SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status • Hacker News Board

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#341

Post by 8note » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

tyre wrote: post #62

formvoltron wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nah the very worst thing about the spacex ipo is that schwab won't allow me to short it. has nothing to do with the recency of the issue. today i shorted some skhy when i realized it's trading about 30% over the Korean share price (I could be wrong about that)

I'm not an investor in SpaceX but I don't think shorting stocks at IPO should be allowed. The market should be given time to settle on a price, and it's unlikely that anyone needs to short it on day 1 for hedging. It's purely price speculation. Yeah, I know why people _want to_ (betting), but it doesn't serve a broader economic purpose.

the company manipulates itself to look its best possible, taking long term bad decisions in order to juice the value, and wont have more immediate items to juice the share price again for a while

its a reasonable expectation that 3 months after an IPO the price will be lower than it was at IPO

not really a bet so much as that on average the prices at IPO are a local maxima

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#342

Post by sebastiennight » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

wredcoll wrote: post #299

mikelitoris wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like no true scotsman. Remember kids: socialism is judged by how it failed in real life, capitalism is judged by how perfect it is in theory

The term "capitalism" was literally only created for the purpose of writing criticisms of the (then) current system of markets/trading/taxing/investing. Try actually defining capitalism in a way that doesn't apply to basically any random society since the dawn of agriculture. Stuff like people buying and selling items using a currency for a price the individual chooses has been common to basically every human society…

> Try actually defining capitalism in a way that doesn't apply to basically any random society since the dawn of agriculture.

.. feudalism?

Which, AFAIK, lasted much longer, and is just not the same thing?

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#343

Post by 8note » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

wredcoll wrote: post #318

notahacker wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're confident the price of bananas will fall tomorrow you absolutely can sign a contract to deliver bananas next week at the current price and then buy them when the price drops...

Yes, you can but does that ability benefit the population/nation/market as a whole?

yes because shorts can also be wrong, and the buyer knows they have a stable price

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#344

Post by danudey » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

wredcoll wrote: post #299

mikelitoris wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like no true scotsman. Remember kids: socialism is judged by how it failed in real life, capitalism is judged by how perfect it is in theory

The term "capitalism" was literally only created for the purpose of writing criticisms of the (then) current system of markets/trading/taxing/investing. Try actually defining capitalism in a way that doesn't apply to basically any random society since the dawn of agriculture. Stuff like people buying and selling items using a currency for a price the individual chooses has been common to basically every human society…

Saw an interesting discussion on how capitalism has existed for as long as markets have existed, including ancient Greece, and how it inevitably leads to wealth inequality, monopolistic behavior, unsustainable resource extraction, and all the other negatives we see today. The only difference is that in Greece, all of these negatives would have been applied locally but now they're all being applied globally. Instead of one super-wealthy man being a pain in the ass for the local Athens economy, he can now ruin things for everyone everywhere.

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#345

Post by groundzeros2015 » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

baggy_trough wrote: post #280

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly is a contrast from the Tesla years. But overall I think the current consensus is: - we don’t believe in startups (low quality scams) - we don’t believe in technology. (It’s surveillance and distraction). - we don’t believe in markets (regulate the RAM) - we don’t believe in agency (unruly rule breakers) And honestly we’ve seen a lot of events that strengthen those positions. Some of it is age as well. I’…

I can't identify one item on that list that I think would be fair to consider a consensus.

Really? Do you want to try one out?

I don’t see very many articles interested in new startups. It’s usually about them failing. I often use market explanations in my comments and these are not received favorably.

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#346

Post by runarberg » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

z2 wrote: post #138

runarberg wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one am glad that you were not allowed to short SpaceX. People gaming the market for their own profits are the worst kind of exploiters and swindlers. You contribute absolutely nothing while siphoning the profits that workers make, lowering the salaries of everyone that actually works for a living. Note this has nothing to do with my feelings about SpaceX. I am Elon hater nr. 1 and hope SpaceX burns to dust, I o…

Putting one's money where their mouth is in expressing that a company's stock appears overvalued is very low on my list of "things that exploit the proletariat."

I don’t care the method people use to game the market. They are still participating in a systematic exploitation of workers and deserve the maximum of nothing of what they hope to gain.

My parent wanted to make some unearned money by making speculations and gambles. If they were allowed and if they were successful, they would have made a bunch of money while contributing nothing. Every single dollar they would have made in their speculative gamble would have come from somebody else who actually contributed and but didn’t get the full value from their work.

I am glad that my parent was denied the privileged to participate in this systematic exploitation. The ideal number of speculative investors is zero, and any movement towards that number is an improvement for workers.

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#347

Post by danudey » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

wredcoll wrote: post #301

adrianN wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there even a government under true capitalism or is it more like the lunar anarchy described in „the moon is a harsh mistress“?

What even is "true capitalism"?

Usually "true capitalism" means one of two things:

1. Capitalism where there is no government or regulatory interference, and the "invisible hand of the free market" produces some kind of utopian society based purely on every business abiding by rules enforced by no one, where somehow corporations don't take advantage of workers they way they do now despite there being no laws against it.

2. The same thing but sarcastically because it's obvious that that system would be demonstrably worse than the restricted version of capitalism that we have now.

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#348

Post by elbasti » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

Here's what this means for SpaceX for those of you uninitiated in bond-math:

1. SpaceX issued long-term bonds whose coupon (ie, "interest rate") was 6.5%.

2. Those bonds are now trading for less than their face value. That means that if you buy one of those bonds on the secondary market, you will get a return (yield) of 7.387% (if the price of a bond goes down, but the coupon stays the same, the yield goes up).

3. This doesn't affect SpaceX directly, but it tells you that if SpaceX were to issue new bonds today, they would have to offer 7.4% coupon on them, not 6.5%. Note that even though that was caused by a 10% drop in the bond value, it's a 13% increase in cost of borrowing!

SpaceX is a cash-flow negative company that depends on debt and selling equity in order to pay the bills. They will have to issue bonds again, and those bonds will be more expensive.

Note that the shortest maturity bonds don't have to be repaid for 5 years, so the impact on cash is not going to manifest for a while...at least 5 years time (assuming they did another bond offering tomorrow). In that sense it's a nothingburger.

The immediate impact it could have is if spacex depends on issuing new, shorter-term debt (lines of credit, etc) whose price could be impacted by the market's perception of their riskiness.

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#349

Post by fluoridation » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

artemonster wrote: post #296

dgritsko wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You dropped your "/s".

This is not reddit, people actually read and understand sarcasm (most of the time)

Poe's law means you should still give some indication that you're making a joke.

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#350

Post by bko » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

tavavex wrote: post #137

lucd wrote: post #41

The worst about the SpaceX IPO is Nasdaq changing their inclusion rules for the Nasdaq 100. The index fast-tracked SpaceX stock for inclusion 15 days after the IPO, instead of the normal three-month seasoning period. They also changed its 10% minimum float rule to a 3x weighting boost for low-float stockss. So many people will unwillingly and prematurely invest into SpaceX, before it has any chance to discover its re…

So, the inclusion rules are basically "these are the hard limits that specify which stocks are eligible, unless someone really big and lucrative comes along, in which case it's whatever and we'll just adjust the rules to make them eligible"?

I think the rules are there are hard limits unless a multi-trillion dollar company IPOs with a significant absolute float, in which case tracking the "market" obviously includes said company.