After June 26, when SpaceX begins its index inclusion, how will tens of billions of dollars flow in? Will SpaceX see a massive price surge?

Author: SoSoValue Research



If you open any stock trading app or forum right now, you’ll likely see the same types of posts:

“$SPCX is about to be added to the Nasdaq 100. Tens of billions in passive capital will flow in. Should I position myself early?”

“It takes effect on July 6. Will it surge 20 points that day?”

As of press time, according to data from the decentralized RWA asset trading platform SoDEX.com, the perpetual contract price for SpaceX ($SPCX) is trading around $150. The total market cap of a company not even officially included in an index has already “taken off” to $2 trillion—that’s the magic of speculative anticipation.

If you’re already pondering these questions, you’re thinking deeper than 70% of traders. But the truth might shock you—those billions of dollars in buy orders will not blindly rush in on "effective date" to lift the price for you. The scene you imagine of a “big player buying with one click” simply doesn’t exist on Wall Street’s script.

In this article, we’ll thoroughly dissect what seems like a simple matter of index inclusion. You’ll find it’s actually a carefully choreographed, multi-participant liquidity game. If you don’t understand the rules, you might easily go from being a "booster" to becoming the exit liquidity.

1. The “Master Commander” You Imagine Doesn’t Exist

The average retail investor pictures it like this:

At 9:30 AM on July 6, the Nasdaq opens. A “master commander” of a trillion-dollar index fund gives the order. A trader hits enter, sending a massive buy order directly into the market, sending $SPCX’s stock price rocketing higher.

Dramatic. Exciting. But completely wrong.

In reality, those hundreds of billions of dollars are scattered across hundreds of fund companies. BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street—each manages funds tracking different indices. They don’t collude, have no unified command, and are even competitors. Yet their actions sync up perfectly at a specific moment, not because someone is directing them, but because they all follow the same golden rule:

“Minimize tracking error.”

The KPI for a passive fund isn’t “how much money it made,” but “how closely it tracked its index.” Buying cheap isn’t good; buying expensive is a major sin. Any deviation from the closing price used for index calculation creates tracking error. Too much error, and fund managers lose their bonuses or even their jobs.

So, the last thing these people want is to “stand out.” Their only wish is to complete their required purchases on index reconstitution day at a price as close to the closing price as possible. They don’t want bargains, they don’t want attention. They just want to get the job done like ghosts.

This leads to a dilemma: hundreds of hungry competitors must rush into the same store at the same time to grab the same coveted item, under orders that whoever pays too much is fired.

Guess how they compete?

2. Two Types of Indices, Two Scripts, But Never Acting on the “Last Day”

SpaceX is being added to two indices: the Russell US Index and the Nasdaq 100. Their different rules create completely different buying rhythms.

Script 1: The Russell Index – The Drama is in the Final Minute

The Russell Index rule is brutally simple: Reconstitution is announced on June 26, and takes effect immediately after the close on that day. No hesitation period, no transition.

Retail investors usually think funds tracking the Russell will be buying aggressively all day on June 26. But watching the intraday chart might disappoint you—the price might be calm, and volume might not be as explosive as expected.

That’s because all the buying is compressed into the final seconds of the close.

Wall Street has a tool specifically invented for this day: the MOC order (Market-On-Close). In plain English: “I don’t care what the final price is. Right at the closing auction, you must fill my order completely.”

On Russell reconstitution day, trillions of dollars in passive capital converge into a tsunami of MOC orders in the final minutes before the close. The closing auction volume on the NYSE and Nasdaq explodes by several times. You watch the chart all day, thinking nothing happened, but the massive real turnover happens silently in the few seconds of the closing bell.

You didn’t see the volume spike because you didn’t watch those few seconds closely enough.

Script 2: The Nasdaq 100 – A 10-Day “Legal Head Start” Window

Nasdaq’s rules are different. According to predictions, SpaceX will be announced for fast inclusion on June 26, with formal effectiveness on July 6. These 10 days in between are the most exciting phase of the entire game.

Many retail investors agonize: should I buy on announcement day or wait until the effective date?

The answer: Whatever you think of, Wall Street has already thought of it and is executing it with real money. During these 10 days, three groups of players emerge:

First Wave: Arbitrage Funds – The Legal “Booster Crew.”

On the very day of the announcement, they start accumulating. Their logic is brutally simple: hundreds of billions in passive capital *must* buy on July 6, regardless of cost. If I buy now and sell it to them during the closing auction, it’s a guaranteed profit. They aren’t betting on SpaceX’s fundamentals; they are betting that “passive buying is inelastic.”

Second Wave: More Aggressive Index Funds.

They fear that the freely tradable float on July 6 will be too small to buy their required quantity. So, they start buying a day or two early, using algorithms to break orders into small chunks and stealthily accumulate in the secondary market.

Third Wave: The Most Disciplined Index Funds.

They strictly follow the rules, saving their biggest buy order for the closing auction on July 6, using MOC to solve the problem in one shot.

So, the real script for the 10-day window is: In the first few days after the announcement, arbitrage capital pushes the price up. In the middle days, front-running funds stealthily accumulate. On the final day, the main force executes precise crosses with the arbitrage funds during the closing auction.

Here’s the painful conclusion: If you rush in on July 6, expecting passive capital to lift the price, you’re most likely the exit liquidity being sold to by the first two waves of players.

3. Lock-Up Period: The Ultimate Boss Determining the “Squeeze”

The analysis above is based on the assumption that there is sufficient free-floating stock available for purchase.

SpaceX breaks this assumption.

From its IPO on June 12 to the reconstitution dates of June 26 and July 6, it’s less than a month. Following traditional IPO lock-up rules, the vast majority of shares held by pre-IPO investors are locked up for 180 days. The actual “free float” available for trading in the secondary market might be only 10-15% of total shares.

