By Christine Idzelis
Individual investors will soon have access to risky ETFs that let them make bets on SpaceX shares
How will SpaceX’s stock perform after the company goes public?
Excitement around the upcoming market debut of SpaceX has spurred the exchange-traded-fund industry to plan new ETFs that will that give traders a way to make risky leveraged bets on the company’s stock after its initial public offering.
After Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPCX) goes public on Friday, ProShares is expected to launch on Monday the ProShares Ultra SpaceX ETF, which will trade under the ticker “SPCF” and which targets two times the daily return of SpaceX’s common stock, Simeon Hyman, global investment strategist at ProShares, told MarketWatch in a phone interview on Thursday.
Earlier this week, ProShares had said in a press release that the ETF would launch on June 12, the same day SpaceX goes public.
Meanwhile, Themes ETFs is planning to launch the Leverage Shares 2X Long SpaceX Daily ETF (ticker “SPCH”) and the Leverage Shares 2X Short SpaceX Daily ETF (“SSPC”). The firm tentatively plans to be ready to launch the new SpaceX ETFs on the Cboe at 4 a.m. Eastern time on Monday, Paul Marino, chief revenue officer at Themes ETFs, told MarketWatch by phone on Thursday.
While the firm’s announcement Wednesday indicated the ETFs would trade on the New York Stock Exchange, Marino told MarketWatch that “we wanted to make the product accessible to investors as soon as we possibly can, and Cboe gave us that opportunity.”
SpaceX is widely anticipated to be the largest initial public offering on record, with an expected IPO price of $135, amounting to a $1.77 trillion market value for the company.
Companies such as SpaceX have been staying private longer, which may have led to “pent-up demand” for them in public markets, Hyman said.
While individual investors may soon passively gain exposure to SpaceX via funds tracking indexes such as the Nasdaq-100 NDX, leveraged ETFs are risky and aren’t intended for investors who want to hold the underlying stock over the long term. For traders who want to speculate on the direction of travel for SpaceX shares, a move higher in its daily stock price could lead to juiced-up returns via the leveraged ETFs. But a wrong-way leveraged bet would magnify losses.
To achieve their objectives, leveraged ETFs use derivatives as opposed to investing directly in the underlying shares of a company.
For bullish investors trading the ProShares Ultra SpaceX ETF, if the company’s stock rises on a given day, that means the ETF should gain about two times as much as SpaceX’s shares.
But the prospectus for the ProShares ETF warns that, “conversely, it should lose approximately two times as much as SPCX when SPCX falls on a given day.”
As part of their risk management, traders in the ProShares Ultra SpaceX ETF should also consider the construction of their broader portfolios, Hyman said. Single-stock ETFs have been one of the fastest-growing areas of the market for leveraged ETFs, he added.
Themes’s planned Leverage Shares 2X Long SpaceX Daily ETF similarly aims for 200% of the daily performance of SpaceX shares. For bearish traders, the firm’s Leverage Shares 2X Short SpaceX Daily ETF will provide a way to potentially profit from their expectations for a daily decline in the company’s share price.
Themes also flagged risks for investors considering making juiced-up bets on the rise or fall of SpaceX’s stock using its leveraged ETFs.
“For periods longer than a single day, the Funds will lose money if SPCX has flat performance, and it is possible that the Funds will lose money even if SPCX performance rises or falls over a period longer than a single day,” Themes said in its announcement Wednesday evening of the new ETFs. The firm also acknowledged how a wrong-way bet on an expected decline or climb in SpaceX shares risks being painful for traders.
“An investor could lose the full principal value of his/her investment within a single day if the price of SPCX increases or decreases by more than 50% in one trading day,” Themes warned.
Earlier this year, Themes launched a leveraged ETF CBRG linked to shares of Cerebras Systems (CBRS) following the artificial-intelligence-chip maker’s IPO in May.
Cerebras’s IPO is among the largest so far in 2026.
See: As SpaceX IPO anticipation heats up, what 2026’s biggest IPOs say about investor demand
To underscore the volatility of leveraged ETFs, the Leverage Shares 2X Long CBRS Daily ETF saw a gain of 36.4% on June 8, FactSet data show, as Cerebras shares rose 18.3%. And on June 1, the ETF plunged 20.4% as the stock fell 10%.
On Thursday afternoon, the Leverage Shares 2X Long CBRS Daily ETF was down more than 10% in recent trading as shares of Cerebras’s stock dropped more than 5%, according to FactSet data.
-Christine Idzelis
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06-11-26 1604ET
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