Money Stuff: The Podcast · Friday, July 31, 2026
Financial firms are offering structured notes linked to SpaceX's performance, which has seen its stock price fall post-IPO. While marketed to retail investors as downside-protected investments, the notes may function as a mechanism for banks to acquire out-of-the-money put options on SpaceX from these investors.
“So there's a Bloomberg story this week about basically banks or financial firms are rolling out structured notes on SpaceX.”
“The other way to think about structured notes, is that banks have these retail clients. The retail clients, yeah, the kind of buy whatever you sell them, and so the job of the structured notes business is to sell them the stuff you want to sell. And what happened here, I think it looks to me from looking at these structured debts is that the banks wanted to buy puts on SpaceX.”
“This is a way for them to buy very out of the money puts on SpaceX from people who don't quite realize that they're selling out of the money puts on SpaceX their retail customers.”