Investopedia Markets News (all except PF)

Intel shares have more than tripled in value since the start of the year.
Credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Key Takeaways

• Intel shares rallied Thursday after the chipmaker got a double upgrade from Bank of America analysts.
• The analysts said they expect Intel to see growing demand for its AI hardware, and that potential new deals for its foundry business are encouraging.

Intel's stock is soaring in the wake of a big vote of confidence from Bank of America.

Shares of Intel (INTC) were up over 4% close to $112 in recent trading, making it one of the best-performing stocks in the S&P 500, after Bank of America gave it a double upgrade. The analysts raised their rating for Intel's stock to "buy" from "underperform," and hiked their price target to a Street-high $135 from $96, citing greater confidence in Intel's ability to win new customers for its manufacturing business.

The analysts said they viewed recent reports that Intel could soon strike a deal with Apple (AAPL), along with Intel's agreement to help supply Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX's Terafab, as "supportive data points" for the business. The stock also got a boost earlier this week following a report of a deal with Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google and the possibility of an agreement with Nvidia (NVDA).

Why This Matters to Investors

Bank of America's bullish call could help boost confidence in Intel's stock, amid some worries about the sustainability of its recent runup.

The analysts also said they see Intel continuing to benefit from growing demand for its AI server chips. Back in April, Intel said it sees double-digit sales growth for its servers likely extending into 2027.

Bank of America's latest target makes it the biggest bull among the analysts tracked by Visible Alpha. Only three other firms have recommended buying the stock, compared to three neutral ratings, amid some concerns about growing competition and whether Intel's recent rally may have left it overvalued. The stock, which has more than tripled in value since the year began, has blown past their mean target around $100 with its recent gains.

With Thursday's rise, Intel shares are up nearly 450% in the last 12 months and nearing last months highs.

A draft of the federal budget would eliminate subsidized federal student loans for future college students.
Credit: Anjali Sharif-Paul / MediaNews Group / The Sun via Getty Images

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• A proposed budget bill would eliminate federally subsidized student loans.
• If passed, new federal student loans for undergraduates would accrue interest while students are still in school.
• The budget bill still requires full Congressional approval before being sent to the President.

The House Appropriations Committee passed a fiscal year 2027 budget this week that would eliminate federal student loan subsidies.

The bill would increase the maximum Pell Grant award for the 2027–2028 by $50. To pay for it and help close a projected shortfall in the program, the bill proposes cutting the federal subsidized student loan program.

During the 2024-25 academic year, subsidized loans were the third-largest federal student aid program, with about 4 million recipients borrowing an average of $3,790, according to the College Board. This loan type is available only to undergraduate students who can show financial need. While borrowers are in school or on a deferment, the Department of Education pays any accrued interest.

Why This Matters

Eliminating subsidized loans would increase the cost of repayment once a borrower graduates. A growing number of current federal student loans are already struggling to make their payments.

Currently, first-year undergraduates can borrow up to $5,500 in federal student loans (the annual loan limit increases each year a student is in school), of which up to $3,500 may be subsidized. The remaining amount, $2,000, is unsubsidized and accrues interest while the borrower is in school.

If the House bill were to become law, undergraduate student loans would have the same limits, but all borrowing would be unsubsidized. The bill cuts other aid for low-income undergraduates, slashing the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, which is aimed at the neediest students, by 40% and Federal Work-Study by 26%.

The budget is still a few steps from becoming law. It still needs to be approved by the Senate, and may undergo further changes after negotiations between the Senate and the House over the final budget bill. To avoid another shutdown, Congress and the President must approve a 2027 fiscal year budget before Oct. 1.

This would be another significant change for incoming borrowers. The One Big, Beautiful Bill Act made dramatic changes to student loan rules, some of which will go into effect this year. The 2025 law reshaped how existing and upcoming borrowers repay their student loans. Starting on July 1, stricter loan limits, including the elimination of Graduate PLUS loans and restrictions on Parent PLUS loans, take effect.

SpaceX is generating buzz and chatter ahead of its historic IPO.
Credit: Photo by Aubrey Gemignan / NASA via Getty Images

Key Takeaways

• SpaceX's public debut is a subject of fun chatter and debate, but it also raises important questions for investors.
• Investopedia examined three of those today: What the massive deal could mean for markets, indexes, and people buying the stock.

