Wanna take some of this off my hands?

SpaceX’s June IPO made thousands of current and former employees overnight millionaires. Anthropic is expected to go public next month, while OpenAI could follow sometime next year. Once a company goes public, employees can be left holding highly concentrated stock positions that, if sold, could trigger massive capital gains taxes.

“The IPO is not the finish line, it’s the starting gun on a new set of problems,” said Brooks Schaffer, founder of Waypoint West. “And the lockup period that typically follows, usually six to 12 months, is not a holding period. It’s a decision deadline. By the time it lifts, a client should be executing a plan, not starting to build one.”

Start at the Beginning

The first thing advisors need to do when a client’s company IPOs is determine exactly what they own, said Adam Broughton, a partner at Mission Wealth. Different types of equity compensation, including incentive stock options and restricted stock units, have their own features and timelines. “Getting a copy of the stock plan is really important,” he told Advisor Upside. “You’d be surprised how often the clients don’t know what they own, and the advisors might not know what to ask for.”

Then it all comes back to the financial plan. Will the client be fully funded for retirement and aspirational goals such as helping family with college, buying homes or starting a business? “You want to build out that capital road map before you start getting into the weeds of tax management and stock concentration,” Broughton said. “That’s going to tell us how much of this capital we can play with versus how much needs to be protected to keep the financial plan funded.”

Time to Diversify. Once the financial plan is mapped out, advisors can look for ways to reduce the concentrated position:

• One popular method is long-short separately managed accounts, which aim to generate tax-loss harvesting opportunities in both rising and falling markets.
• Clients can also contribute appreciated stock to donor-advised funds or charitable remainder trusts to help manage the tax consequences of diversifying.
• Exchange funds are another option. Not to be confused with ETFs, they allow clients to contribute stock to a private pool of securities, providing diversification without immediately selling the stock and triggering capital gains taxes.

Employees going through an IPO are fielding constant questions from friends and family about what they’ll do with the money, while trying to make six- and seven-figure decisions under real-time pressure, Schaffer said. “Separating a client’s loyalty to the company they helped build from a rational view of their own balance sheet is often the highest-value thing an advisor does in this window, more than any single tax strategy.”

Reckoning? What reckoning?

Late last month, Harrison Street Real Estate’s VCMIX fund began a first-of-its-kind intraperiod auction process designed to ease redemption bottlenecks that have followed the interval fund for years. The novelty of the auction drew headlines, but Harrison Street is far from the only manager prorating shareholder withdrawals in 2026, per Morningstar research. The trend has sparked a broader discussion about whether investors and their advisors truly understood what they were buying while collectively rushing into semiliquid vehicles in recent years.

“We’ve all heard the common narrative of yield-chasing investors trapped in illiquid funds and advisors regretting a pitch they didn’t understand,” Cion Investments CEO Michael Reisner said. “It doesn’t match reality, though.”

Words Matter

Particularly problematic is the increasing use of the term “gating” in conversations about semi-liquid funds, Reisner said.

“Gating, properly understood, is what happens when an open-ended fund manager slams the door on redemptions to halt a run,” he said. “Think of the UK property fund suspensions after Brexit or the money market gates of 2008. What’s happening in non-traded business development companies and interval funds today is the opposite.”

From day one, these vehicles were engineered with quarterly redemption windows, generally capped at 5% of net assets. In other words, any “gates” that exist in this market are down (and disclosed) before the funds ever accept investors.

“Calling this ‘gating’ is like objecting to a rule that was clearly posted before the game began,” Reisner said. “[In any case], a genuine crisis of confidence would show up as a drop-off in new commitments. That hasn’t happened.”

By the numbers:

• The semiliquid market grew from $126 billion in 2020 to nearly $535 billion by the end of 2025, per Cion.
• Institutional investors committed at least $16 billion to North American direct lending funds just last quarter, marking the second-strongest quarter in four years for an interval fund structure that comes with strict liquidity limits.

Retail investors show some signs of pulling back, per Morningstar, but institutional investors clearly remain confident in interval funds.

Investor Protection. While it’s been maligned by some frustrated investors, the 5% quarterly cap exists to protect all investors, not just the ones redeeming. Without it, a manager facing a surge of redemptions might be forced to dump valuable assets at distressed prices into a thin market, harming the investors who stayed. “It’s a feature, not a bug,” Reisner said. “These products are built for a multi-year horizon, and where that’s understood, there’s no reckoning.”

Much as the universe is expanding, so is the cosmos of space ETFs.

Two exchange-traded funds have come to market recently that take aim at the burgeoning space economy, a growing collection of firms and industries that comprise space tourism, orbital data centers, satellite manufacturing and more. The latest US strategies come from VanEck and WisdomTree, whose space funds launched in May and July, respectively. Meanwhile, London-based Seraphim Space recently debuted its New Space UCITS ETF in partnership with HANetf.

“This opportunity is not simply investing in space,” Seraphim CEO Mark Boggett said. “It’s investing in the infrastructure layer that’s going to power connectivity, intelligence and economic activity.”

A SpaceX Odyssey

The elephant in the room, SpaceX, generated volatility throughout the sector earlier this year, with a massive selloff after the company’s IPO. This led to oversold positions in companies like the commercial satellite operation company HawkEye 360, Boggett said, making them valuable for the space-curious investor. WisdomTree’s fund, on the other hand, holds companies like Planet Labs, which makes commercially available satellite imagery for things like agriculture and mapping. This satellite data is important to feed AI models, Boggett added, which can be used to do things like identify illegal fishing or oil transportation when it occurs.

“AI is only as powerful as the data that is being fed, and this data is increasingly coming from space,” Boggett said, adding that the information is leading to insights “for industries like agriculture, defense, insurance, energy [and] supply chains.”

Performance among the biggest US-based space ETFs is mixed, reflecting that volatility:

• The Tema Space Innovators ETF (NASA), which has over $1 billion in AUM, is down about 2% year to date.
• The Ark Space & Defense Innovation ETF (ARKX), which has about $755 million, is up just over 9% YTD.
• The Procure Space ETF (UFO), which manages roughly $545 million, is up 10.5% year to date.

Open the Pod Bay Floodgates, HAL. With its new product, Seraphim, a space tech venture capital firm, is diving into the world of ETFs for the first time. “What we’re looking to be compared against is the performance of the other ETFs that take a much broader view, including traditional space companies within their index,” Boggett said, “as well as the new space companies.”