I am working on this post mid-flight heading out to see my daughter for Family Weekend at LSU. The prices you see below are Thursday’s closing prices from October 1st. Once I touch down in Louisiana, we have a crazy schedule and I want to focus on my kid whom I miss terribly thus I am not waiting for the weekly closing prices.
Three companies went public this year that I wrote about when they happened. Cerebras in May, SpaceX in June and SK Hynix in July. Those posts discussed more of the volatility that a stock price can have right after an initial public offering. Well, the dust has settled now so I thought revisiting the stock prices might provide some teaching moments, for you and me.
Where the three of them sit
- Cerebras priced at $185, closed its first day at $311.07 and closed Thursday at $169.52
- SpaceX priced at $135, closed its first day at $160.95 and closed Thursday at $148.07
- SK Hynix priced at $149, closed its first day at $168.01 and closed Thursday at $193.50
Two of the three are above the price they went public at. Cerebras is now below it. And two of the three are below the price they closed at on their first day. Full disclosure, I started writing this post on Monday, September 28 and on that day, all three were above the price they went public at. Cerebras has fallen in the last three days.
You never had a shot at the IPO price
The $185, the $135 and the $149 are the prices the underwriters sold shares at the night before trading started. Those shares went to institutions, funds and insiders. Nobody reading this got in at that price. A few of you might have, but very few.
For most of us, the first price we could pay was the opening price the next morning, and it is a different number than those listed above.
Cerebras priced at $185 and opened at $350. That is up 89 percent before a single ordinary person could buy a share. It closed that first day at $311.07 and closed Thursday at $169.52. Anyone who bought at the open is down 52 percent. I wrote about the Cerebras IPO in Weekly Notes — May 23, 2026.
At $169.52 Cerebras is below the $185 the institutions paid. Everybody who touched that stock on day one is now losing money, including the people who got the price you and I could not. Note, many employees are still doing well as they held pre-IPO shares likely well below the IPO price. For large IPOs like this, many millionaires are created on day one of trading.
One more detail on Cerebras. Its highest price in the last year is $386.34, and it hit that on its first day of trading. The best price that stock has ever seen came within hours of it becoming a public company.
What happened when index funds were required to buy
SpaceX was added to the Nasdaq 100 15 trading days after going public, one of the fastest additions on record. Every index fund tracking that index then had to buy it, roughly $4.3 billion worth. I wrote about this in Weekly Notes — June 27, 2026.
Well, SpaceX closed Thursday at $148.07, below its first-day close of $160.95. Billions of dollars of buying took place when the company was added to the Nasdaq 100. Those purchases had nothing to do with whether the company was a good investment, and the price is still lower than where day one ended.
The winner among the three IPOs
SK Hynix went public in July at $149 per share. Demand ran seven times oversubscribed, which means investors placed orders for seven times as many shares as were being sold. It closed its first day at $168.01 and closed Thursday at $193.50, up 30 percent from the offering price and up 15 percent from that first close.
Cerebras opened up 89 percent, which is a far louder signal of demand than seven times oversubscribed, and Cerebras is the one that is down by half. Demand at the offering tells you how the auction went. It does not tell you what the company is worth in three years.
The story is not over
Cerebras has been public since May. SpaceX since June. SK Hynix since July. That is nothing. Any of these three could look completely different in five years and I have no idea which way things will go.
So the lesson is not which of these companies to own. It is that three good companies produced three different outcomes over the same few months, and what separated them was the price each buyer paid. The people who did worst were the ones who bought on the first morning, when there was this fear of missing out.
If a company you want to own goes public, it will still be there in six months. So will the price, up or down. The rush is the part you get to skip. I will acknowledge it is sometimes difficult to avoid the hype. I have that same fear of missing out from time to time.
Blessings Come From the Worst of Times.
See you next Saturday.
Christopher
Nothing here is personalized financial advice — just one person’s notes. The companies named are examples, not recommendations. Always do your own homework before you invest.
Weekly Notes — October 10, 2026