Rocket Lab stock is well off its high again, and its shock record says the most serious damage comes from rate moves rather than from anything on the launch pad.
Rocket Lab (RKLB) stock trades near $70, roughly 53% below its 52-week high and down about 30% over the past month, even after an 8.4% bounce in the latest session
It has still comfortably beaten the S&P 500 over the trailing twelve months, so this is a fall from a long way up. The question is what it does when a genuine market shock lands. The 2022 Rate Shock Took 70% Off The Stock Across the five market shocks it has traded through since 2020, Rocket Lab has fallen an average of 37% peak to trough while the S&P 500 fell 13%.
The deepest was the 2022 inflation shock and Fed tightening, a 70% peak-to-trough fall, and the 2023 yield shock took another 46%. Those shocks are not the ceiling: from its 2021 peak to a 2024 low, the stock lost about 83%. It has fallen hardest in rate and valuation shocks, the kind of selloff that reprices tomorrow’s cash flows rather than today’s rockets.