A few years ago I hit the jackpot with a pony on an obscure road in the north. There I met one of the executives. We took some fun photos and are now exchanging holiday greetings. Unfortunately, I received an email from him this week. He really wants to buy SpaceX. Shortly thereafter, a security guard stopped me near the New York Stock Exchange. He said he would like to know how much SpaceX should be purchased for. At the time, colleagues in the gardening industry were puzzled by the idea of what was worth sacrificing to make space. Microsoft? Salesforce? A logical choice, apart from Friday’s massive manipulation of these stocks, which was a lot of fun for those of us who hold these positions. However, let’s backtrack a little. There are not one, but three deals expected to define 2026 and even 2027. That said, after Anthropic’s rapid fundraising (nearly tripling since February, which was no easy feat considering its previous valuation was already over $300 billion), things seem to be going pretty well. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is in pole position and is scheduled to debut within two weeks. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, may be next simply because it needs funding. Considering it can’t afford a down round and secured a post-money valuation of $852 billion in March, the valuation sounds like it could exceed $1 trillion. That could be a tall order given the heavy losses and shaky leadership. Anthropic is solidly profitable. If this is the third listing, it might be worth the wait, if only because A) you can afford to wait, and B) the money from racetrack executives, Wall Street guards, and handyman gardeners is exhausted and there’s nothing left to come out of. Indeed, only SpaceX has officially released an initial public offering prospectus, known as an S-1. CNBC reports that OpenAI is working on a confidential filing, but some have suggested Anthropic could go public as early as the fourth quarter. With these caveats in mind, let’s dig into them to see if we can understand what happens here. I want to take the best information I have gathered from both the seller and buyer sides during my syndication work on IPOs, and the knowledge of the current situation from the executives nominally in charge of the process, to advance to a higher level. First, no matter what you hear, see, or learn, it’s probably wrong. Because no one knows how things will turn out, no matter how high up they are. One reason for this is that there are too many cooks in the kitchen. Let’s take SpaceX as an example. Mr. Musk has an iron hand, wants lots of retailers on board, and wants a valuation of at least $1.8 trillion, at least for now. This is unreasonable. How do you define retail? Are early investor Ron Barron’s fund entourage considered private investors? What about loyalist Cathie Wood? how much do they get paid? Given that Morgan Stanley was fully committed to acquiring Twitter-now-X, everyone expected Musk to choose Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriter for the IPO. Maybe everything went well and they said, “Let’s make it even.” As it turned out, Goldman Sachs was the lead bank in the deal. This is good for the club as the fees should be high. But Goldman’s syndication desk knows little about retail. Then again, does Fidelity count as a retail business? Perhaps a big slug is promised to Robinhood for its users? While stocks seem to have skyrocketed abnormally on Friday, there is nothing really “out of the ordinary” in the West as the market has become. There’s a good word to describe this deal. It’s “chaos”. With disruption comes loss. So let’s try and see what happens. This is a three step process. First, there’s the pricing. Ostensibly the source of its $1.8 trillion valuation. The second is the start date and first day of trading, which is where the full speculation takes place. Third, thanks to a rule change by the administrators of major U.S. stock indexes such as the Nasdaq 100, it could be included in stock indexes sooner. This is the really tricky part. Because it has never happened and no one knows what will happen. This was seen late in trading on Friday when the stock price of Nvidia, the club’s name, plummeted in the last 10 minutes of trading due to rebalancing. Put on your “1999 hat.” Because that’s the last time we experienced this level of ignorance. I’ve been saying that we need to leave room to the imagination for SpaceX to be worth as much as $4 trillion soon, considering all the market orders placed by people who didn’t get stock in this deal. A market order tells your broker to buy or sell immediately at the highest available price. In the midst of the SpaceX frenzy, they probably have no idea how much they’ll buy it for. They’ll just buy it. There is a recent history template. It’s the much-lauded IPO of Nvidia knockoff Cerebras, the latter a punching bag in the process. Cerebras shares are priced at $185, valuing the company on a fully diluted basis at $56 billion. The deal was reportedly 20 times oversubscribed, meaning 20 times the demand for the number of shares offered. The allocation amount is unknown, but the stock opened at $350, almost 90% above the trading price. Cerebras briefly supported a valuation of more than $100 billion when its stock price reached $386. Well, the stock price is currently $237 per share. That means everyone who bought on the so-called “aftermarket” is dead in the water. Yes, that’s unthinkable. Everyone is a loser except those who “participated” in the allocation trade at the $185 price. Even these people can be losers if they issue some order “in the market” to the syndicate’s desk to support the cause and secure additional inventory. With their mixed average, they can also be submerged. Here comes the first lesson. If you do it wrong, you can actually lose money in this business. That’s why you want to try to get as much profit as possible from your trading. Call your broker and give it a try. It’s worth the effort. And please beg. There are no market orders. Let’s play around like we’re trying to catch a tarpon. Stock will go away and come back when you get tired of it, so you can buy it at that time. If not, wait. With orders flooding in on the market and Mr. Musk’s knowledge of the company, I think we can expect