Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal

Record Primary Markets, SpaceX's Reckoning, and CME Fights Back - Capital Markets: IPOs, M&A & Exchanges - Week of June 23-30, 2026

Record M&A and the two largest primary raises ever collided with SpaceX's debut wipeout and CME's lawsuit against the CFTC over Kalshi. Our synthesis for the week of June 23-30, 2026.

Capital Markets: IPOs, M&A & Exchanges

Week of June 23-30, 2026: Record Primary Markets, SpaceX's Reckoning, and CME Fights Back

The tape this week told two stories at once. On paper, the primary market is the strongest it has been in a generation: Goldman has advised on more M&A faster than any bank in history, and June produced the two largest primary capital raises ever recorded. Yet the marquee deal of the cycle, SpaceX, spent its first two weeks public turning into the second-largest one-day market-cap wipeout on record. The gap between the plumbing (record volumes, fat fee pools, banks raising dividends) and the price action (a marquee IPO down a third, a trillion-dollar issuer blinking) is the trade to watch into July.

The IPO Window Is Wide Open, and Already Testing Investors

The supply side has rarely looked better. On The Markets (June 26), Goldman's John Flood framed June as historic: two high-profile IPOs totaling roughly $140 billion notional, described as the first- and second-largest primary capital raises in U.S. history, inside a two-week window. Nasdaq's vice chairman, on Brew Markets (June 29), went further, calling 2026 a candidate for "the largest capital-raise year in history," with Anthropic, Databricks, Canva, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac all in the pipeline.

The demand side is where it gets interesting. SpaceX priced at $135 on June 12, ran to $225 (a ~$2.3T market cap), then reversed hard, shedding roughly $400B in a single session, the second-largest one-day wipeout in history per Prof G Markets (June 24), and settling near $150 by week's end. The trigger, on Market Maker (June 26): a $25B bond offering upsized from $20B on 3 to 4x oversubscription, Baa1-rated at 110 to 175bp over Treasuries (wide of the ~93bp average for the rating). The structural tell for PMs is the ~4% float: on ETF Edge (June 29), panelists flagged SpaceX entering the Russell 1000 at ~12bps (and Russell 1000 Growth at ~22bps), forcing mechanical passive buying into a name with almost no tradable supply. The same segment cited JPMorgan data worth pinning to the wall: high-profile IPOs average a 19% first-day pop but underperform the market by ~20% cumulatively over three years, with only 13 of 30 recent marquee debuts posting positive first-year returns.

The most consequential IPO news may be the one that isn't happening. Multiple shows, Bloomberg Tech (June 26) and The Morning Market Briefing (June 26), report OpenAI weighing a delay to 2027 on its ~$1T target, with bankers citing congestion from Anthropic, Databricks and "$1.9T in SpaceX stock flooding the market over the next six months." Read-through: a delay dents Goldman's and Morgan Stanley's forward fee pool and effectively cedes the AI valuation benchmark to Anthropic.

Down-market, the window is being stress-tested by lower-quality paper. On Run the Numbers (June 25), Lime's S-1 (a $200M raise at a $1.8B valuation, Nasdaq: LIME) pairs $887M FY25 revenue (+29%) and $104M FCF with a going-concern flag and a September debt maturity wall, an IPO that is less a coming-out party than a refinancing.

M&A: Records Up Top, Pharma Doing the Heavy Lifting

The advisory league tables are eye-watering. Market Maker (June 29) reports Goldman has advised on $1.15 trillion of M&A by mid-June, the fastest any bank has hit the mark, ~45 to 50% YoY growth, reclaiming the top spot from JPMorgan ($720B). The drivers cited: AI-driven consolidation, defensive positioning, and equity strength enabling stock-funded deals. Concrete prints this week included SpaceX's $60B acquisition of Cursor (with a $4B termination fee) and Fox's $22B purchase of Roku at $160/share, per Market Maker (June 22), plus the previously announced $65B Unilever-McCormick food combination, a reverse Morris Trust targeting a mid-2027 close and ~$600M of synergies, dissected on The M&A Podcast (June 25).

Healthcare is the engine room. JPMorgan's healthcare banking co-heads, on Making Sense (June 26), describe XBI at five-year highs on double the prior year's volume, with Sun Pharma-Organon the largest cross-border deal of the year and a patent-cliff-driven pipeline of large-cap buyers chasing cheap biotech. BioCentury (June 23) added AbbVie's $10.9B acquisition of Apogee. Antitrust friction was conspicuously absent from the commentary, the working assumption is light regulatory resistance in the current environment.

Exchanges: CME Is Fighting for Its Franchise

The structural story of the week sits at the exchanges. CME sued the CFTC on June 18, challenging the regulator's May 29 approval of Kalshi's Bitcoin perpetual futures, arguing perps are swaps, not futures, and that the CFTC sidestepped proper rulemaking, covered across Grain Markets and Other Stuff (June 22) and Unchained (June 27). The CFTC called the suit "lawfare" to protect a derivatives monopoly. The stakes: Kalshi's perps have already done >$5B in volume, CME stock is down ~9% since the approval, and CEO Terry Duffy is stepping down. This is competitive desperation as much as legal principle.

CME's own fundamentals remain elite, Q1 2026 record revenue ~$2B (+14%), all-time-high ADV of 36.2M contracts/day (+22%), 70% operating margins, per The 7investing Podcast (June 29), but the moat is being probed from two sides. CBOE, broadcasting live from Chicago on The Exchange (June 25), is leaning into the same event-contract land grab: CEO Craig Donahue detailed mini-SPX binary options, "plus contracts," and a pending SEC filing for KPI-based event contracts on company metrics (e.g., Tesla production volumes), cleared through CBOE Clear.

Prediction Markets and Retail Flow: Volume Boom, Credibility Test

Event contracts are the fastest-growing corner of market structure, and the messiest. FYI (June 24) pegged Kalshi at $9B weekly volume (+117%) and Polymarket at $13.1B, though Polymarket's share is sliding toward ~25%, and The Breakdown (June 29) flagged Polymarket open interest falling to $310M from a $494M peak, even as Meta announced an "Arena" prediction-market app. The credibility hit is real: per WSJ Tech News Briefing (June 23) and Joseph Carlson (June 22), Polymarket paid creators $2 to 3K/month to post fabricated winning trades, ~70% of 1,105 analyzed videos were fake, potentially breaching its 2022 CFTC settlement barring U.S. users. Watch this as a regulatory catalyst.

Retail options are riding the same wave. SpaceX's options debut was the most active launch in history, ~1.8M contracts, 1M calls in the first hour, more than 5x Meta's 2012 record, per The Options Insider (June 25). Fidelity, on Options Insider Radio (June 29), put total options volume at 1.5B contracts, with single-name 0DTEs and Monday/Wednesday expirations now live.

The Overlay

Banks are signaling confidence with capital: post-stress-test dividend hikes of GS +11.1%, MS +15%, JPM +10%, Citi +11.6%, WFC +11.1%, per Dividend Talk (June 27). The counterweight: consensus on Insights Now (June 25) is no Fed hikes through year-end 2026, while Jeremy Grantham, on Squawk Pod (June 26), called this "the most expensive market in American history," with SpaceX the emblem of the froth.

Bottom line: the issuance machine is firing on all cylinders, but SpaceX is the live experiment in how much the market will pay for scarcity and story. If a ~4%-float, money-losing trillion-dollar name can't hold its debut, OpenAI's hesitation looks less like timing and more like discipline, and the back half of the pipeline gets repriced.