SpaceX stock is taking off again, but with one key difference this time

SpaceX is the star of the stock market again as the Nasdaq 100 Index makes all-time highs.

With Monday's 8% rally to $171, shares of the rocket maker have jumped nearly 50% off its lows, reclaimed its IPO price and made CEO Elon Musk a trillionaire again. The run doesn't stop there. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas reiterated a $300 price target for the company Monday, and last Thursday, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket delivered four astronauts to the International Space Station in under eight hours — a record.

With the stock building momentum, options volume was twice the 30-day average Monday as 1.7 million contracts worth a total $900 million exchanged hands, 1 million of them calls worth more than $640 million.

The sentiment recalls the fervor with which SpaceX debuted in June, but there's one key difference this time around: after seven weeks of trading within a 10% price range, SpaceX implied volatility is significantly lower. That means that unless it keeps up the velocity of its moves the past two days, traders should expect a longer haul if they're looking for new highs.

It took SpaceX less than three full sessions to go from $171 to its intraday high of over $225 after its June debut. At the time, implied volatility was over 110. Today it's at 55, up from an all-time low below 50 on Thursday.

As a result, market-makers are assigning less than a 50% chance SpaceX touches $225 at any point between now and July, according to options pricing at the close of Monday's session. Looking at closer-dated expiries, there's a 54% chance the stock will touch $185 by the end of this month.

Also of note is that market-makers are assigning equal or higher implied volatilities to puts as they are calls, Barchart data shows, suggesting downside swings are as great a possibility as an upside surge. It's common for puts to trade with richer options premium than calls in indexes like the S&P 500, but for stocks, skew can go either way. In Nvidia, by comparison, calls are more expensive in many expiries, meaning investors are more concerned with missing rallies than avoiding crashes.

Still, options flows in SpaceX Monday were decidedly optimistic. Traders likely bought 456,000 calls, compared to under 240,00 puts, according to Cboe LiveVol. They likely sold 250,000 puts and 295,000 calls, the data show.

"Starship has helped out but it seems like Wall Street is piling in starting Q4," said Charles Moon, a technical and momentum trader at Prosper Trading Academy in Chicago. "SpaceX and Tesla are feeding off each other. They're moving more in sync lately."

The 30-day correlation between SpaceX and Tesla is currently 0.66, according to ThinkOrSwim data.

"Adjusted for growth, SpaceX is one of the cheaper ways to play the strong optionality of the Space and Intelligence Economy," Morgan Stanley's Jonas wrote in a note to clients Sunday.