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Editor’s Note: In today’s Smart Money, we’re featuring a guest essay from Louis Navellier, one of America’s most respected quantitative investors.
Louis has been watching the SpaceX IPO closely — but not because he’s tempted to buy it. What he finds fascinating is how markets react when millions of investors chase the same story at the same time.
He argues that this dynamic is no longer limited to high-profile IPOs.
Now, AI-powered trading tools are quietly pushing retail investors into the same crowded positions across the entire market. When institutional money — the “elephants,” as Louis calls them — starts heading for the exit, the investors left behind may not see it coming until it’s too late.
Below, Louis explains the risk, names one space stock his system currently rates an “A” that just got cheaper for no fundamental reason, and introduces the framework he’s spent 47 years building to track where the smart money is moving before the crowd catches on.
Without further ado, here’s Louis…
There are some stories that can’t help but make you proud to be an American.
Victor Glover is one of them.
Glover is a Navy captain, test pilot, engineer, and NASA astronaut. He earned three master’s degrees from three different institutions. During his naval career, one of his commanding officers gave him the call sign “Ike” — short for “I know everything.” It was partly tongue-in-cheek. But it fit.
In April 2026, Glover piloted Artemis II around the moon. In doing so, he became the first African American to leave low Earth orbit and travel beyond it. Along with his crewmates, he helped set a new record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth.
That is the kind of achievement people remember.
But as an investor, I look at that story a little differently.
I see the astronaut, the rocket, and the mission. But I also see the enormous industrial machine behind it all. Artemis II was not just a triumph of courage and exploration. It was a triumph of supply chains, chips, sensors, navigation systems, advanced materials, communications equipment, and thousands of private-sector components that had to work together perfectly.
And Artemis II was not the end of the story. It was the beginning of a much larger campaign.
That is the part most investors miss. And that brings us to the recent SpaceX IPO — and the real lesson it has to teach.
In this piece I’ll explain why I passed on the IPO — and give you one space stock my system currently rates an “A” that just got cheaper for no fundamental reason.
A Great Story Is Not Always a Great Stock
When Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX) went public, the crowd did what crowds usually do. They saw the name. They saw Elon Musk. Then they chased the stock.
The stock priced at $150 per share. Within two trading days, it had surged more than 40%, climbing above $200. Then gravity showed up. The stock fell back to Earth, all the way back to $150 last time I checked.
A lot of investors were reminded of a lesson I’ve learned again and again in nearly 50 years in this business: A great story is not always a great stock.
SpaceX is a remarkable company. Starlink has changed the world. I would never bet against Musk. But IPOs are different. By the time a hot private company reaches the public market, the early investors have already had the first bite. Wall Street bankers have every reason to make the story irresistible. And individual investors are often left trying to calculate risk with very little useful data.
That is not how I invest. I need quarterly earnings, analyst revisions, and institutional buying data. I need to run the stock through my system. Until then, buying a hot IPO is not investing. It is guessing — and I don’t guess with my money.
There is also a structural problem nobody is talking about. Right now, only about 5% to 6% of SpaceX’s float is tradable. The rest is locked up. Those 4,400 employees who became millionaires on paper? When their lockup expires, they will start cashing out — not because they’ve lost faith, but because that is what human beings do when a number on a screen becomes life-changing. Even if they sell 10% or 20% of their holdings, that will be a wall of supply hitting the market.
SpaceX will not be profitable until at least 2028. It is betting everything on its Starship rocket — still in testing, not yet ready to launch satellites or carry humans.
I miss all IPOs, for lack of a better word. Even if it’s a great company — and the jury’s still out on SpaceX — there will always be a better window.
The Proxy Stocks Got Punished — and One of Them Is Now a Buy
Here is something that did happen as predicted.
In the months before the SpaceX IPO, investors who wanted exposure to the space story bought proxy stocks — Rocket Lab Corp. (RKLB), Planet Labs PBC (PL), AST SpaceMobile Inc. (ASTS). These were the next-best options for investors who couldn’t buy SpaceX directly.
The moment SpaceX went public, those investors dumped the proxies and bought the real thing. The proxy stocks got hammered. Some genuinely strong businesses just got cheaper for no fundamental reason.
Good stocks bounce like fresh tennis balls, though. That’s the kind of dislocation my Precursor Intelligence system was built to find.
