New Rocket Lab Price Target as Space-Tech Spending Turns Heads
Our adjusted target is now the highest across Wall Street.
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Long-time Sarge-folio holding and "Stocks Under $10" core name Rocket Lab USA RKLB simply exploded to the upside on Monday. The shares soared 10.7% for the regular session, closing the day up 194% from the April low. In doing so, the stock poked through my $42 target price.
There was no new company-specific news. However, a new report from venture capital firm Seraphim Space noted that investment in space-tech ramped to $3.1 billion during Q2 2025, marking a sharp recovery in sector spending.
On a trailing 12-month basis, space-tech spending only grew from $8.5 billion to $8.7 billion thanks to a weakish H2 2024, so this was welcome news. The note points out that 70% of global space-tech spending has been captured by U.S. companies as both corporate and national security applications in space continue to grow.
The "golden dome" program is expected to drive continued growth. Interestingly, Chinese spending on space-tech dropped sharply during the quarter. This has led to superb stock market performance by our Rocket Lab, as well as other publicly traded firms like BlackSky Technology BKSY and AST SpaceMobile ASTS.
There Was Some News...
After the closing bell on Monday, Rocket Lab announced that it had awarded a contract to Bollinger Shipyards to support the build-out of its ocean landing platform for its reusable "Neutron" rockets. Bollinger is the largest privately owned new construction and repair shipbuilder in the U.S.
Modifications and the application of Rocket Lab technology to Bollinger's 400-foot-long landing platform in Amelia, Louisiana has already begun. Operations are set to begin at that location by early 2026.
Wall Street Weighs In
On Monday, five-star rated (by TipRanks) analyst Andres Sheppard of Citigroup reiterated his "Buy" on RKLB while increasing his price target to $50 from $33. Sheppard previewed second-quarter earnings across the aerospace and defense industries, noting that he expects that momentum already under way will continue.
Earnings Preview
Rocket Lab is expected to release its second-quarter financial results after the closing bell on August 7. Right now, Wall Street is looking for an adjusted loss per share of $0.07, on revenue of slightly more than $135 million. This should, if accurate, reflect a drop from an adjusted loss of $0.05 per share for the year-ago comp, but on year-over-year revenue growth of more than 27%.
Out of the five sell-side analysts covering RKLB, as was true three weeks ago, when I last covered this stock in depth, two have upwardly revised their earnings estimates and two have downwardly revised their earnings estimates since the start of the quarter.
The Chart
Readers will see in the chart below the breakout from the cup-and-handle pattern that I set up for you over the past few months. What I have added is an Andrews' Pitchfork model that now shows a new breakout above the upper trendline of that model. That is our new pivot. Yes, the algorithms that run price discovery in 2025 can see all of these patterns that we, as humans, try to pick out for you with our own skills of pattern recognition.
The stock retested its 21-day EMA (exponential moving average) with the development of that earlier handle in mid-June and really has never looked back. Relative Strength is now more than quite robust and is now firmly into technically overbought territory.
The daily MACD (moving average convergence/divergence), below the chart, is still postured extremely bullishly, as it has been for almost a month. The histogram of the 9-day EMA stands well above zero. The 12-day EMA is also well above the 26-day EMA with both of those lines also well above the zero-bound. That's still about as bullish a setup as I get to see in this line of work, gang.
Obviously, I take some kind of action once a price target is taken out. Then we adjust fire and plan out our next move for the balance of our long position.
Our new target is the result of my modeling, not just to re-establish my target as the high across Wall Street (which it is). We are now the Street high target for both Palantir Technologies PLTR and Rocket Lab. We're also probably the only analyst on the Street with actual skin in the game.
Rocket Lab USA (RKLB)
Price Target: $51 (up from $42)
Pivot Point: $41 (up from $33)
Add: Between the 21-day EMA and 50-day SMA
Panic: Loss of the 200-day SMA
At the time of publication, Guilfoyle was long RKLB and PLTR equity.
