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Elon Musk is photographed at SpaceX in Brownsville, Texas.<\/p>\n
Marvin Joseph | The Washington Post | Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The SpaceX initial public offering<\/a> on Friday is poised to be the biggest ever<\/a> \u2014 and is generating a lot of buzz. <\/p>\n But IPOs can carry dangers<\/a> for the average investor, according to finance experts. <\/p>\n For starters, stocks are often unprofitable in the early period after an IPO, experts said. And buying individual companies \u2014 instead of investment funds with a broadly diversified basket of stocks \u2014 can make that volatility more acute for unwary investors due to their concentrated positions. <\/p>\n There’s good news, though: Investors who want a piece of SpaceX don’t have to buy the stock outright. <\/p>\n There are ample mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that hold SpaceX positions, or will do so after the company goes public. They would hold the stock as one sliver of a broader investment portfolio.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The same is true of other highly anticipated, blockbuster IPOs slated for this year, like those of Anthropic<\/a> and OpenAI<\/a>, experts said.<\/p>\n “There will be other ways investors can access the stock, other than buying the IPO,” said Zachary Evens, an analyst of passive strategies at Morningstar. <\/p>\n At $135 per share, SpaceX would be valued at nearly $1.8 trillion<\/a>, making it the seventh-biggest company in the U.S. by market capitalization. The IPO is poised to make CEO Elon Musk<\/a> the world’s first trillionaire<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Vehicles drive past a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket displayed outside a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. facility in Hawthorne, California, on June 8, 2026. <\/p>\n Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The universe of investment funds for retail investors generally falls into two categories: those that are actively managed and others that are passively managed. <\/p>\n The latter, known as index funds, are designed to track the broad performance of the stock market via a specific market index. Data shows that, over the long term, such funds generally outperform<\/a> those in which money managers actively pick stocks. <\/p>\n Many index fund investors will get access to SpaceX within days or weeks following the IPO, experts said. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The timeline depends on the specific criteria established by various index providers \u2014 and ranges from a few days to more than a year. <\/p>\n For example, the Russell U.S. indexes can add mega-cap companies like SpaceX into their indexes after five days of trading<\/a>, Evens said. <\/p>\n The same timeline applies to indexes provided by FTSE, CRSP and MSCI, according<\/a> to Vanguard Group. <\/p>\n Here’s what this means for investors: Those with shares in index mutual funds or ETFs that track these indexes, such as the Russell 1000 or CRSP U.S. Total Stock Market Index, will own a piece of SpaceX after that five-day period, Evens said. Morningstar owns CRSP Market Indexes.<\/p>\n Examples of such funds include the iShares Russell 1000 ETF (IWB<\/a>How to get access to SpaceX in index funds<\/h2>\n