Elon Musk's SpaceX and its imminent public debut have entered the zeitgeist.

The "SPCX" stock, set to list Friday, has outsized expectations and memes to match. In the online spaces where traders chatter, there are jokes about how rich the "SpaceX lunch lady" will be post-IPO; memes about the stock being marketed at grocery stores; and back-and-forth about whether its extra-large offering represents a market "bottom" or a sign of a "bubble about to burst." (Our primer on the deal is here.) "My mother-in-law's mahjong club is all-in on the SpaceX IPO," one X user joked.

Fun aside, the listing is big financial news. A narrative is taking hold that some folks are so hot to get in that they're selling tech majors and chip stocks to raise cash. The IPO priced at $135 per share, and raised nearly $75 billion, the biggest offering on record. The listing, with an implied valuation near $1.8 trillion, stands to make SpaceX's trading debut a moment that'll rock market history.

All together, the moment spotlights three big questions investors are debating. Will SpaceX be good for markets? For indexes? And portfolios?

What It Means for Markets

Some market watchers think the IPO is bound to rise—if for no other reason than investors have been waiting for the next big thing, and see SpaceX—and, perhaps, other upcoming AI IPOs expected this year—as filling that gap. (Both OpenAI and Anthropic have lately lodged SEC filings that indicate movement toward trillion-dollar listings of their own.)

The size of the SpaceX deal could give markets indigestion, some experts say, since the money has to come from somewhere. CNBC's Jim Cramer on his X account earlier this week said "This market cannot handle another hyperscaler offering without taking a big hit right now." Vanda Research in a recent note wondered whether "retail investors are rotating out of semi stocks...ahead of [the] SpaceX IPO." Stocks closed higher Thursday, but have generally fallen in June, with tech shares feeling particular pressure.

What might soothe some of that anxiety is the observation by Deutsche Bank's Jim Reid that "companies tend to issue when equity demand is strong, earnings momentum is healthy and investor risk appetite is elevated." In other words, Reid said, "causality usually runs from strong markets to issuance, rather than issuance causing markets to fall."

What It Means for Indexes

That major index providers—including Nasdaq, LSEG's FTSE Russell and the Center for Research in Security Prices or "CRSP" Market Indexes—have moved to make it possible to more quickly add new large companies like SpaceX to their products has raised some investor eyebrows. It's even caught the eye of some lawmakers: Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday implored the Securities and Exchange Commission to delay the IPO, saying the "net result could be disastrous."

Taken broadly, the concern about SpaceX and other mega IPOs getting a fast pass into big benchmark indexes is that it'll force funds that track them to buy shares and boost prices, with insiders at the rocket company unloading overpriced shares on unwitting investors who parked their retirement dollars in broad market funds. Yet that an IPO—even a big one—is being added to major indexes is a somewhat mundane occurrence: "SpaceX did not invent the IPO," said Elisabeth Kashner, director of global funds research and analytics at FactSet.

The worry that retail investors are getting a raw deal—even if SpaceX may not be eligible to join the S&P 500 for a year—is "legitimate," Kashner told Investopedia, but it's unclear that a longer seasoning period, the window of time a new company has to wait until it's eligible for inclusion, would mitigate that concern.

"It really all comes down to whether you think its post IPO valuation is a fair reflection of the corporate value," Kashner said. "And that's not a new question, IPO or not."

What's It Means for Portfolios

For investors who seek to buy shares of SpaceX, the basic question boils down to: What's a good price for the stock? Some traders may not much care, since flipping IPOs on their first trading days is a long-running strategy. The company has said it plans to sell at $135, a price some retail investors may get through their brokers' allocations. (Though those brokerages may not look kindly at quick sales; some have said investors who sell on the first day may face penalties.)

Estimates of the shares' value have begun to trickle out, though many big sell-side analysts may wait until trading begins to pile on. Academics including NYU business professor Aswath Damodaran, sometimes called the "Dean of Valuation," as well as a couple Morningstar analysts get at this question with various math exercises that suggest that SpaceX's marketed IPO price is above their estimates of the company's worth. They consider how SpaceX makes money; the probability of the company being able to quickly build reusable rockets and find a market for them; whether it "successfully overcomes engineering constraints" and scales orbital data centers; as well as moonshot scenarios in which Elon Musk colonizes Mars.

