SpaceX didn’t just go public. It detonated a trading frenzy that’s already rewriting ETF record books.

Just days after the company’s June 12 IPO on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, a wave of leveraged exchange-traded funds launched to give traders amplified exposure to Elon Musk’s aerospace juggernaut. By June 16, the entire suite of SpaceX-linked ETFs had racked up over $3 billion in combined trading volume. The standout: the Leverage Shares 2X Long SpaceX Daily ETF ($SPCH), which alone accounted for $1.3 billion in trades, setting a new benchmark for second-day ETF volume.

The IPO that launched a thousand trades

SpaceX priced its shares at $135 each, raising approximately $75 billion in what ranks among the largest initial public offerings in history. The listing happened on Nasdaq under the SPCX ticker.

By June 15, just three days after the IPO, Leverage Shares had already rolled out a pair of leveraged products: the $SPCH (2x Long) and the $SSPC (2x Short). A 2x leveraged long ETF aims to deliver double the daily return of the underlying stock. If SpaceX shares climb 3% in a day, $SPCH targets a 6% gain. The flip side, of course, is that losses get doubled too.

Most individual ETFs in the suite exceeded $100 million in daily trading volume, with additional tickers like $SNK and $SPCL also drawing notable attention. But $SPCH was the undeniable star, its $1.3 billion volume day eclipsing the previous second-day record held by $IBIT, the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF.

Crypto platforms got there first

Hyperliquid, the decentralized perpetual futures platform, saw over 7 million contracts traded on SpaceX-linked perpetuals before the official IPO even happened. That pre-IPO activity totaled $1.2 billion in trading volume, essentially functioning as an unofficial price discovery mechanism for a company that hadn’t yet listed.

What this means for investors

The $3 billion trading day across SpaceX ETFs isn’t just a fun headline. It signals a structural shift in how retail and institutional investors access newly public companies.

For context, $IBIT’s previous record was considered a landmark moment for ETF launches, coming amid a historic wave of spot Bitcoin ETF approvals. $SPCH beating that benchmark in the aerospace sector, not crypto, tells you the leveraged ETF playbook is now being applied across asset classes with similar success.

Leveraged ETFs are designed for daily holding periods. They use derivatives and debt to amplify returns, which means they can diverge significantly from the underlying stock’s performance over longer timeframes due to a phenomenon called volatility decay. If SpaceX stock bounces up 5% one day and down 5% the next, $SPCH won’t end up back where it started. It’ll be slightly lower. Over weeks or months, that drag compounds.