Let’s do the math: Assume SpaceX’s market cap post-IPO is $2 trillion, with a free float of 15%. That means a free float market cap of $300 billion. Passive funds tracking just the Nasdaq 100 are expected to buy $10.2 billion to $12.7 billion worth of shares. This means they need to absorb over 4% of the free float.

4% in a single day. And it’s hundreds of hungry funds using “at any cost” MOC orders.

If all this money tried to buy aggressively during the closing auction on July 6, the price wouldn’t just move a few points; it could create a massive spike of tens of points or more.

So, how do Wall Street’s hungry funds avoid the stampede?

The answer might surprise you again: They don’t go to the “supermarket” to fight at all.

Path 1: “Backdoor” Block Trades

Fund managers directly call up investment bank sales desks: “Find me a few big institutional holders to trade with privately. I’ll negotiate a price OTC and transfer hundreds of millions in stock in one go. Don’t create chaos for me on the public exchange.”

These OTC block trades don’t go through the exchange’s central order book. The price is negotiated, and details might be disclosed days later. You stare at the candlestick chart and see nothing.

Path 2: “Detour” via Derivatives

A more advanced play involves signing a total return swap with large shareholders who are still in their lock-up period. Simply put: you keep holding the shares in name, but all the economic exposure (gains and losses) from the stock’s price movement belongs to me. Through this derivative arrangement, the index fund perfectly bypasses the legal restriction against selling locked-up shares and avoids the exchange’s public market system.

Here’s the ultimate truth: The vast majority of that hundreds of billions in index buy orders will never appear in the volume bars on your candlestick chart. They are completed silently in the “dark pools” and OTC markets you can’t see, via block trades and derivatives.

You’ve been waiting for a massive volume surge as a signal, but the smart money has already finished its work in the shadows.

4. A Survival Guide for Retail Investors: How Can You Participate?

After all this talk about “how not to play,” you must be wondering: how *should* I participate?

First, the harsh reality: in terms of information, tools, and access, ordinary retail investors are at a massive disadvantage compared to institutions. Trying to trade short-term against institutions is a bet with odds worse than a coin flip. So we’ll focus on relatively stable “boring methods” that don’t rely on insider knowledge.

The Worst Strategy: Chasing Momentum

Seeing the June 26 announcement, some retail investors assume the price will definitely rise and immediately jump in. Bolder ones might use derivatives to amplify returns. In such a volatile game, misjudging the direction combined with high leverage leads to instant liquidation. You think you’re arbitraging, but you’re actually engaging in a knife fight with a well-equipped institution.

The Middle Strategy: Wait for Emotional Lows, Go Long-Term

The logic is simple: index inclusion creates structural passive capital demand that is real and long-term. But short-term prices will be whipsawed by arbitrage capital and emotion.

If you are long-term bullish on SpaceX, consider waiting for the dust to settle—say, a week or two after the effective date. The arbitrage capital will be done selling, volume will normalize, and the price will stabilize. Then you can consider scaling into a position. For building a position, you could use leverage tools available on platforms like SoDEX.com, a popular decentralized RWA trading platform supporting up to 20x leverage on SpaceX. This way, you’re betting on the company’s growth. SoDEX has also recently launched a $SPCX trading event with a prize pool of up to $100,000, offering additional upside potential.

The Best Strategy: Profit from Volatility with Options – The Most Stable & Technical

Around index inclusion, the biggest certainty is not whether the price goes up or down, but that volatility will absolutely spike. Everyone knows big money is coming, but no one knows the exact day it will hit. This uncertainty pushes option premiums to very high levels.

This gives option sellers a natural advantage. A classic stable strategy is to sell a Strangle when implied volatility spikes—simultaneously selling an out-of-the-money call and an out-of-the-money put.

You aren’t betting on price direction. You’re betting that “the price won’t go up *too* much, and won’t go down *too* much.” As long as the stock price stays between the two strike prices at expiration, you collect the entire premium. Why is this relatively stable? Because you’re on the side of time. Arbitrage capital and passive funds will likely complete their exchange off-exchange in dark pools, so the actual price movement on the chart is often less dramatic than what the options market is pricing in. You are profiting from a “pricing error.”

Of course, a warning: if a true black swan event occurs (e.g., lock-up shares are suddenly allowed to be sold early), a seller’s theoretical loss is unlimited. Strict position sizing and stop-loss plans are absolutely necessary.

Core Mindset

In this game, the most important skill for retail isn’t “how to front-run institutions,” but “how to use the constraints of their rules to find their pricing mistakes.” Options volatility arbitrage is one such approach with a relatively higher win rate.

5. So, Will SpaceX's Price Explode Upwards?

Having read this far, you should be able to answer this question yourself.

It might go up, but definitely not in the way you imagine an “instant 20-point surge on the effective date.”

The real action will likely happen during the warm-up period after the June 26 announcement. Arbitrage and front-running funds will battle it out, pushing the price to an equilibrium level. By the time the effective date of July 6 arrives, you might see a curious sight: extremely high volume, but a calm price. Because buyers and sellers are executing precise crosses in the closing auction.

The “final decisive battle” you imagine is actually a carefully rehearsed “settlement ceremony.” The thrilling charge has already sounded before the battle begins. By the time you hear the noise and rush in, only scattered cleanup operations remain on the battlefield.

So, back to the question at the start of this article:

How does hundreds of billions of dollars buy into SpaceX?

The answer is: It gets bought in places you can’t see, using tools you can’t imagine, and it’s finished long before you’re paying attention.

On the index table, the most important thing isn’t guessing heads or tails. It’s understanding the rules of the game. Otherwise, you won’t even know how you lost.