Morningstar's math puts SpaceX's stock price at $63, while Damodaran's lands him at $98—both significant discounts to the company's IPO price. But more bullish takes are out there, too: Still, billionaire investor and longtime Musk supporter Ron Baron thinks SpaceX could be worth as much as $30 trillion in the next decade or so, making its IPO price sound like a steal. Oppenheimer analysts on Thursday issued a price target of $190. Polymarket bets indicate a perceived 45% probability that SpaceX's market cap will top $2.2 trillion at Friday's close.

What ultimately will determine whether SpaceX is good for investor portfolios, is the price at which they buy and sell—like any other investment. (And there are other ways to get SpaceX exposure besides the stock—including a range of ETFs and, eventually, the aforementioned index funds.)

This article has been updated since it was first published to reflect the official pricing of the deal.

Thursday's losses leave Oracle's shares nearly 50% off their highs last September
Credit: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg / Getty Images

Key Takeaways

• Oracle shares plunged after the tech giant said it expects to raise billions of dollars this fiscal year to fund its AI buildout.
• The news overshadowed record quarterly results and a record backlog.

Earlier this month, Oracle's shares were at 2026 highs. But they've dropped more recently as tech shares have retreated—and the company's latest results aren't helping.

Shares of Oracle (ORCL) were down 11% in recent trading, a day after the company said it expects to raise $40 billion through debt and equity financing this fiscal year, adding billions to already announced plans, to fund its AI buildout on top of some $48 billion in funding a year earlier. While the database and cloud services company posted quarterly revenue and earnings that beat analyst estimates, investors may be expressing concern about the costs associated with the company's growth.

The latest slide leaves Oracle's shares in the red this year—and, at recent prices around $180 apiece, well off last fall's record highs above $340.

Why This Matters to Investors

Oracle's latest fundraising efforts could worsen sentiment around the stock, which has been dogged in recent months by concerns about the company's AI spending and its reliance on a few large customers.

The company reported adjusted earnings per share of $2.11 on revenue that jumped 21% year-over-year to a record $19.2 billion in its fiscal fourth quarter. Both figures came in ahead of analysts' estimates compiled by Visible Alpha; Oracle's backlog jumped 363% to a record $638 billion. The company said much of that growth was tied to "large scale AI contracts," which may be fueling concerns about its reliance on a comparatively small number of clients for its revenue, though some analysts said the company was meaningfully widening its customer base.

Looking ahead, Oracle said it expects first-quarter revenue growth of 27% to 29%, ahead of Wall Street's projections. It kept its revenue forecast for the full year steady at $90 billion.

"The near-term elevated capital intensity as the company rushes to bring capacity online remains a key investor concern," William Blair analysts wrote. But "we continue to view Oracle as a long-term AI beneficiary."

The layoffs to Microsoft's Xbox division are expected to be finalized next month, the report said.
Credit: Beata Zawrzel / NurPhoto / Getty Images

Key Takeaways

• Microsoft's Xbox division could soon face a large round of layoffs, as new CEO Asha Sharma looks to revamp the unit.
• Sharma took over the top job at Xbox in February.

Microsoft's Xbox division could soon face a shakeup of its workforce under new CEO Asha Sharma.

The console and video game maker is planning to undergo a "major" round of layoffs, that could be announced as soon as next month, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. Sharma is also considering other changes that could include increasing Xbox's focus on making games exclusive to its consoles and cutting marketing spending, the report said.

Sharma, who took over the top job of the gaming division in February, said at a conference that the Xbox division was "not in a healthy spot" and needs a reset. Xbox has spent some $20 billion on investments in Xbox hardware and software over the last five years, and in the same period its annual revenue has declined by nearly $500 million, Sharma said in a message to Xbox employees.

Microsoft and Xbox did not respond to Investopedia requests for comment in time for publication.

Why This News Is Significant

The move could point to the start of a broader transformation under Sharma's leadership.

Sharma said Xbox is facing the same soaring memory costs that are leading to higher prices in other hardware categories, but said the company has been "impacted more greatly than many of our peers due to the choices we made over the last half decade."

