Two major brokerages open IPO access as SpaceX's listing draws record investor appetite
Retail Canadian investors can now access initial public offerings at the same price as institutional players.
The change arrives as the SpaceX IPO draws unprecedented retail interest across North America.
Wealthsimple announced Thursday it will allow retail clients to request shares in select IPOs on Canadian and US stock exchanges at the offering price, with no minimum order.
The Toronto-based fintech works with investment banks that allocate shares to the platform, which then distributes them to clients.
"Access to IPO shares is one of the starkest divides in public market investing," said Swapnil Parikh, Wealthsimple's vice-president of product.
Everyday investors are excluded from the offering price, he added, while "big institutions get to buy in."
Questrade said it plans to go further.
The firm has offered launch-day IPO access since 2013 and told Bloomberg it will launch a private markets platform this summer that will initially include pre-IPO opportunities and "institutional-grade private credit."
The new product will, according to a Questrade spokesperson, "let clients buy into a company while it's still private, months before it ever hits a public exchange."
Both announcements arrive as SpaceX dominates investor attention.
As of May 20, SpaceX filed its S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission targeting a US$2tn valuation, according to the Motley Fool, which would mark the largest IPO on record.
Reuters reported the listing could price as early as mid-June on the Nasdaq, seeking to raise more than US$75bn.
The Wall Street Journal reported in late 2025 that SpaceX was on track to generate US$16bn in annual revenue, with Starlink alone contributing US$7.16bn.
Canadian ETF issuers are already positioning ahead of the listing.
As previously reported by Wealth Professional, Harvest ETFs filed what it described as the first publicly filed ETF prospectus in Canada offering SpaceX exposure, registering the Harvest SpaceX Enhanced High Income Shares ETF (SPXE) with Canadian securities regulators.
Ninepoint Partners has since announced plans to launch the Ninepoint SpaceX HighShares ETF (SXHI) on the Toronto Stock Exchange following the IPO, subject to TSX listing approval.
According to Ninepoint, SXHI will hold up to 100 percent of its assets in SpaceX Class A common stock, write covered call options on up to 50 percent of those holdings, and employ cash borrowing of up to 33 percent of its unlevered net asset value, carrying a management fee of 0.29 percent.
Not all observers are convinced the enthusiasm is warranted.
Todd Sohn, ETF strategist at Strategas, told CNBC that a Reuters analysis of seven existing pure-play space ETFs found all of them hold the same four stocks, including Rocket Lab, among their top 10 holdings, with portfolio overlap of 50 percent or more across every fund.
"I start to worry when everybody is thinking the same way," Sohn said, adding that volatility remains the central risk.
Some companies within ETFs will outperform, he said, while others with flawed business models will collapse.
Back on the IPO access side, Wealthsimple noted that when demand exceeds available shares, the platform selects clients through an allocation process disclosed in advance.
Clients who sell or transfer IPO shares within the first 90 days will be barred from future IPO access, Bloomberg reported, a policy that also exists at US brokerages.
US-only IPOs will be restricted to accredited investors.
Questrade's Hwan Kim told Bloomberg the firm will not pursue pre-IPO access to SpaceX specifically, saying secondary markets for high-profile pre-IPO names "can attract a lot of noise, which can lead to unintended consequences when coinciding with lock-up periods."
