Index-inclusion day is supposed to be a party. Passive funds line up to buy, forced demand meets thin supply, and the newly added stock pops. That is the script. SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) officially joined the Nasdaq 100 today, and by lunchtime shares were down 5.65% to $151.35, while the broader Nasdaq 100 proxy QQQ slipped 1.74%. So SpaceX is underperforming the very index it just joined on the day it joined.
Steve Grasso, CEO of Grasso Global, went on CNBC this morning and said the quiet part out loud. Institutional buyers already front-ran this.
What Actually Happened on Inclusion Day
Grasso’s read, delivered during the “Morning Call Sheet: AI trade stays strong despite semiconductor pullback” segment, is that flat-to-lower price action at the exact moment forced buyers show up tells you something. Front-running an index add is what it sounds like. Hedge funds and quant desks know weeks in advance which stock is about to get added, they buy it early, and they sell into the passive-fund demand on inclusion day. If the stock does not pop when the buying arrives, it is because someone was there first. Reddit noticed too. r/stocks users landed on the framing “SPCX finally joined the Nasdaq-100. The first reaction was to sell it”, and community sentiment collapsed from a bullish reading of 72 over the weekend to a very bearish 18 by Tuesday morning.
Why $27 Billion Still Has to Chase This Stock
The mechanical piece Grasso keeps hammering is the part most retail investors miss. The Nasdaq 100 is float-weighted, meaning your weight in the index depends on how many shares actually trade freely, not on total market cap. SpaceX has a roughly $1.15 trillion market cap but only a sliver of that is public float. Jim Cramer walked through the same dynamic in June, noting that “when SpaceX comes public, it will be weighed like a $225 billion company” and that “as the lockups gradually expire and SpaceX’s float increases, so will its weight within the index”.
Grasso puts a number on the cumulative demand. Roughly $27 billion in notional passive buying will have to be absorbed in tiers over time as each lockup releases and index funds are forced to rebalance up.
That demand arrives as a staircase, tier by tier, not in a single session.
The Front-Running Tell, and What Grasso Is Doing About It
The staircase is why Grasso stays long. He added to his SpaceX allocation, plans to hold longer, expects extreme volatility, and sees a decent chance of a retest of $135 before the next leg higher. It also implicitly admits the easy money got pulled forward. The retail crowd sniffed this out too.
When a third of the float is short and the stock still cannot rally on forced index buying, the short thesis has more weight than the retail bulls wanted to believe. For context on why the underlying business justifies staying engaged through the chop, SpaceX is now a three-pillar company. Falcon and Starship on the launch side, Starlink delivering broadband via approximately 9,600 satellites to customers in 164 countries, territories, and other markets, and xAI, acquired in early 2026, making Grok a core asset.
What This Means for You
The tiered demand is real. The forward pull on returns is also real. If Grasso is right about a $135 retest, chasing SPCX at $151 on inclusion day is buying the top of the front-run rather than the bottom of the staircase. Volatility is the price of admission. Grasso’s own positioning, long and adding on weakness, is the shape of the trade for anyone who believes the mechanical bid arrives in waves rather than in a single Tuesday morning bell.
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