I just don’t understand how it can have quarterly revenues of only $1M and get listed on the NASDAQ. Is this at all common?
One other curveball. NASDAQ does use Market Makers. I have absolutely no idea if they’ve been involved in trading DJT stock at all, but it’s inherently a possibility.
TL;DR: the guy to your right at the poker table? He might be a casino employee.
ETA: for those interested in who the institutional holders are, with a stake in DJT …
I think it was them being a SPAC which allowed this to happen.
Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) Explained: Examples and Risks
A special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) is a company without commercial operations and is formed strictly to raise capital through an initial public offering (IPO) for the purpose of acquiring or merging with an existing company.
Also known as blank check companies, SPACs have existed for decades, but their popularity has soared in recent years. In 2020, 247 SPACs were created with $80 billion invested, and in 2021, there were a record 613 SPAC IPOs. By comparison, only 59 SPACs came to market in 2019.12 - SOURCE
When I received restricted stock grants from my company, once they were fully vested, they ended up on my W2 as income. The company also simultaneously sold enough stock to cover Uncle Sam’s share. A very tidy system.
When I finally sold the stock, that’s when capital gains kicked in. Trump and his peers have different tax challenges than I, but I would think any stock gifted or earned would amount to income. Not sure what else it would be.
The good news is that the daily 10% loss in share price is less of a hit to one’s portfolio with each passing day.
Dark Biden FTW!
In addition to what you and others have said about the revolving door …
When demand for a share significantly exceeds supply, the price goes up by leaps and bounds. Few want to sell, and many want to buy.
When we see a share price plummeting day after day hour after hour that is unmistakable evidence of the opposite. Lots of shares are looking for an exit and demand for shares is thin on the ground.
The actual number of investors wanting out vs wanting in could go either way, depending on whether the would-be transactors are folks who are trying to trade 20 shares, or 20,000 shares. But very clearly the dollar-weighted sentiment of the players in the market, who are mostly MAGAt individuals, is strongly net negative.
About the only thing that can save the share price from this rout is some kind of meme manipulation, maybe where the little guys will stick it the Man, those Wall Street short selling baddies.
If only trump had some successful communication mechanism to reach his small true-believing shareholders, then he could rally them to the meme. If only.
Or if only the TS/DWAC/DJT merger/rollup had occurred closer to a close election. If this was unfolding in September or October and trump had a decent chance at actually winning that election without overt skullduggery, I believe we’d be seeing a very different price trajectory today.
I hope he does, that he tries to manipulate the market to his benefit. The SEC don’t play.
You’re right of course.
Up until he wins the election and the investigation stops and the SEC is disbanded, defunded, or some Bannon-like critter is made the head of its enforcement division.
The thing is, Trump cannot sell any shares for five months and he holds most of the stock.
I am not sure it is possible for his minions to move the market much on what is left unless they really go all in and snap-up all available shares.
Unfortunately for Trump, MAGAts like money as much as he does and while they may squander $100 here or there dumping their life-savings into this is not likely for any but the ones who will drink the Kool-Aid even knowing it is poisoned. And I do not think there are enough of them to save Trump.
Sort of. As you say, his holdings are locked up. Which also means they have zero impact on the current short term price trajectory. Those shares are not in the market or even potentially in the market for 5 months. Which is an eternity in share trading.
The true free float is a pretty small number of shares. If some dedicated people can, through some buying and lots of hot air, break the doom-loop of sentiment, engineering an offsetting boomlet isn’t that hard.
Witness the wild sentiment swings and the effect they have on the price of Bitcoin.
And once there has been a boomlet, it becomes easier for folks to persuade themselves (or be persuaded by propaganda) that there are more boomlets ahead where that came from.
Trump started out owning 90% of it. While he’s a greedy pig, I don’t believe this is some stunning plot of his to purchase additional shares.
Yeah, good point. The descent into depravity we’re poised to endure if he wins will make his first term look statesmanlike. I can get into a real panic if I dwell on the thought.
To add to what’s already been said, the stock market (or more accurately, any given stock exchange) is by design a very liquid market – there are always buyers and sellers. The way this is achieved is by price. If there’s a shortage of sellers, the price goes up to entice more selling. If there’s a shortage of buyers, as is the case with this scammy piece of shit, the price goes down to entice more fools buyers.
As already mentioned, there are also traders tasked with buying and selling out of their own accounts to smooth out temporary imbalances. The whole point and value of an exchange is that you can always buy and sell, but the market determines the price. In the very rare case when there’s a large and persistent imbalance between between buyers and sellers, the exchange may temporarily halt trading in a particular security, for example to prevent a runaway complete meltdown.
Indeed. The markets are, literally and at the base of it all, a price discovery mechanism. How much is a bushel of wheat worth today? How much next month? How much is Company-X worth?
Where it gets weird is when companies are not really “worth” their valuation. But, at the end of the day, the price is whatever someone is willing to pay for it, even if the price is not really worth it. Is one Bitcoin really worth $63,269.20 USD?
A slightly closer example that I’m aware of: Rocket Lab. Went public via SPAC, fairly small and unprofitable, still founder-led, etc.:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RKLB/holders
| 10.77% | % of Shares Held by All Insider |
| 55.46% | % of Shares Held by Institutions |
| 62.16% | % of Float Held by Institutions |
Pretty different from blue chip stocks… but still nowhere close to the 70% insider ownership of DJT.
The “worth” is some combination of fundamentals and anticipation of future value. When the latter is unsupported wishful thinking you get “meme” stocks and things like the dot-com bubble. And things like MAGAts throwing their money away on DJT, by which I mean both the stock and the orange conman.
DJT is also “distinguished” by the fact that the vast majority of institutional investors won’t touch it. A very few are indeed listed, but only as of last December. For all we know they dumped it when it went public, unloading it on eager MAGAts, and there may be others wisely shorting it.
Brief googling shows Bill Gates owned 45% of MSFT shares after their IPO, and I’d presume Ballmer et al also held some.
Brin and Page each held 16% of Google when it went public.
Zuckerberg held 28% of Facebook.
Dorsey and Williams only held about 15% of Twitter combined after their IPO.
So, the lesson we should learn from all this is that the tech CEO that Donald Trump most closely resembles is Bill Gates! 
I know you’re joking but I’m inclined to give a serious response here. As a businessman Bill Gates was a ruthlessly aggressive asshole; as a technologist he was smart but undisciplined. He knew how to code, but he never understood software engineering, and Microsoft’s software development culture reflects that. Windows and Office have both historically been a mess of unstructured and buggy spaghetti code. But Gates nevertheless built a vast and successful company and is now dedicating himself to philanthropy.
In contrast, the singular salient statement that can be made about Trump is that he’s a crook and a predator. He’s also an almost unfathomably ignorant simpleton. His ventures have always been failures because he doesn’t know anything beyond ways to cheat people out of their money…
Note that the 6-month waiting time before DJT can sell his shares can be waived by the board of directors. Here’s the list.
It includes the usual “experts in social media business” such as Nunes and Patel. It also has DJT Jr. but no Eric. (The guy really, really doesn’t mind how obviously he cares so little about that kid.)
Such a waiver would obviously hurt the share price a lot, so the current fall has to have him worried. There’s so little wiggle room to gain anything huuuge from this path.