The First Drop

You're watching the number fall for the first time. SpaceX is down 22% from its June 16th high. And you can't do a thing about it. You're locked up. Can't sell. Can't buy more. So why am I making a video about trimming and adding into a stock you can't even touch? Because the feeling you have right now—that knot in your stomach, that flicker of doubt—is exactly what you need to deal with before you're ever allowed to act on it. Not after.

Some of you are sitting there wondering if you should have sold at the top. Others aren't scared. You're annoyed. Annoyed that you don't actually have a plan, just a gut feeling you're hoping holds up the next time this happens. Hold on to both of those thoughts. We're going to use them.

The Two Camps That Will Wreck You

Here's the first thing I want you to accept. This is not the last time SpaceX drops. It's the first time, sure. It won't be the last. Not for a company doing what this one's trying to do. And almost everything you'll hear about a moment like this falls into one of two camps.

Camp one says sell now, take the win, you got lucky once, and you should quit while you're ahead. We've watched that advice wreck people before. We watched it happen to Tesla holders years ago, back when Tesla was the punchline instead of SpaceX. People were talked into selling a company they believed in right before it did the exact thing they originally believed it would do.

Camp two says the opposite. Never sell. Diamond hands. Hold no matter what because selling is for cowards. Because if you ever trimmed a winner, you'll regret it forever.

I think both camps are wrong, and for the same reason. They're reactions dressed up as strategy. Neither one is actually a plan. A real plan doesn't ask what you feel like doing today. It tells you in advance what to do before the day shows up. That's the whole point of this conversation.

The Plan That Actually Works

So here's a plan we use with concentrated positions, the same one we've used with Tesla holders for years now. We trim in the strength, we add back in the weakness. A 22% move off a high, like the one you just watched, is exactly the kind of swing worth using to revisit your position size. I'll say that once with the real number, because that's what's actually happening right now. For the rest of this, I'm going to talk in general terms, because I'm not telling you to act at exactly 22% forever, every time. This is illustrative, and it shouldn't replace a real conversation about your own numbers.

Before I go any further, I want to say something that doesn't get said enough. Trimming at a high sounds simple. Buy low, sell high. It's the first sentence anybody ever learns about investing. The kind of thing you'd say to a kid. And it might be the hardest thing investing actually asks you to do.

Here's why. If you bought SpaceX, or went to work there because you believed in the mission, trimming at a high feels like betrayal. Everyone around you is euphoric. The price keeps climbing. Every voice you trust is telling you to hold tighter, not less. Everyone's making videos about it, holding spaces on X. Selling anything in that moment feels like doubt, even though it's discipline doing its job at the exact moment it's least comfortable to do it. The easy moments to trim are never the moments that matter. The hard ones are the only ones that count. And that's true whether you're managing $20 million dollars or $20,000. I'll tell you honestly, this is the hardest part of the job for us, too. Not the analysis. The conversation. Clients fight us on trims at highs all the time because it feels wrong in the moment, even when the math is right. That's just what discipline costs.

The Mission Matters More Than the Dollar

Now, a lot of you didn't get into SpaceX to make money and run. You got in because you believed in the mission from the start. And for people like that, the real goal isn't just dollars. It's owning more of the thing you believe in over time. More shares. More of the company as it actually becomes what you always thought it could become.

Here's the part that nobody walks through, though. Say you trim some of your position at a high. That money doesn't vanish. It sits waiting until a real pullback like this one shows up. When it does, that same money buys you back more shares than you sold because each share now costs less. Do that consistently on the way up and on the way down, and years from now you can end up holding more shares of the company than the person who just sat there the whole time and never touched it. Not fewer shares. More. For someone who believes in the mission, that should matter more than the dollar figure on a statement. Trimming here doesn't work against SpaceX. Done consistently, it can leave you owning more of it on a longer timeline, the hard way instead of the easy way.

There's a second reason to do this, separate from the share count. Trimming some at a high means one bad earnings call doesn't get to control your entire financial life. That's just sound position management, the same thing we tell anyone holding a concentrated stake in any one company, mission or no mission.

Most of Wall Street will tell you the smart move is to never sell a winner. Most of retail will tell you the same thing for a different reason: diamond hands. If you ever sold a share of Apple, you regret it. That whole line. I don't buy it, and what I just walked you through is why. Holding through everything doesn't always mean bravery. A lot of the time it's just inertia that found itself a good story. The actual rebellious move, the one nobody on either side wants to admit, is trimming a stock while everyone else is just discovering it. While they're FOMOing in late, you're already taking some off the table. That's somebody running the math while everyone around them is running on adrenaline.

Why the Swings Keep Coming

Why will swings like this keep happening? Because SpaceX isn't one business. It's three or four stacked on top of each other. And the market won't give full credit to any of them until each one proves itself on its own.

Starlink is the most mature piece, the one already generating real revenue, running something like 9,600 satellites across more than 160 countries. But the market wants to see subscriber growth and revenue per user keep climbing before it fully believes the next leg up.

Starship is the riskier piece, still working toward a real commercial flight cadence instead of a promised one. And every delay there gets read by the market as a reason to wait.

Then there's the part furthest from being proven, and probably the part most responsible for the volatility you're seeing right now. SpaceX wants to put AI compute into orbit. Satellites running chips powered by the sun, cooled by space itself, feeding back into the Starlink network on the ground. They've reportedly already got a deal close to a billion dollars a month from Google for compute capacity, which is real revenue today. But their own stated target—something like 1 gigawatt of orbital AI compute by the end of next year, scaling toward 100 gigawatts within a few years after that—is a long way from where things stand right now. And the terrafab chip plant that's supposed to help supply all of it is, in SpaceX's own filing, still a general framework, not a signed deal, with no fixed budget and no fixed timeline.

I think the market hasn't priced any of it in yet, and I think that's a real opportunity. I also think it's fair to call it what it is: unproven, years from paying off, if it pays off at all. Both things are true at once. That gap between what's real today and what might be real later is what keeps creating swings like the one you just watched. Get used to it. There will be more.

The Mirror You Need to Hold

So here's the mirror I want to hold up. Look at what you're feeling right now watching this drop for the first time. That feeling is data. If you can watch a real decline and feel nothing, you're rare, and you probably didn't need this conversation. Most of you felt something somewhere between worry and regret. Remember exactly what that felt like.

Now hold the same mirror up to the high that's still coming. The one where the price blows past where it sits today. Where the same people calling for calm right now are posting about how obvious it was all along. You'll feel just as sure then as you feel uneasy now. Same uncertainty, opposite direction. If you can see that clearly from here before either moment fully arrives, that's exactly when you build the rule. Not in the middle of either feeling, when it's already too late to think straight.

And because you're locked up right now, this is actually the best time to do it. You can't act today even if you wanted to, which means there's no trade riding on this conversation. No pressure. That's the moment to sit down and build the plan. Not the day your shares unlock and that clock starts running. Waiting until you can trade to start thinking about how you will trade is the exact mistake this whole conversation is about.

So if any of this is landing, go to rebellynaire.com and set up a call now. We'll build a plan together while there's nothing on the line yet, so that by the time there is something on the line, you're not improvising.

One last thing. This isn't only a SpaceX conversation for us, and it isn't only an Elon Musk conversation either. Tesla's sitting in almost the same spot right now with robo-taxi scaling and Optimus still ahead of it. Both still waiting on the market to give them real credit the same way SpaceX is waiting on Starlink and Starship. And it isn't just his companies Wall Street gets wrong. There's a pattern we built a whole firm around finding wherever it shows up, whoever's running the company.

I'm Brad from Ferguson with rebellynaire. Bye for now.