The SpaceX IPO and the Oldest Mistake in Investing

By: Jack Strulowitz

There has never been a more exciting time to watch companies go public. SpaceX, the rocket and satellite giant that spent two decades as one of the most coveted private companies on earth, just made its debut on the Nasdaq. OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly close behind, with filings already in motion. The 2026 IPO pipeline is being described as the biggest in years, and if you follow financial news, you’ve probably felt the pull. These are genuinely transformative companies, and the excitement surrounding them is understandable. But excitement and opportunity are not the same thing, and it’s worth slowing down before confusing one for the other.

Here’s something most people don’t know about how IPOs actually work. By the time a stock is available for you to buy, it has already passed through the hands of founders, early employees, venture capital firms, and institutional investors who got in years or even decades before you, often at a price that bears no resemblance to what you’ll be paying on opening day. These investors held on not out of loyalty but because they were waiting for the IPO, which is quite literally the moment the smart early money cashes out and hands the position over to the public.

Every trade has two sides. When you buy those shares at the peak of excitement on IPO day, someone on the other end of the transaction is selling. That seller is not a stranger making a random bet, but often an institutional backer or insider who has spent years waiting for this precise moment of public enthusiasm to hand you their position. They know the company better than you do, and they chose today to get out. SpaceX, for all their incredible achievements, was already trading below their IPO price just days after going public, which is neither a coincidence nor a surprise but simply the pattern repeating itself.

None of this means IPOs are fraudulent or that these companies won’t ultimately succeed. Some of them certainly will. A company can change the world and still disappoint the investors who bought it at the top of the market.

This brings me to something I think about a lot when I see investors chasing excitement: the difference between taking the highway and taking the exit ramp.

Anyone who drives in New York knows the feeling. You’re on the highway, traffic slows to a crawl, and something in your brain says there has to be a better way. So, you take the next exit, cut through a side street, get stuck at a few lights, and then sit at a railroad crossing while the LIRR rolls by. By the time the gate lifts and you merge back onto the highway, you’ve lost more time than you ever would have sitting in traffic. And the whole detour that felt so productive at the moment turns out to be a slower grind that ends up costing you.

Chasing newly listed stocks is the financial version of taking the exit ramp. It feels like the kind of engaged, proactive move that separates serious investors from passive ones, but the engagement itself is usually the problem. The more closely you watch your portfolio, the more you’ll feel compelled to act on what you see, whether that means chasing something on the way up or cutting your losses on the way down. The irony is that the investor who checks their account every day is almost always worse off than the one who checks it once a quarter.

The late Nobel laureate and behavioral economist, Daniel Kahneman, famously summarized this, stating: “All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions.” Study after study has confirmed this, showing that the average investor earns far less than their own funds actually returned, simply because they kept jumping in and out at the wrong times.

A diversified portfolio, meaning a broad mix of equity funds holding thousands of companies across industries and geographies does not give you much to watch, and that turns out to be the whole point. Without a single name to obsess over, or an earnings call that could upend your plan overnight, the temptation to do something is largely removed, and over long stretches of time that restraint tends to be worth more than any individual stock pick.

When you own a slice of thousands of companies rather than a concentrated bet on one or two, you stop needing to be right about any individual name. History has not produced a single meaningful long-term period in which a diversified investor who stayed the course came out behind, and there is no particular reason to believe the next thirty years will be the exception.

The real competition in investing is not stocks versus funds, but discipline versus behavior, and it plays out between the investor who builds a diversified, growth-oriented portfolio and holds it through volatility and the one who keeps finding reasons to take the next exit. The boring portfolio wins not because it’s smarter, but because it removes the temptation to do something, and in investing, doing something at the wrong time is usually more expensive than doing nothing.

The 2026 IPO market will produce some winners, but it will also produce a long list of investors who bought at the top of the hype cycle and spent years waiting to get back to even. The investors who build lasting wealth tend to have one thing in common: they stopped trying to find the perfect moment and stayed the course. n

Jack Strulowitz is a Financial Advisor at Bernath & Rosenberg in Cedarhurst, NY, where he helps high-net worth individuals and families manage their investments and build comprehensive strategies for retirement, tax, and estate planning. For questions or to schedule a consultation, please contact [email protected] or 847-962-3352.

The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance referenced is historical and is no guarantee of future results. All indices are unmanaged and may not be invested into directly.

Investing involves risk including loss of principal. No strategy assures success or protects against loss. 

Securities and advisory services offered through LPL Financial, a registered investment advisor, member FINRA/SIPC.