prices to be at least double what they were for Cerebras. That means we can expect a price of $4 trillion on the first day of trading after a chaotic start. When you get inventory, you don’t want to be part of that Scrum except as a seller. Unfortunately, if you don’t believe my analysis or get too carried away and are left hanging, you may have an opportunity to buy in a surprising way. Administrators of various indexes are trying to machine-gun SpaceX into their devices. To do so, expect significant drawdowns from all other stocks, especially megacaps like Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft. That’s where the money is. I think they will be egged on by the club and now is a great time to buy, but I don’t know how close the other two deals will be. Similar sales pressure is likely for these other names. Newly public stocks spike on entry and fall after joining the index. If you don’t get stock in the SpaceX deal, then perhaps it’s time to consider buying. Is it worth buying at all? Again, when it comes to contracts, yes. Post-agreement, this is unlikely to happen in the short term. Peeling of insider stock will occur multiple times as part of the novel way trades are structured. No one knows what’s going to happen, including Mr. Musk and the bank syndicate desks, so we expect a hit every time, but we have to remember that everything is very similar to 1999. Will it be a good stock? It really depends on the basics. Since the company is losing a lot of money, I think they might just want it for bragging rights until the process is complete and the flavor is ingrained. It’s not about profits. OpenAI will likely be next. Here are companies that don’t share Musk’s name. CEO Sam Altman’s personality is difficult to understand, but I find him very diplomatic. OpenAI needs funding, so this will be a real fundraiser. Again, if you can enter into a trade at the offer price, accept it. If you can’t do that, don’t bother. You could end up in a celebras situation. We expect this to be a loss-making IPO, as this is a traditional business for loss-making companies. We predict that the best price may be after incorporating the index. I would like to be more optimistic, but when a company needs capital, the institutions participating in the transaction will be the sellers. They need to consider the future prospects of the company, which means they would rather not own the company. Finally, we have my favorite, Anthropic. This is a B2B company and probably the fastest growing company in history, at least at this size. The annual revenue run rate exceeded $47 billion, up from $10 billion in revenue last year. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is on track to return to operating profit this quarter. You have to play by different rules here. You probably won’t get any stock in that trade. The first price is not the highest price. If you want to try your hand at acquiring stocks, we highly recommend using limit orders, which give your broker a specific price to buy or sell a stock. Select the limit in dollars. You could say you won’t pay more per share than the price of Nvidia stock. Calculate that price and place a limit order at that level. We do not use market orders even if the opening price is unlikely to be the highest price of the day. You may have to be like the successful Cerebras holders who played it for $380. At the very least, Anthropic is such a great company that I don’t expect the kind of losses that buyers in the Cerebras market are currently experiencing. I really like Anthropic, so I might have to break my discipline and buy it to make sure I get it on day one. But even if I wanted 200 shares, I wouldn’t buy more than 50 shares because I’m scared of what celebrities would do. If it’s worth less than Nvidia, you can buy 50 of them at any price. Nvidia is another very fast-growing company with a very low price-to-earnings ratio in the consensus 2027 forecast. In the end, these three will be ruled by the basics. Returning to SpaceX, Mr. Musk’s money-losing genius, we expect it to have a chasm, if not a canyon, to drive through, but it might actually be worth buying if it closes below its opening price. All possibilities. I can console myself by buying the mask dream. It’s unlikely to work out, but it could be like owning Green Bay Packers stock until you see some kind of profitability. OpenAI is the hardest game to play because I don’t like paying money to loss-making companies, with the exception of companies run by Mr. Musk. We all know what he’s been doing to Tesla believers. OpenAI may need to offer a large amount of stock to survive long enough to reduce losses. That’s the real guess. The need for computing power, competition from Anthropic, the possibility of more intercompany revenue streams, and concerns that all the big institutions that own it will want to cash out clearly make this company difficult. If you want to make money off of it, consider what Cerebras is doing now. I know, that sounds dire. There is an obvious dual nature here. I want to make you money, but I also don’t want you to lose money. Finally, keep in mind that if Anthropic were to go public for the third time, the market would be severely depleted of capital. This transaction itself will be cheaper than, for example, the first or second time it is done. The company is about making money. Big mutual funds will want stocks that are trading, both at the opening price and beyond. I think the low price is the opening price of the stock. Yes, that would be fine. It’s so good that I would like to give it to a charitable trust. That’s enough. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is longlisted for MSFT, CRM, NVDA, and AAPL. See here for a complete list of stocks.) As a subscriber to Jim Cramer’s CNBC Investment Club, you will receive trade alerts before Jim makes a trade. After Jim sends a trade alert, he waits 45 minutes before buying or selling stocks in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim talks about a stock on CNBC TV, he will issue a trade alert and then wait 72 hours before executing the trade. The above investment club information is subject to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, along with our disclaimer. 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