This was a wild week. The market swung in both directions on news that mostly was not about the companies whose stocks were moving. Alphabet’s record stock issuance from last week kept teaching its lesson. And on Friday, the largest IPO in stock market history hit the Nasdaq. Three items, all connected by a single thread: when prices move, ask why before reacting. Let’s get into it.
1. A week of wild swings, mostly on headlines that did not change a single company
Last week I wrote about Friday’s big drop and the distinction between noise and a real repricing of expectations. The Iran headlines from that week were noise. The jobs report was a repricing. Telling them apart mattered.
This week tested that lesson over and over. The Nasdaq opened the week up sharply, then dropped hard mid-week on a drone shootdown and harsher language out of Washington, then climbed back on talk of a deal being days away, then wobbled again on a fresh drone strike Friday morning, then rallied into the close as news leaned positive again. By the end of Friday the major indexes were green, but the path to get there was extraordinary.
Here is what I want you to take from that chart. The companies underneath all those swings — Dell, Micron, NVIDIA, Broadcom, Apple, every name on the Nasdaq — did not change in any meaningful way this week. There were no major earnings releases. The economy did not flip. Inflation did not spike. Customers did not vanish. The only thing that moved was the headline environment, and within that environment, what moved most was statements from Washington and action from the Middle East.
This is the most important kind of week to recognize. When a market swings hard on news that does not change company fundamentals, the move is noise. Painful for traders. Tempting for both panic and FOMO. But irrelevant to the long-term value of the actual businesses being traded.
As I have mentioned, I leave the house by 4 a.m. most days and I have CNBC on for my drive to work (although recently I have been working my way through the new Harry Potter full cast audiobooks). I also have CNBC on at my desk before the market opens and throughout the day.
So I had a front-row seat to several of these reversals as they happened. Twice on Friday I watched the entire market flip direction within an hour. Once on the morning drone strike news. Once again as language softened a few hours later. Same companies. Same earnings power. Different price tags. By the same afternoon, all of it had reversed back.
Last week I named two reasons markets drop hard: noise and real repricing. This week showed a third category worth knowing. The headlines this week were not about events that had actually happened so much as events that might happen. A deal that might be days away. Damage that might or might not be coming. The market was trying to find its way in a fog of what might be. That kind of trading is some of the most reversible volatility there is, because as soon as a real fact arrives — in either direction — the speculative move gets unwound.
If you found yourself reaching for the sell button this week or feeling like you needed to chase something green, that is the urge to address before next week’s set of headlines lands. Rules built before a volatile stretch are the rules that hold during one. Rules invented during the stretch are usually rationalizations.
Note, as I am writing this post, President Trump now says a peace deal will be signed Sunday. Iran says it is cautious on timing. This is noise today that could be fact by tomorrow and move the markets on Monday.
2. Alphabet, Berkshire, and what disciplined investors actually do with a dilution headline
This story actually broke last week. I held it back because there was already enough content for the June 6th post. I love the story and felt it deserves its own space rather than be a footnote. Weekly Notes is meant to interpret (as I see it), not to react. So here it is.
On June 1, Alphabet — the parent company of Google — announced it would raise $80 billion in new equity to fund artificial intelligence infrastructure. That is the company’s first stock issuance since 2005. For 21 years, Alphabet did not need outside money. Now they do, and the number is staggering.
The $80 billion breaks down into three parts. About $30 billion in a traditional public offering. About $40 billion through an “at-the-market” program over the coming quarters, which simply means selling shares into open-market demand over time. And the most interesting piece — a $10 billion private placement to Berkshire Hathaway.
Alphabet’s stock dropped on the announcement. That part is worth pausing on, because the dynamic is one of the most-missed mechanics in personal finance. Issuing new shares dilutes earnings per share — the same earnings produced by Alphabet get spread across a larger share count, so each existing share suddenly represents a slightly smaller piece of the company. That is true even when the underlying business is growing and even when the cash raised is being deployed into a clear growth opportunity. The math is mechanical. The market read the announcement and reduced what each existing share was worth on a per-share basis.
This is exactly the kind of price move that confuses casual investors. The news was good — demand is so strong they need more capital. The capital is being deployed into the biggest growth opportunity of our lifetime. The buyer of record includes one of the most respected institutional investors in the world. And the stock fell anyway, because the per-share math forced it to.
The Berkshire piece deserves a callout. Warren Buffett stepped down as CEO at the start of this year. He remains chairman at age 95. The call to commit $10 billion to Alphabet was made by his successor, Greg Abel. But the team executing that call grew up under Buffett. The discipline Buffett built into Berkshire — patient capital, deep conviction, willingness to act when others hesitate — is intact. When that team makes a bet of this size on a single company’s AI infrastructure thesis, it is worth paying attention. Not because Buffett picked it personally, but because the way Berkshire evaluates opportunities picked it.
Two weeks ago in this column I wrote about the AI supply chain — the wealth of players operating in this new economy and space. The supply chain kept proving itself this week. Amazon committed a multi-billion-dollar fiber optic order to Corning, the 175-year-old glass company I walked through. Corning jumped close to 9% on the news. Sometimes the picks-and-shovels companies do not even need to surprise anyone to keep getting paid. They just need to win another customer.