Microsoft has spent the last several years making big investments in acquiring studios to attempt to boost Xbox sales to catch up to rival Sony's PlayStation 5. It has also undergone several rounds of layoffs, shuttered some studios, and canceled games as it looked to improve its margins.

"We won’t succeed by hiding hard truths, nor will we succeed by doing the same thing and expecting different results," Sharma wrote. 

Microsoft shares were down about 3% in recent trading, amid a broader pullback in tech shares.

News of the day for June 11, 2026

Stocks tumbled Wednesday as tech stocks extended their recent pullback.
Credit: Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images

Stock futures are pointing to a higher open this morning after two straight days of declines for the S&P 500; Oracle shares are falling as concerns about the company's fundraising plans outweigh a strong earnings report; wholesale inflation data is due to be released after a report yesterday showed that consumer price inflation hit a three-year high in May; Adobe is scheduled to release its quarterly results after the closing bell; and Microsoft is reportedly planning layoffs at its Xbox unit. Here's what you need to know today.

Stock Futures Point Higher After Sell-Off

Stock futures are rising Thursday as the market looks to rebound from two days of selling fueled by tech sector weakness. Futures tied to the tech-heavy Nasdaq were up 1.3% recently, while futures linked to the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.8%. The major indexes fell sharply yesterday, led by steep declines in tech stocks, as investors digested worrisome inflation data and the latest developments in the Middle East. WTI crude oil futures were down 1% at around $89 per barrel this morning, while gold futures fell 0.5% to $4,110 an ounce. Bitcoin was recently trading at $63,100, up from an overnight low around $61,000. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which affects interest rates on all sorts of loans, fell to 4.52% from 4.56% at yesterday's close.

Oracle Stock Sinks as Investors Worry About Fundraising Plans

Oracle (ORCL) shares are slumping premarket despite a better-than-expected earnings report from the cloud services giant, as the company also announced new fundraising plans. Oracle reported $19.18 billion in revenue and adjusted earnings per share of $2.11 for its fiscal fourth quarter, with a backlog of $638 billion, each topping the analyst consensus compiled by Visible Alpha. Oracle said it raised $43 billion in debt and $5 billion through stock sales in fiscal 2026, and said it plans to raise another $40 billion through debt and stock sales in fiscal 2027. Oracle shares were down 9% in recent trading, putting them on track to slide back into negative territory for the year.

Another Key Inflation Report Due This Morning

Investors will get a second inflation report in as many days, with the Producer Price Index for May due out at 8:30 a.m. ET this morning after consumer price data yesterday showed inflation hit a three-year high. Economists estimate that the wholesale inflation metric will show that prices rose 0.7% in May, down from a much higher-than-expected 1.4% jump in April. Inflation has surged lately owing to the sharp increase in fuel prices as a result of the Iran war. The persistent inflation has heightened concerns among investors that the Federal Reserve will need to raise interest rates. Today's report will show how much prices are increasing for businesses.

Adobe Set to Release Results After Closing Bell

Adobe (ADBE) is scheduled to report earnings this afternoon, in the latest test for the Photoshop and Premiere editing software maker to show investors that its business isn't being diminished by the rise of AI tools. Adobe is expected to report adjusted earnings of $5.81 a share on $6.45 billion in revenue, per Visible Alpha estimates, each up year-over-year. The company's last earnings report in March came with the surprise news that longtime CEO Shantanu Narayen would step down once a successor is found, and today's report could bring an update on that search. Adobe shares, which have lost a third of their value since the start of the year, were little-changed in premarket trading.

Microsoft Planning 'Major' Xbox Layoffs, Report Says

Microsoft (MSFT) is planning a new round of layoffs under new Xbox division CEO Asha Sharma, who took over the top job in February, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The cuts are expected to be announced next month, following the close of Microsoft's fiscal year at the end of June, the report said, but the exact size of the reduction has not yet been determined. Microsoft has spent the last several years making big investments in acquiring studios to attempt to boost Xbox sales to catch up to rival Sony's PlayStation 5. The company has also undergone rounds of layoffs, shuttered studios and canceled games as it looked to improve its margins. Microsoft shares are little changed ahead of the opening bell.

