Find your edge in the Strike Zone.

SpaceX went public on June 12 under the ticker SPCX, and the first two and a half weeks have been a roller coaster: an open near $150, a close near $161 on day one, an all-time high of $225.64 on June 16, and an all-time low of $147.11 on June 23. As of June 29 the stock is trading around $156. The more interesting number is what the options market is quoting for where it could be a month, a year, and two years out, and those numbers are big.

For most of my career as an options broker I was constantly watching implied volatility and expected moves across hundreds of names. You develop a feel for what normal looks like at each expiration. SPCX stuck out. The premium on this chain runs well above what I am used to seeing on a stock this liquid. For context I pulled NVDA, a stock everyone accepts is volatile, for the same expirations. It isn't close. A month out, SPCX prices nearly twice the move the market wants on NVDA, and stays richer all the way out to two years. This is a brand-new listing, and the chain is telling you the market has very little settled about it.

The expected move, three ways

The cleanest way to read what the market expects is the at-the-money straddle: buy the call and the put at the strike nearest the stock price, add up what you pay, and that is roughly the move the stock has to make by expiration to break even. It is the price of the expected move, in dollars you would actually spend.

For SPCX, currently trading at $156:

The ~1 month expiration (32 days out) prints an at-the-money straddle of about $26.50, the 155 call plus the 155 put. That is roughly 17% of the stock's value in a single month. A buyer needs the stock to move more than $26.50 in either direction to break even. Note this expiration lands in late July, just before the company's first earnings report on August 6, so the biggest known catalyst sits just outside this window.

The ~1 year expiration (353 days out) prints a straddle of about $77, or roughly 49% of spot. The market is not expressing a view on direction here. It is saying the range of plausible outcomes a year out is very wide, wide enough that a near-50% round trip in either direction is on the table.

The ~2 year expiration (718 days out) prints a straddle of about $99, or roughly 63% of spot. That is a large number, but worth being precise about. It does not say the stock is a coin flip between zero and double. It says owning both sides of this name for two years costs you nearly two-thirds of the share price, which is what happens when you stretch a 60%-plus implied volatility across that much time. The takeaway is the width itself: a low-confidence view of where this lands two years out.

Why the number is this big

Three factors help explain the premium.

First, implied volatility on SPCX sits in the 70% to 80% range across the curve. NVDA, by comparison, runs in the low-to-mid 40s. SPCX is carrying roughly twice the implied volatility of one of the most volatile megacap names on the board.

Second, the float. This matters most for a new listing, and it is the real engine behind the number. Only about 4% to 5% of SpaceX shares trade publicly right now. The rest is locked up. A tiny float magnifies every move, because a small amount of buying or selling pressure swings the price hard. That is exactly what produced the run to $225 and the slide back to $147 inside two weeks. The options market sees that realized volatility and prices implied volatility to match.

Third, a calendar full of known catalysts, all of them mechanical. SpaceX joins the Nasdaq-100 on July 7, which forces index funds to buy the stock into that thin float regardless of price. First earnings land on August 6 and trigger the first wave of insider unlocks. From there, lockups release in stages through the fall, with a large block freeing up in December. The market is pricing a stock whose supply is about to change dramatically, on a known schedule. That is a recipe for rich premium at every expiration.

There is a second-order point worth its own sentence. As those lockups release and the float grows, day-to-day volatility in the name is widely expected to come down. A bigger float is harder to push around. So the elevated long-dated premium on this chain is priced against a supply picture set to loosen considerably. Whether the curve is pricing that correctly is exactly the debate an options trader should be having.

The NVDA comparison

I used NVDA's chain for the same three expirations as a benchmark, because NVDA is a stock everyone already understands is volatile. Same method for both: the at-the-money straddle as a percentage of the share price.

At ~1 month, NVDA's straddle is about $17 on a ~$196 stock, or about 9%. SPCX is at 17%.

At ~1 year, NVDA's straddle runs about 33%. SPCX is at 49%.

At ~2 years, NVDA's straddle runs about 47%. SPCX is at 63%.

Put it in a single ratio: at one month SPCX prices about 1.9 times NVDA's move, at one year about 1.5 times, and at two years about 1.3 times. The premium is widest now and compresses further out. That fits the story. The near-term chain is loaded with float-squeeze risk and a maiden earnings report, the exact things that should fade as supply unlocks and the company builds a track record. The market is paying up most for the part of the timeline it can see the least into.

SPCX is not being priced as a permanently wild stock. It's being priced as an unusually uncertain one right now, with that uncertainty expected to ease, just slowly, and never quite down to a name like NVDA even two years out.

What an options trader does with this

None of this is a recommendation, and the structures cut both ways.

If you like buying premium (long straddles, long calls, long puts) you are paying for that rich implied volatility. The expected move is wide, but wide because the options are expensive. The stock has to actually deliver moves larger than what is already priced for a long-volatility position to win.

If you like selling premium (covered calls, cash-secured puts, spreads) that same rich implied volatility is what you collect. The risk is the other side of the same coin: in a name that can move this much, a short option carries real tail risk, and defined-risk structures exist for exactly that reason. With known event dates on the calendar, a short premium position is short those events too.

The honest read is that SPCX's chain is not so much mispriced as uncertain-priced. The width of the expected move is the market admitting it does not know, against a float and a catalyst calendar both still unresolved. Your job as an options trader is to decide whether that uncertainty is overstated or understated, and to structure the position so that being wrong does not end you.

The bottom line

The options market is currently pricing SPCX to move about 17% in a month, 49% in a year, and 63% over two years, running 1.3 to 1.9 times the implied move of NVDA depending on the expiration. That is not a forecast of direction. It measures how little is settled about a two-week-old listing with a tiny float and a calendar full of supply-changing events.

For traders, the expected move is the price of admission either way. Whether you are paying it or collecting it, the first step is reading it correctly.

Figures sourced from live option chains as of June 29, 2026, with the underlying marked at $156.02. Implied moves are quoted as the at-the-money straddle, the combined cost of the nearest-strike call and put, expressed as a percentage of spot. Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors. This article is for educational purposes and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security or to employ any specific strategy.