What a week. Jobs report panic. Gold crashing. Bitcoin wobbling. Chip stocks getting hit hard. And now Friday morning Nasdaq futures are green and the biggest IPO in history is just hours away. Lot to process.
Thursday Turned Everything Around
Monday to Wednesday was bad. Really bad. Then Thursday showed up and flipped the whole mood.
Nasdaq jumped 2.6% in a single session. S&P 500 gained 1.75%. Dow rallied 930 points. Chip stocks led the whole thing. Same chip stocks that were getting sold off all week. Thursday they came back strong. Market basically decided the AI trade is not dead. Just had a rough few days.
Outside the US it was same story. South Korea Kospi gained 7% Thursday after that wild 8% crash earlier in the week. Japan Nikkei climbed 3.4%. Markets that got beaten up earlier found buyers again.
Friday morning is continuing that mood but more quietly. Nasdaq futures up 0.2%. S&P 500 futures up 0.2%. Dow futures up around 40 points. Not a big move but after the week we just had green is green.
Trump Peace Talk Is Doing a Lot of Work
Big part of Thursday’s rally and Friday’s calm morning traces back to Trump. He said a US-Iran agreement is basically ready. Documents are close to done. Signing could happen soon. The deal is focused on making sure Iran does not get a nuclear weapon.
Markets had already moved positively earlier when Trump said planned US strikes on Iran were called off. Less conflict in the Middle East means less pressure on oil prices. Less oil pressure means less inflation risk. Less inflation risk means the Fed has less reason to raise rates. Long chain but each step connects.
Gold also bounced on this. Went back above $4,200 after dropping near $4,020 earlier this week. Same asset reacting to the same driver just going the other direction now. Rate fears eased a little and gold caught a bid.
SpaceX Is the Real Reason Today Is Different
Everything else this week was basically the warm up. The jobs report drama. Gold selling off. Bitcoin testing $60,000. Iran headlines. All of it was the opening act.
SpaceX goes public today on Nasdaq under ticker SPCX. And the numbers are genuinely hard to get your head around.
$135 per share. 555.6 million shares. $75 billion raised. $1.75 trillion valuation on day one.
That $75 billion raise would be the largest IPO in history. Not close to the record. The record by a wide margin. And the valuation puts SpaceX alongside Apple and Microsoft in terms of size except those companies took decades to get there. SpaceX is doing it on the first day of being public.
Elon Musk’s personal stake in this also becomes something that people will be talking about for a long time if the stock trades near this valuation. Numbers that get compared to the GDP of small countries.
Big IPO Also Means Big Question
Here is the thing with an IPO this size. The money to buy $75 billion of SpaceX has to come from somewhere. Some is fresh money. But a lot of it is probably coming from selling other things. Other stocks. Crypto. Bonds. Whatever people need to sell to free up cash.
That is what liquidity absorption means in plain language. It is not necessarily bad but it can create short term pressure on other assets. Some tech stocks might dip today not because anything is wrong with them but because money that would have gone there is going to SpaceX instead.
How big that effect actually is will be one of the things to watch today.
So Where Does This Leave Us
Cautiously better than Monday. That is the honest answer.
Week started in genuine panic. Worst Nasdaq day in over a year. Gold and crypto both getting crushed. War headlines everywhere. By Thursday that had fully reversed with one of the stronger single day rallies in recent memory.
Now the backdrop looks slightly calmer. Geopolitical tension possibly easing. Rate hike fears cooling a little. And the biggest IPO ever about to test whether investors still have appetite for huge valuations after everything this week put them through.
If SpaceX pops hard today it probably means risk appetite is genuinely back and this week was just noise. If it trades flat like Quantinuum did earlier this week that tells a different story. One where enthusiasm for mega valuations is more fragile than it looks.
By end of day we will know a lot more than we do right now.