What drove the stock market last week — before and after SpaceX’s historic IPO
Wall Street exhaled on Friday after SpaceX nailed its record-breaking debut. The success wiped away a week of anxiety over whether the market had the appetite to digest the biggest initial public offering in history. SpaceX closed up 19% at nearly $161 per share for a market value of more than $2.1 trillion, making it the sixth-largest U.S. public company. The stock opened at $150 — above the $135 fixed offering price. It rallied above $176 as one point before coming in some The AI and rocket company raised $75 billion and made CEO Elon Musk the world’s first-ever trillionaire. Hours before SpaceX began trading, Jim Cramer said that early signs of demand for the IPO looked promising — allaying some of the fears in the market about whether the banks would stick the landing and what the Club had been protecting against all week by making incremental sales to boost our cash. “We’re over the hump,” Jim declared during Friday’s Morning Meeting . While we prepared for the worst, SpaceX’s debut actually sent stocks higher Friday. Signals of a possible U.S.-Iran peace deal soon certainly helped. The S & P 500 advanced 0.5%, bringing its weekly gain to nearly 0.7%. The Nasdaq rose 0.3% on Friday and ended the week up 0.7%. Friday’s rally padded Thursday’s major comeback following Wednesday’s dubbing. Here is a closer look at what drove the market last week, including our growing cash pile, a massive supply deal between Corning and Amazon , and the inflation setup ahead of this coming week’s Federal Reserve interest rate meeting. Our cash pile grew In the walk-up to SpaceX’s debut, Jim warned that mega IPOs could be a headwind for the stock market. Excessive equity supply can lead to investors selling their existing holdings in order to raise cash and buy shares of the hot offering. We did see some of that as the week played out. The two other mega IPOs coming down the pike are OpenAI, which filed its IPO paperwork this past Monday, and Anthropic, which filed earlier this month. “We want the deals to be under control because otherwise it can be disastrous,” Jim said during “Mad Money” on Thursday. It was concerns like these that led us to trim several of our positions last week. Our theory: Raise more cash in the case of a downturn and to hedge against any SpaceX-induced volatility. We sold some Goldman Sachs and Qnity on Monday, Arm on Tuesday , and Eaton and Cardinal Health on Wednesday . Our cash position stands at a larger-than-custom 12%, which gives us plenty of dry power to start buying. AI bets continued Corning announced Monday that Amazon will pay billions of dollars in the coming years for its optical fiber to grow its data center presence. Optical is increasingly replacing copper because it is faster and burns less energy, which is the limiting factor in computing power. The agreement is a boon for Corning’s optical communications division, which produces the networking solutions and fiber-optic cabling essential to data center development. It is just one of many agreements Corning has inked, including Nvidia last month and Meta Platforms in January. A few sessions later, Oracle had plenty of positive things to say about the demand for AI computing as well. The enterprise tech company announced plans to raise an additional $20 billion to fund the AI infrastructure buildout during earnings. What’s most important to us is that the money isn’t going towards hopes and dreams. Oracle has proven that the funding isn’t an “if you build it, they will come” situation. It is a “they are already here, so the faster you build it, the faster you sell it” story. The funding raise overshadowed Oracle’s better-than-expected results, sending shares down nearly 9% on Thursday. Bad time for Oracle shareholders, but a good week for some of our AI-related plays. Intel was our top performer, with a weekly gain of more than 25%. Bank of America’s double upgrade to buy from sell on Thursday was good for a bulk of the gains. Arm Holdings , which has been a rocket ship, was our No. 2 on the week, jumping 11%. Nvidia was flat last week and Broadcom was down less than 1%. Apple shares lost more than 5% on the week after the company announced on Monday at its annual developers conference a new AI-enhanced Siri powered by Google’s Gemini. Apple has been near record highs going into the event. Inflation — hot or not Outside of the AI trade, the market debated the implications of what appeared to be hotter-than-expected inflation data on the Fed’s upcoming policy meeting. The consumer price index for May, a broad measure of the costs of goods and services in the economy, registered its highest reading in three years. To be sure, that’s not great. But Jim said he liked the numbers , arguing the 4.2% year-over-year increase mostly reflects higher oil prices driven by the Iran war. “The things that were outliers are all related in one way or another to Iran. … But when I look at it, I say, ‘Alright, when you get this war over in two or three days … then I think you’ll look pretty good,'” he added. Traders on Friday largely expected the central bank will hold the benchmark interest rate steady when the decision is announced on June 17. It will be the first meeting with President Donald Trump’s chosen Fed chairman, Kevin Warsh , at the helm. Trump has made no secret of wanting lower rates. However, since he nominated Warsh in January, the discussion in the market has moved from the possibility of rate cuts to the possibility of rate hikes. We’ll see how Warsh threads that needle in the week ahead. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) 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