It’s news everyone saw coming from 239,000 miles away (that’s the distance to the moon, where SpaceX plans to begin sending commercial cargo flights as soon as 2028).

The Elon Musk-led aerospace firm filed a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SPCX. The stage is now set for the biggest initial public offering in history, with a listing as early as June 12. On Wall Street, the IPO set up a heated contest to be the underwriter nonpareil.

The Underwrite One

There are a whopping 23 banks named on the cover of the SpaceX prospectus, including groups headquartered in the Netherlands (ING), Japan (Mizuho), Spain (Santander), the UK (Barclays), Canada (RBC Capital Markets) and France (Société Générale).

The top line, though, is as American as free refills. In order, there’s Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan. Goldman Sachs holds the coveted lead-left slot, indicating it’s the premier underwriter. It marks a reunion of sorts, as Goldman was the lead on the 2010 Nasdaq debut of Tesla, the other trillion-dollar company Musk leads. It’s an important win for the bank because the fees for this listing, with SpaceX planning a record-breaking raise up to $80 billion at a valuation of roughly $2 trillion, are going to reach the exosphere. And Goldman is looking to shore up a position as high tech’s underwriting bank of choice as more megacap debuts loom, creating the most competitive jostling for IPOs among banks in recent years — OpenAI, for example, is planning to file for an IPO as early as Friday. Goldman, however, wasn’t the only Wall Street major to be tasked with a prestigious job:

• SpaceX named Morgan Stanley as the IPO’s stabilization agent, putting the bank in charge of transactions to steady or preserve the stock price. Basically, it says Musk’s firm trusts the bank to help steer its all-important early weeks of public trading.
• Last year, Morgan Stanley led all Wall Street banks in equity capital markets revenue, a measure of how much a firm earns from equity-based transactions like IPOs and follow-on offerings, garnering just shy of $2 billion. But Goldman Sachs leapfrogged its rival in the fourth quarter and maintained pole position in the first quarter of this year with a $535 million haul, a 45% year-over-year increase, compared with Morgan Stanley’s $396 million.

Fee Glee Club: The underwriting fees for the SpaceX IPO could total $1 billion, according to some estimates. For comparison, when Goldman and Morgan Stanley led Medline’s $7.2 billion listing in December, they took home more than a third of the $156.5 million in fees. In other words, someone’s getting a nice bonus this year.

It all depends on how you look at it.

The S&P Indices Versus Active scorecards have long delivered a bleak message for active management: Most funds simply underperform their benchmarks over time. Roughly 90% of actively managed large-cap funds lagged the S&P 500 over the past 15 years, per the latest data. But a recent study backed by the Investment Adviser Association Active Managers Council wants to change that narrative. It argues SPIVA’s methodology may not reflect what clients actually experience when allocating to active mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. It could flip the script on the active management story, warranting another look from all those passive-loving advisors.

“[SPIVA’s] statistics are calculated correctly, but the way they’re calculated is not very well tailored to actual investment decision-making,” said Tim Riley, study author and University of Arkansas associate professor. “SPIVA gives the impression that passive is dominant and the clear answer for what you should be picking, but a much more balanced portrayal is needed.”

Change Up

The researchers said three adjustments would paint a more accurate picture of active management performance. First, SPIVA treats funds that close before the end of a time horizon as underperformers. Riley argued that approach ignores funds that may have delivered strong returns for years before shutting down. “For investors, if we give you 19 years of great performance and then close, that still creates a lot of value,” he told ETF Upside.

Second, the report weighs all funds equally regardless of size. That means a $5 million fund counts the same as a $10 billion strategy, even though far more clients are exposed to the larger fund. Lastly, the researchers said active funds should be measured against investable passive funds rather than indexes that clients cannot directly buy. “On average, when we make that switch, there’s a lot more value to be active than when you compare against a hypothetical benchmark,” Riley said.

Under those alternative methods, the actively managed funds’ results look a bit different:

• Some 43% of domestic equity assets outperformed over the five years through 2024, nearly three times SPIVA’s figure of 15%.
• Similarly, in that same period, 86% of assets in high yield bond funds outperformed, in contrast to SPIVA’s report that just 46% of funds in the category outperformed.

“When we improve that tailoring, we see much stronger performance from active funds, especially among fixed income where that result completely flips,” Riley said.

Keep it Down. While many advisors still say passive strategies are superior, there is room for active management in portfolios. Regular Advisor Upside contributor Allan Roth said in a Morningstar report that active ETFs are generally better than active mutual funds, but not as good as the lowest-cost and most broad index ETFs. “Avoid expensive, flashy ETFs that can have outstanding performance and then often crash just as investors pour their money in,” he said.

It’s tempting to think of retirement as a math problem. Save enough to leave the paycheck behind and, voilà, the rest is sunsets and sailboats.

Survey data and advisors’ anecdotal experience shows retirees with plenty of money still experience uncertainty. Enter the “not great, but not bad” retirement experience, a state of being reported by 35% of respondents to Schroders’ latest retirement survey. Some advisors, who have ample experience working with clients in this category, said the survey results were less about money and more about the psychological side of retirement. Getting retirement “right,” they broadly agreed, requires a plan that goes beyond dollars and cents to answer hard questions about identity, purpose and meaningful social connection. Advisors who help clients answer these questions can enable them to move from the not-great-not-bad category to “comfortable” or even “living the dream.”

Asi, Asi

The Schroders survey offers a decidedly mixed view of retirement wellbeing. Asked how they are experiencing life after work, most landed somewhere in the middle:

• 4% are “living the dream.”
• 37% are “comfortable.”
• 35% are “not great but not bad.”
• 19% are “struggling.”
• 5% are “living the nightmare.”

One big challenge is that many haven’t considered what day-to-day life in retirement will actually look like. “People focus on the fun parts like golfing every day, traveling, spending time with grandkids,” said Jamie Bosse of CGN Advisors in Manhattan, Kan. Those things are wonderful, but eventually, the vacation feeling wears off. “For some, it can even feel like a grieving process as they let go of who they were in one chapter of life, and begin discovering who they’ll become in the next.”

Others fall victim to their success as lifelong, diligent savers. “For ardent savers, starting to spend down their nest egg is often met with reluctance,” said Kevin Feig, founder and advisor at Walk You To Wealth in Boston. “For my clients, the key to a successful retirement is having a financial plan that supports a broader time plan.” Questions to answer include: How will you spend your time? What’s important to you? Will working part-time give you a sense of purpose?

A Retirement Paradox. Mitchell Kraus, an LPL Financial advisor in Santa Monica, Calif., attributes the not-great-not-bad retirement phenomenon to the “high-achiever’s paradox.” The very drive that helps people build meaningful wealth makes stepping back feel like a threat to identity, not a reward for success. “I have a meaningful number of clients who grew up with financial anxiety so deeply wired that no spreadsheet, Monte Carlo simulation, or logical argument will convince them they have enough,” Kraus said. “That’s not a planning problem. It’s a psychological problem, and standard financial advice doesn’t touch it.”

What may move the needle is helping clients map how they’ll invest their time, relationships, health, community and legacy with the same intentionality they used to build their portfolio. “The clients I see thriving aren’t necessarily the wealthiest,” Kraus said. “They’re the ones who designed their next chapter before they left the last one.”