The Hottest IPO of the Year
A 'final' timeline for the Iran conflict... Hiring is at a four-year low... Inflation is back in the picture... SpaceX is going public... But not without its red flags... Speculations have their place, when sized correctly...
Just two or three more weeks...
That was the timeline President Donald Trump laid out for the end of the Iran conflict in a speech last night. He added that the U.S. continues to negotiate with Iran, and said the operation is "getting very close" to achieving its goals.
In a post on the social platform X, Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out the U.S.'s four objectives... These included destroying Iran's weapons facilities, as well as the country's navy and air force.
Trump said these three goals had all been accomplished. The only remaining goal is making sure Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.
But that was the end of the optimistic commentary. Put simply, the time between now and Trump's predicted end to the conflict won't be quiet. As the president put it last night...
We're going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong.
Even with a timeline in sight, there's still plenty of time for things to change. And based on last night's speech, strikes on Iran will continue, which could derail further negotiations.
And Trump has his eyes on the next targets if negotiations break down. More from last night's speech...
If there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously.
We have not hit their oil, even though that's the easiest target of all, because it would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding. But we could hit it and it would be gone and there's not a thing they could do about it.
So we expect the recent volatility to continue at least throughout the rest of the month.
We saw that in the market's reaction today. Stock futures fell off after Trump's speech began.
All three major U.S. indexes fell more than 1% early in the morning, before rebounding and bringing the S&P 500 and Nasdaq into positive territory on the day. And oil jumped more than 10% – with West Texas Intermediate crude hitting a four-year high of $110 per barrel.
He must've seen today's market action coming... Trump said that once the conflict does end, "gas prices will rapidly come back down" and "stock prices will rapidly go back up."
The president must've missed the four-year low in hiring...
On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey ("JOLTS") report for the month of February.
Total job openings fell from January's seven-month high to 6.88 million. And total hires fell to 4.85 million, hitting the lowest level since April 2020. When you exclude the COVID-19 pandemic, you'd have to go all the way back to August 2014 to find a month with fewer hires than February.
Tomorrow, the bureau will release its monthly Employment Situation Summary for March, including the unemployment rate. Wall Street expects 52,000 job gains, with the unemployment rate sticking at 4.4%.
Ahead of that, payroll processor ADP released its monthly employment report, showing that the private sector added 62,000 jobs in March. That was above Wall Street's estimate, but it's below February's 66,000 new jobs.
So for now, signs are pointing to a less-bad month than February, when the market lost 92,000 jobs. But since hiring is also in a slump, the jobs market remains on shaky ground.
The combined labor market and inflation problem...
As we've written in previous Digests, the jobs market weakening at the same time we face sticky inflation has put the Federal Reserve in a tough spot. The Fed would usually respond to labor struggles with rate cuts, while it would raise rates to tame inflation.
Now, it's dealing with both problems at the same time.
The Fed cut rates last year to help the jobs market, when inflation had come down from its peak and was approaching the target range of 2%. That might not be the case anymore. As we wrote in the March 11 Digest...
One estimate from Apollo Global Management Chief Economist Torsten Slok is that $100 oil would boost headline inflation by 0.7 percentage points. That would put it closer to 4% than 3%, to say nothing of the Fed's supposed 2% target.
At the time, the Cleveland Federal Reserve was projecting March's consumer price index data to come in at a 2.9% year-over-year increase. Just three weeks later, the Cleveland Fed is now projecting CPI to come in at 3.3% in both March and April.
That would be the highest level for inflation since June 2024.
The Iran war, and oil above $100 per barrel, add a level of uncertainty to the Fed's next move. Right now, the market is pricing in a 97% chance of the Fed leaving rates unchanged at its meeting at the end of the month – and a 3% chance that the Fed hikes interest rates.
That's not what the market would want to see.
In other news, SpaceX has filed to go public...
The rocket company filed confidentially for an initial public offering ("IPO") later this year, according to Bloomberg. The IPO would come around June with a valuation of $1.75 trillion, Bloomberg said.
That would instantly make SpaceX one of the eight largest companies in the world. And we're willing to bet that a lot of investors are going to try and snap up SpaceX's shares...
For one, the space industry has been one of the market's top performers. Over the past year, the Procure Space Fund (UFO) has more than doubled. And in 2026, it's up another 27%, versus a 4% decline for the S&P 500.
And since SpaceX is also run by Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, plenty of mom-and-pop "retail" investors and trend-chasers will be interested. The company is adjusting its offering to meet that demand.
According to CNBC, SpaceX may allocate 30% of shares from its IPO to everyday retail investors, instead of the typical range of 5% to 10%. That's a red flag. As our colleague James Royal explained in a recent Investing News article...
At the same time, you must be cautious when anyone cuts you in for a "can't miss" deal normally reserved for the elite. If it's such a great opportunity, then why are you being invited to profit, too?
As the saying goes, "If you look around the table and can't figure out who the sucker is, it's you."
Musk knows where the demand for his shares comes from... In February, Yahoo Finance reported that Tesla was the second-most-purchased stock from retail investors so far in 2026 – only behind Microsoft (MSFT). And SpaceX is getting out ahead of this.
But when retail goes "all in" on a single stock, that's usually a sign of a top. Just look at GameStop (GME), the poster child of 2021's meme-stock frenzy... GameStop is off more than 70% from its highs that year.
GameStop was trading based on excitement and momentum, completely disconnected from its fundamentals. We could see something similar with SpaceX if retail investors pile in.
That's not the only issue with SpaceX's IPO...
As our colleague Sean Michael Cummings wrote in the March 30 edition of the free DailyWealth e-letter, "animal spirits" are taking over when it comes to SpaceX's upcoming offering.
And a lot of that has come from Musk's ability to drum up headlines from future goals and products. From Sean...
For example, Tesla owners have been promised Full Self-Driving vehicles for nearly a decade. But as recently as 2024, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety ("IIHS") rated Tesla's automated driving as "poor."
Now, as Sean wrote, Musk is saying SpaceX is the key to "make us an intergalactic civilization."
SpaceX may end up being a good investment somewhere down the line. It has secured government contracts from NASA, the Air Force, and the Space Force. But right now, the story is built on hype.
There are better ways to manage your portfolio...
As Sean concluded...
By following a disciplined approach, you can avoid buying based on hype and ensure your portfolio is safe. Remember to use proper position sizing. You can always speculate on moonshots with smaller amounts of money and scale in gradually.
We agree with Sean... speculations like hot IPOs and small-cap hypergrowth companies can have a place inside a well-built portfolio. But give them a much smaller weighting than the well-run, capital-efficient businesses that should be your portfolio's cornerstone. And even when you speculate, you can find speculative investments with more substance than hype.
New 52-week highs (as of 4/1/26): Altius Minerals (ALS.TO), New York Times (NYT), Pfizer (PFE), and Sempra (SRE).
No questions in today's mailbag, but we do have one clarification to acknowledge. Yesterday's edition included a typo when we referenced the estimated global daily oil-supply deficit given the blocked Strait of Hormuz. The number should have read 10 million barrels, and we've updated it on our website.
Lastly, one housekeeping note... Our offices and the U.S. stock markets are closed tomorrow for the Good Friday holiday. After today, stay tuned for a special series of essays from editor Corey McLaughlin that will begin in the Masters Series and continue on Monday.
All the best,
Nick Koziol
Baltimore, Maryland
April 2, 2026