Trump said he may not renew the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a trade pact made during his first administration.
Credit: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

Key Takeaways

• President Donald Trump said he wasn’t interested in renewing the USMCA, a treaty he negotiated in his first term that controls trade between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
• Scrapping the treaty would be yet another seismic shakeup of the trade landscape that’s already been deeply altered by tariffs.
• The U.S. does about $2 trillion in business with the two countries every year, making them the nation’s largest trade partners.

President Donald Trump intensified his shakeup of the trade landscape this week when he said he wasn’t interested in renewing one of the country’s most important international agreements.

Speaking with reporters at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said the U.S. wouldn't renew the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the trilateral pact that sets the rules for trade in autos, agricultural products, intellectual property, and other commerce between the U.S. and its two largest trading partners.

"I'm not looking to renew it," Trump said. "Because, to be honest with you, the United States does much better. We don't need anything that Canada has, we don't need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have, and they have to treat us better."

What This Means For The Economy

Withdrawing from the USMCA could result in more imports being subject to tariffs, which have raised prices for U.S. consumers and fueled a resurgence of inflation.

Trump’s comments come as talks between representatives of the U.S. and Mexico continue. A round of negotiations concluded in Mexico City on May 29, and another is scheduled for mid-June with a third in July.

Trump’s comments notwithstanding, the three economies are deeply intertwined. The U.S. did $935 billion in trade with Mexico and $909 billion with Canada in 2024, according to the U.S. Trade Representative.

The agreement, which went into effect in 2020, is especially consequential for U.S. consumers because products compliant with the treaty are exempt from many of the tariffs Trump imposed in 2025. An estimated 80% of imports from the two countries were USMCA-compliant in 2025, according to the Brookings Institution think tank, based on government trade and tariff data.

Lawmakers are asking Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, to cancel eligible student debt and stop loan collections.
Credit: Eric Lee / Bloomberg via Getty Images

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Student loan defaults and delinquencies have reached historic highs.
• The end of the SAVE repayment plan and the planned resumption of wage garnishments are expected to worsen borrowers' financial challenges.
• Lawmakers are urging the Department of Education to clear a backlog of loan-forgiveness applications and prevent wage garnishments to stop further defaults.

More than 60 congressional Democrats this week called on Education Secretary Linda McMahon to cancel debt for borrowers who already qualify for forgiveness and to keep collections paused amid what they call the worst student loan default crisis on record.

The letter comes as more borrowers than ever are behind on their federal student loans. The number of borrowers in delinquency (one missed payment) and default (at least nine missed payments) surged last year.

"The Trump administration’s actions have fueled this default and delinquency crisis," the lawmakers, led by Senators Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., wrote in their letter. "The administration initially blocked borrowers from accessing lower student loan payments and reduced access to debt relief, while failing to conduct sufficient outreach to borrowers in or at risk of delinquency."

Why This Matters

Default can hurt a borrower's credit score and raise the cost of future borrowing. Mass defaults can be a drag on economic growth as borrowers with garnished wages and wrecked credit spend less.

High Numbers of Defaulted Borrowers

Despite efforts to bring borrowers back into repayment after the pandemic, default and delinquency rates in 2025 were higher than ever.

During the pandemic, the Department of Education paused all federal student loan payments. As part of the pause, borrowers who didn't make payments wouldn't be considered delinquent or in default on their loans.

Payments resumed in October 2023, but an on-ramp period meant missed payments didn't automatically send a borrower into delinquency. The on-ramp ended a year later, and defaults increased dramatically in June 2025, since borrowers do not default until after about nine months of nonpayment.

As of December 2025, about 7 million borrowers were in default, and more than 3 million were delinquent, according to the Department of Education. That means about one in four of all federal student loan borrowers were behind on their payments.

In March, a federal appeals court permanently ended the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan. Almost 7.2 million SAVE borrowers will soon be forced to choose another income-driven repayment plan or be placed in a standard plan. Experts warn that the end of SAVE will only add to the historically high number of borrowers in default.

Wage Garnishments

In March, the Department of Education announced it was handing over many of its federal student loan responsibilities to the Treasury Department. As part of this transition, the Education Department said it would resume student loan collections.

The Education and Treasury Departments also plan to restart wage garnishments. The government can take part of a defaulted borrower's wages, withhold a portion of Social Security benefits, and seize tax refunds.

