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price of trump media Shares closed Friday down nearly 20% this week.
DJT stock, which fell more than 8% within the first hour of trading on Friday, rose slightly by the end of the day.
The stock closed 18 cents higher at $32.59, or about 0.5%.
But that closing price was still more than $38 lower than the price Trump Media stock was initially sold for when the social media company began public trading on March 26.
Shares of the company that owns the Truth Social app have fallen 47.4% so far in April, wiping out billions of dollars in market capitalization.
Former President Donald Trump is the company’s largest shareholder, owning nearly 60% of the company’s stock.
President Trump is scheduled to begin jury selection Monday in his criminal trial in Manhattan Supreme Court on charges of falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Trump Media opened its first day of trading on March 26th at a price of $70.90 per share and hit a high of nearly $80 per share later in the day. With today’s trading, the company’s market capitalization exceeded $9.5 billion.
As of Friday’s close, Trump Media’s market capitalization was $4.45 billion, down $5 billion from its all-time high reached more than two weeks ago.
Trump Media began trading publicly a day after merging with Digital World Acquisition Corporation, a shell company created to help private companies go public.
Trump Media reported revenue of just $4.1 million last year and a net loss of $58 million.
This performance and the company’s stock’s relatively high price have attracted strong interest from short sellers, who are effectively betting that a company’s stock price will fall.
As of this week, DJT’s so-called short interest was $208.7 million, with 5.44 million shares sold short, according to Ihor Dusaniowski, managing director of predictive analytics at S3 Partners, a leading financial data market platform.
Less than 100,000 Trump Media shares were available for short sale. A trader who wants to short a stock must borrow and sell the stock with the hope of later buying back the same number of shares at a lower price and returning them to the lender, pocketing the price difference between the trades.
Trump Media has 136.7 million shares outstanding.
A week ago, Mr. Dusaniwski announced that traders wishing to short Trump Media stock would have to pay up to 900% of the annual financing cost and would have to sell one share within a month to break even on the trade. He said it needs to fall by $30 per month.
But since then, the cost of financing Trump Media’s short sales transactions has plummeted by 200%.
Trump Media announced that following the Jan. 6, 2021 invasion of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of President Trump supporters, social media giant X, then known as Twitter, banned President Trump from using the app. It was launched.
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, frequently posts on Truth Social. He used the app to denounce the four pending criminal cases he faces, as well as the civil suit that resulted in more than $500 million in judgments against him.
President Trump hosted a party this week to celebrate Trump Media at his club Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
“I think the truth has become very important. The truth is powerful and it’s committed,” Trump told attendees, the newspaper reported. RSBN News site.
President Trump said of the company, whose CEO is former Republican Congressman Devin Nunes, “We forget that we have no debt, we have over $200 million in cash, we are very liquid.” I hope not.”
— Additional reporting by CNBC Nick Wells