SpaceX heads for your 401k 🚀

Welcome back to the Day Trading newsletter 📈

A holiday-shortened stretch that ended with the Dow at record highs, a brutal two-day wipeout in chip stocks, and a soft June jobs report that flipped the script on the Fed.

And now, every index fund in America is about to buy a little bit of SpaceX…

Let’s get into it 👇️ 

📆 Monday 7/6 — ISM Services PMI (10am ET): First big read on the services economy heading into the second half. May came in at 54.5, the strongest in three months; economists expect around 54.0. Watch the prices-paid index, which has been running at its hottest since 2022.

📆 Monday 7/6 — SpaceX index buying peaks (4pm ET close): The bulk of the estimated $4.3 billion in forced index-fund buying is expected to execute near Monday's close, ahead of Tuesday's Nasdaq-100 inclusion. Expect heavy volume and volatility in SPCX into the bell.

📆 Wednesday 7/8 — FOMC Minutes (2pm ET): Details behind June's hawkish pivot, when nine officials penciled in at least one 2026 rate hike. The minutes predate the weak June jobs report, so read them as a snapshot of the Fed's mood before the data turned.

📆 Thursday 7/9 — Initial Jobless Claims (8:30am ET): The first labor-market data since the June payrolls miss. Claims sat at a low 215,000 last week — a sustained move higher would confirm the labor market is genuinely cooling, not just pausing.

📆 Friday 7/10 — Delta Air Lines Q2 Earnings (before open): The unofficial kickoff to earnings season. Wall Street expects EPS around $1.44 — down roughly 31% from a year ago — on about $17.7 billion in revenue. Delta's read on summer travel demand sets the tone for consumer names.

🔻 Tesla sank 7% Thursday — its worst day in nearly a year — despite reporting record Q2 deliveries of 480,126 vehicles. The stock had climbed roughly 12% in the weeks leading up to the report, and traders locked in profits while fretting about margins, which take center stage when earnings land July 22.

🤖 South Korea's chip giants got crushed Thursday, with SK Hynix plunging more than 14% and Samsung falling around 9%. The rout — sparked by fears that Meta renting out spare AI computing power signals slower chip demand — triggered emergency trading curbs in Seoul and erased hundreds of billions of dollars in market value.

🚘️ Rivian jumped nearly 13% Thursday after raising its full-year delivery target to 65,000–70,000 vehicles. Second-quarter deliveries of 12,194 topped the roughly 10,600 expected as R2 SUV shipments ramped up. Rival Lucid went the other way, delivering just 3,953 vehicles — missing estimates — and announced a leadership shakeup.

🥇 Gold reclaimed $4,100 an ounce Thursday, rebounding from an eight-month low after the weak jobs report cooled rate-hike bets. The metal notched its first weekly gain in a month as the dollar pulled back from 14-month highs. Higher rates make zero-yield assets like gold less attractive — so softer data is fuel.

🧗 Bitcoin climbed back toward $62,000 Friday, up about 3% for the week after hitting a 21-month low of $58,278 on Wednesday. Fading rate-hike odds gave crypto room to breathe, though sentiment gauges remain deep in fear territory after a month of extreme-fear readings.

🛢️ OPEC+ agreed Sunday to raise oil output quotas by another 188,000 barrels per day starting in August. It's the latest in a string of monthly increases as exports through the Strait of Hormuz recover, coming on top of nearly 800,000 barrels per day in quota hikes from April through July. Saudi Arabia and Russia received the biggest allocations.

🔼 The Dow closed at a record high Thursday to cap the holiday-shortened week, even as tech stumbled. The blue-chip index gained about 2% on the week while the Nasdaq-100 finished roughly flat, as the jobs miss eased fears of an imminent Fed rate hike — traders now see less than a one-in-five chance of a hike this month.

🚢 The U.S. and Iran wrapped up technical talks in Doha with "positive progress" on Strait of Hormuz shipping and $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds — but the nuclear program stayed off the table. Negotiations resume July 11. Oil traders are watching closely: more Iranian barrels flowing means more relief at the pump.

Before Tuesday's opening bell, SpaceX (SPCX) officially joins the Nasdaq-100.

This comes just 15 trading days after completing the largest IPO in history, an $85.7 billion raise in June.

It's a fast-track entry under the index's new rules, which let certain mega-IPOs skip the usual seasoning period (SpaceX wouldn't have qualified under the old ones).

Because it's a fast-track addition, no current member gets dropped. The index will simply hold more than 100 names for a while.

More than $800 billion is benchmarked to the Nasdaq-100, and J.P. Morgan estimates index funds will be forced to buy about $4.3 billion of SpaceX stock, with much of that buying expected near Monday's close the day before the change takes effect.

If you hold QQQ or a Nasdaq-100 fund in your 401(k), you'll own a piece of SpaceX on Tuesday.

Index funds don't pick stocks (they hold whatever the index holds) so this is a one-time surge of buying that has nothing to do with fundamentals, and funds can't wait around for a better price.

That said, your slice is smaller than the headlines suggest: thanks to the index's modified weighting and SpaceX's tiny float, the stock is expected to enter at a weight of less than 1% (even with a valuation above $2 trillion).

What to watch:

• Monday's close, when the bulk of the forced buying hits, and Tuesday's open, when the mechanical bid disappears

• Whether SpaceX holds its gains once index funds stop buying because they have to.

• Don't expect an S&P 500 encore anytime soon, either. S&P Global has said it won't relax its rules and will wait at least a year before considering SpaceX.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: Not financial advice. Do your research before making any trades.