Processing Backlogs

The Department of Education has struggled to clear its backlog of loan-forgiveness applications. While the Education Department has made more progress recently, tens of thousands of eligible borrowers are still waiting for their debt to be discharged.

The department has worked through much of a backlog that once neared 2 million applications for income-driven repayment plans, but more than 530,000 were still pending as of April.

What the Democrats Want from the Education Department

The lawmakers called on the department to cancel debt for borrowers who already qualify under existing forgiveness programs and create a new interest-free forbearance for those who can't afford their payments.

This letter also asked the Education Department to end its transfer of the federal student loan portfolio to the Treasury Department and continue the pause on wage garnishments for defaulted borrowers.

The letter gives McMahon until June 22 to report to lawmakers when the department will clear the income-driven repayment backlog and whether it will resume monitoring loan servicers to ensure they're accurately billing borrowers.

Chairman of the Federal Reserve Kevin Warsh is looking to change up the way the Fed measures inflation.
Credit: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

Key Takeaways

• Fed Chair Kevin Warsh wants to shift the Fed's focus from its favored inflation gauge in favor of a “trimmed average” when analyzing inflation trends.
• Trimmed averages discard prices that rise or fall too much in a given month.
• A researcher who helped develop the measure said it's useful for policymakers to help understand trends, but it might not be useful for central banks communicating with the public.

The Fed’s new leader thinks the statistics we use to measure inflation could use a trim.

Speaking to senators at his confirmation hearing in April, Kevin Warsh dissed the Fed’s favored inflation measure, the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index. He said he wanted to create an inflation measure using a “billion prices” collected from the private sector. He also wants the new measure to use a “trimmed average” of prices instead of the traditional PCE.

What This Means For The Economy

Changing the benchmark for the Fed’s 2% inflation target could lead to big shifts in monetary policy.

While many think of the consumer price index (CPI) when considering inflation, Federal Reserve has long favored the core PCE price index—the PCE but without food and energy prices. The idea is that removing the typically volatile prices found in food and energy, which are prone to large swings up and down in any given month, will give a clearer picture of inflation's overall trajectory and where it’s likely to go over the next few months or years.

Core PCE prices have a few problems as an inflation benchmark. For one thing, they ignore the most essential expenses in household budgets, which could create a disconnect between what statistics say about inflation and what the public is experiencing.

“If you go and you say, ‘Well, I don't care about energy and food price fluctuations,' that's like 40% of the average person’s spending,” said Stephen Cecchetti, a professor of economics at Brandeis University.

In the early 1990s, Cecchetti was a researcher at the National Bureau of Economic Research and part of a group working on a way to measure inflation that filtered out noise and showed which trends were likely to persist.

Between 1994 and 1997, Cecchetti wrote several papers with Michael Bryan, pioneering the use of measures like "median inflation" and "trimmed mean inflation" and developing indexes based on those ideas.

Trimmed mean inflation is simple in theory: you ignore the outliers in any given month. However, experts disagree about how much of the highest and lowest prices to toss out. For example, the Dallas Fed removes the 24% of prices that fell the most and the 31% that rose the most. By contrast, the Cleveland Fed’s "trimmed mean CPI" cuts 16% total off the upper and lower tails.

There are other technical questions about whether to weight each price category by volatility or by spending, how finely to break down the price categories, and so on. All this makes trimmed means tricky to explain to the public.

“There are a lot of decisions you have to make once you start down this road,” Cecchetti said. “And while it might be useful to guide policy, the question is whether it's useful for communication, and I think that's a tougher sell.”

Inflation Measures Are Sending Different Signals

Emphasizing one measure over the other could affect the Fed’s interest rate policy, as the trimmed-average reading has lately pointed in a different direction than the Fed's usual inflation gauges. Trimmed average inflation has run cooler than core PCE, although historically, the opposite has been the case.

Some economists have worried that relying on trimmed averages could lead Warsh to take the risk of inflation less seriously than some of his colleagues on the Fed’s policy committee. For example, the chart above shows how the Dallas Fed's trimmed mean has run much cooler over the past year than the PCE.

“We remain skeptical about the usefulness of the measure as it tends to be slow in detecting a change in the inflation trend and has understated inflation lately,” Aichi Amemiya, senior economist at Nomura, wrote in a research note earlier this month.