One personal note about the Alphabet dip, in the honesty I try to bring to this space. I added to my long-held GOOG position on the dilution-driven drop. Small additions, across two accounts I manage, on a stock I have held a long time and have real conviction about. None of that is a recommendation. The framework is the part worth sharing: when a stock you genuinely understand drops on mechanical news that does not change the underlying business, the discipline you built before the drop is what tells you what to do. Mine said add a little. Yours might say something different. That is the whole point of having your own rules.
3. The biggest IPO in stock market history happened Friday — and the discipline lesson still applies
SpaceX went public Friday under the ticker SPCX. The headline numbers alone are extraordinary. The company priced the offering at $135 per share. That price raised $75 billion, the largest IPO in history by far — more than 2.5 times the previous record, which was Saudi Aramco’s 2019 offering at about $29 billion. The implied valuation at $135 a share was roughly $1.77 trillion. By the day’s close, with the stock at $160.95, the valuation had crossed $2 trillion.
There is enough information in the SpaceX SEC filing and from news this week to fill a book — to say nothing of the years of public commentary, NASA contracts, and Starlink subscriber data already in public record. So I am not going to try to cover everything. I want to share a few high-level facts that I think are genuinely interesting and that point a regular investor toward the questions that actually matter.
First, SpaceX is not really a rocket company. According to their own filing, for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, Starlink — the satellite internet subscription business — accounted for roughly 69% of revenue. The AI segment, recently added through the xAI acquisition, made up about 17%. Rockets, the business most people associate with the SpaceX name, contributed only about 13%. So when retail investors think they are buying a rocket company, what they are mostly buying is a subscription internet service that happens to launch its own satellites and recently added an AI piece. Always look under the hood at where the money actually comes from.
Second, the valuation is aggressive by any conventional measure. At the IPO price of $135, the company traded at roughly 40 times its trailing revenue and 175 times adjusted earnings. For context, the S&P 500 historically averages a price-to-earnings ratio around 15 to 20. Whether SpaceX deserves the premium is a real question being debated by serious analysts in both directions. What matters is that you are paying for an enormous amount of future growth that has not yet arrived.
Third, the company is openly telling investors not to evaluate them on quarterly earnings. In a CNBC interview the morning of the IPO, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said, “I do not want to focus on quarterly earnings. What folks who invest in SpaceX need to know is that what we’re doing is very futuristic. And we should be thinking about the future as well as the current quarter.” That is an honest statement, and worth hearing clearly. SpaceX is a story stock first and a quarterly-earnings stock second. If you buy it, that is what you are buying.
Fourth, the math on what counts as success is genuinely astonishing. Elon Musk’s compensation package includes performance-based shares that vest only when certain milestones are met. One of those milestones is establishing a permanent human colony of at least one million people on Mars. That is not casual marketing. That is contractually written into how he gets paid. Make of that what you will, but it tells you something honest about the time horizon you are being asked to think on when you buy this stock.
Now the discipline lesson. Three weeks ago I wrote about Cerebras, the previous big AI-related IPO. The lesson then was that the headline price you read about — the $185 insider IPO price — was not the price you could actually buy at. The average investor had to pay $311 at the first-day close, and the stock has been drifting back toward $185 ever since. At Friday’s close, CBRS traded at $214 per share.
SpaceX did something differently. The company set aside roughly 30% of the public offering for retail investors, versus the typical 5 to 10%. The Nasdaq estimated that around $15 billion of the $75 billion raise came from individual investors. So the access gap that bit Cerebras buyers was much smaller here. Many retail investors did get shares at the $135 IPO price.
But the discipline lesson still landed, just at a smaller scale. Look at Friday in segments. Insiders and IPO participants got in at $135. The opening trade was at $150. The day’s high was $176.52. The close was $160.95. That is the same stock, same day, four very different starting points. If you got the IPO allocation, you are up 19% on day one. If you chased the open at $150, you are up about 7%. If you chased the high in the $170s, you closed the day down something like 9% from where you bought. Same company. Same week. Wildly different outcomes, separated only by which hour of the day you decided to act.
That is the pattern this column keeps returning to, week after week. The headlines you react to, the price you pay, and the discipline you bring to the decision all matter more than the company itself. Cerebras and SpaceX teach different versions of the same lesson. The first-day pop is the most dangerous moment to chase, even when the company is genuinely strong, even when access is broader than usual, even when everyone you know is talking about the trade.
And SpaceX is just the first of three. Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude assistant, filed paperwork with the SEC two weeks ago to begin its own IPO process. OpenAI is reportedly close behind. The next twelve months will bring more giant AI-related IPOs than any twelve-month period in recent memory. Each one will test the same rules. The rules built before the IPOs land are the rules that protect you when they do.
Whether or not you bought SpaceX this week, the broader picture matters. The AI rally is now sitting at extraordinary valuations across the supply chain. Some of the biggest companies in the world are raising tens of billions of dollars to chase the buildout. Berkshire is committing real capital. And entirely new companies are about to enter public markets at trillion-dollar valuations. None of this is bad news for someone with rules. It is exactly the kind of environment those rules are meant for.
See you next Saturday.
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 — June 6, 2026