Planet Labs is one worth looking at right now. The company operates the world’s largest fleet of Earth-observation satellites — more than 200 satellites providing daily imaging of the entire planet. Its customers include government agencies, defense contractors, agricultural companies, insurance firms, and financial institutions that use satellite imagery to make better decisions.
The stock got caught in the SpaceX proxy selloff. But the business didn’t change. My Precursor Intelligence system currently rates Planet Labs an “A.” That means both the fundamental grade — earnings momentum, sales growth, analyst revisions — and the quantitative grade, which measures institutional buying pressure, are strong.
Planet Labs is worth putting on your radar here. It got cheaper because of SpaceX, not because of anything wrong with the business.
The Better Trade Is the One Nobody Sees
But here’s what I want you to understand.
Planet Labs is the obvious SpaceX-adjacent story, and the crowd will find it eventually. The more interesting opportunities are the ones that don’t look like space stocks at all.
Think about what Artemis II actually required. Not just rockets. It needed supply chains, chips, sensors, advanced materials, navigation systems, and communications equipment. A 100-year-old aluminum company making specialized aerospace alloys for the Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft. A semiconductor foundry making the analog chips that help spacecraft see, hear, communicate, and manage power in the brutal conditions of deep space.
These are not the stocks people think of when they hear “space.” They are not the names AI tools are pointing investors toward. They are companies three or four steps back from the headline story — the ones Wall Street’s elephants have been quietly accumulating before anyone else noticed.
I’ve identified two of them in my new special report, The SpaceX Stampede Report. Both have real earnings. Both are seeing institutional accumulation. Both are the kind of businesses I prefer to own during a boom: picks-and-shovels companies for the new space and AI infrastructure economy.
Are You Investing Like an Elephant or a Mouse?
The SpaceX IPO is a perfect small-scale illustration of something I’ve been tracking across the entire market.
There are really only two kinds of investors in the stock market. I call them elephants and mice.
Elephants are the big institutional players — pension funds, endowments, large asset managers. They move slowly and methodically. They don’t react to headlines. They analyze fundamentals, build positions quietly over months, and wait.
Mice are retail investors. They move in herds, all reacting to the same information at the same time. They’re quick to buy and even quicker to run.
What concerns me right now is that AI trading systems are rapidly turning millions of retail investors into mice moving in perfect synchronization — millions of people using the same tools, the same datasets, the same recommendations, all crowding into the same stocks at the same time. When those AI systems all receive the same “Sell” signal simultaneously, the exit door doesn’t just jam. There is simply no one left on the other side of the trade.
I call this the “50-Million AI Coordination Trap.” And July 23 — at the height of second-quarter earnings season, when AI systems will be processing identical data and reaching identical conclusions simultaneously — is when it faces its first real test at scale.
I’ve spent 47 years building a system designed to read the elephants before the mice show up. I call it Precursor Intelligence. It tracks institutional money flows across 6,000 stocks, looking for the signs that the elephants are quietly moving in or out before the pattern becomes visible to those 50 million AIs and everyone else.
I’ve put together a full presentation explaining exactly how this works — what the trap looks like, which kinds of stocks are most vulnerable, and where my system is seeing institutional accumulation right now. During that free broadcast, I also name my No. 1 stock to buy and my No. 1 stock to avoid as the AI coordination trap builds.
Victor Glover didn’t get to the moon by chasing the obvious path. He got there by understanding every system behind the mission — the ones most people never think about.
That’s how I’ve tried to invest for 47 years. The crowd can chase the rocket, but I’d rather follow the money trail behind it.
Watch that free broadcast here.
Sincerely,
Louis Navellier
Senior Investment Analyst, InvestorPlace
P.S. Planet Labs got cheaper because of SpaceX, not because of anything wrong with its business. My system rates it an “A” right now. But the two stocks I find most interesting in the SpaceX story aren’t the obvious space names at all — they’re the behind-the-scenes materials and semiconductor companies I cover in The SpaceX Stampede Report. Watch my presentation to learn how to get that report.
The Editor hereby discloses that as of the date of this email, the Editor, directly or indirectly, owns the following securities that are the subject of the commentary, analysis, opinions, advice, or recommendations in, or which are otherwise mentioned in, the essay set forth below:
Rocket Lab Corp. (RKLB)