Fed officials have increasingly voiced concerns that the Iran war could ignite a fresh bout of high inflation even as the pandemic-era burst of inflation lingers, keeping it above the Fed’s 2% goal for a fifth year.

However, Warsh isn’t alone on the Federal Open Market Committee in his interest in using trimmed means as an inflation benchmark. As recently as January, Fed Governor Michelle Bowman pointed to trimmed-mean inflation indexes as evidence that inflation was cooling.

Cecchetti said the trimmed inflation measures he helped develop can help central banks filter out noise and estimate the medium-term trend for inflation, but that the Fed would be better off sticking to the CPI or PCE, not excluding food and energy, when talking about inflation to the public.

“[Trimmed mean] statistical techniques result in numbers that are going to be useful for internal decision making and technical analysis, but not necessarily that useful for public communication,” he said.

The SpaceX IPO stands to be one of the biggest stock-market events in recent memory.
Credit: Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images

Key Takeaways

• The scale of, and publicity around, the SpaceX IPO has made the event, expected as soon as this week, one of the biggest stock-market stories in recent memory.
• In this article, Investopedia explores some basic questions for investors who might be wondering just what to make of the massive deal.

If your crowd likes to talk stocks, chances are the group chat has been busy lately: The SpaceX IPO might be the hottest topic with retail investors since shares of Nvidia began their rocket ride to a $5 trillion market cap.

That may have investors wondering what they need to know—or do—ahead of the deal, which is set to land the company more money than any previous initial public offering, and immediately put a second Elon Musk-led company (after Tesla) in the upper echelon of big public U.S. companies.

Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX—or, soon, the ticker "SPCX"—is set to start trading Friday. On prediction markets, bettors generally expect the shares to rise in their first session; prognosticators have offered a range of viewpoints on the company's value, some optimistic and others cautious. Market watchers suspect that retail investors may be pulling money out of other assets ahead of the IPO.

We can't answer short- or long-term questions about what, exactly, SpaceX stock will do after it hits the market. But for investors looking for answers to basic questions, here you go.

What are the basic details of the IPO?

The company on Thursday said it sold nearly 556 million shares at $135 apiece, raising some $75 billion in a deal that would imply a market value around $1.8 trillion. It's expected to start trading Friday.

What does SpaceX do?

SpaceX's rocket launches are effectively the face of the franchise, as they're widely watched and tracked online. But that's just part of the company's business: It launched 170 rockets last year, but it also runs the Starlink satellite-connectivity business, which has more than 10 million subscribers, and an AI business known for the Grok chatbot and X social-media app. For a more detailed look at what it does and the numbers, including both actual performance and company projections, read our story here.

How do I buy shares of SpaceX?

Some retail investors will access the shares at the IPO price through their brokerages, some of which have allocations for their clients; investors considering doing so should read the fine print, since those offers may restrict when you can sell without some kind of penalty, such as reduced access to future offerings. Others may simply wait until after the shares begin trading, hoping to either join in the first-day frenzy or to let the dust settle a bit.

What if I want exposure to SpaceX, but don't want the stock?

Some investors already have exposure to SpaceX through purchases of exchange-traded funds that bought pre-IPO stakes in the company. Other funds with various investing approaches are expected to buy shares after the IPO; investors should investigate exactly how much exposure to SpaceX those funds have, since it will likely vary substantially. (Fund investors should also consider expenses and other factors apart from holdings.)

I'm an index-fund investor. Will I own SpaceX when it goes public?

One of the hot topics leading up to the SpaceX IPO has been whether the stock would move more quickly than is typical into the index funds favored by many American investors. At present, the answer is "it depends." (Though it won't join major indexes on its first trading day.)

S&P Dow Jones Indices decided after a review not to update its criteria for inclusion in the S&P 500, the index that underpins some of the most popular passive investments on the planet. That broadly means SpaceX wouldn't get into that measure for at least a year.

The rules governing some other indexes tracked by popular funds, including the Russell 1000 and the Nasdaq 100, have been updated, meaning the stock could be added to related funds after five and 15 trading days, respectively, instead of the months that would've previously been required.

MSCI, the index provider behind the All Country World Index, didn't change its rules, under which certain companies are eligible for inclusion in its indexes after 10 trading days.

This article was first published on June 10, 2026. It was updated to reflect the official pricing of the deal.