that the market’s just still factoring in much more optimistic scenarios specifically for Starship, greater commercial advantages for those orbital data centers than we think is most probable. As a reminder, when you think about how to be able to value this company, you really have to do a lot of scenario analysis and come up with your probabilities for each of their divisions, trying to understand what is the potential for the total amount of growth over really the next five to 10 years. When you put that together on that probability-weighted basis, that’s really how we dial into our fair value estimate for this one.

SpaceX’s Short-Term Trading Patterns

Dziubinski: Let’s talk a little bit about SpaceX’s stock activity last week. It was a volatile week for the stock, yet it finished the week up almost 23%, even after we saw some of those lockups expiring. What do you make of it?

Sekera: This is one where you really need to divorce what’s going on with the fundamentals of the company and the valuation of the company versus how it’s going to trade in the marketplace because a lot of these technical factors like the lockups and when the lockups open up and how much of those restricted shares become available. In this case, I think it was about 20% of the restricted shares became available for sale. My understanding is that’s over 900 million shares. In this situation, you need to think about, from a passive versus active standpoint, who might be buying and selling the stocks. If you think about passive funds and ETFs, essentially these are funds or investment styles that are trying to match an index. They have to buy and sell stock in the same proportion as that stock is a percentage of that index by market cap.

The question here becomes: Of all of these newly unrestricted shares, how many of them are sold by those people that own those shares versus how many are kept? And compare that with what percentage of the market overall in those indexes are passive and how much they have to buy versus how much is actively managed money out there in the funds, what retail investors are doing to be able to then absorb the amount of the shares that are being sold by those newly eligible shares. Again, there’s a lot going on here, a lot of machinations in the short term, which you just really don’t know. In this case, I think that there potentially could be a huge impact to the short-term trading of the shares, but overall, it’s not meaningful to what we think SpaceX’s long-term intrinsic valuation is worth. According to our analysis, it’s a 1-star-rated stock that trades at double our $62 fair value estimate.

Again, I would say if you’re really involved in SpaceX, you need to understand what those fundamentals are, what your assumptions are as far as that long-term growth for this company. In this case, if you want to be involved in the company, I think you need to ignore what’s going on with the short-term trading patterns.

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