I read that, but I am not sure I understand it.
It’s at about $31 now.
I’m no expert, but it appears that up to over 24 million additional shares of stock may be issued/sold by the company for an infusion of cash – which they may be needing seeing as Truth Social generates less income per quarter than your average McDonalds. Of course that means current shareholders are going to have their shares further diluted.
The spin on this is that the rubes will be told that the company is losing less money per share. See, it’s winning all the time!
Down 14.5% today to $26.75.
Down 35.5% in the past week.
It will be interesting to see if there is a floor, and if the price moves below the previous mid-March low of $22.84
We may find out tomorrow.
I did some math.
Market cap for this stock is currently $4.727 billion. At 26.75 per share, that’s about 176,710,280 shares.
Trump owns about 65% of the outstanding shares – 114,750,000 shares.
When Trump can sell his shares in September, this is going to become a penny stock – if it isn’t in bankruptcy before then.
Should be fun watching it slide down more and more. But, even if it is still at $1 when he can sell, he is still going to make a lot of money. Once you get rich enough, it’s damn near impossible to not make a ton of money.
Yep. Even if it plummets to 10 cents/share, that’s still a cool $10 million to Trump for doing absolutely nothing but raging in ALL CAPS while sitting on the crapper.
I’ll do that for half price.
Just because you can sell a stock doesn’t mean anyone will buy it. Right? Or is it easy to offload stock no matter what?
I’m no expert but my understanding is that as long as it’s listed on a stock exchange – and I think NASDAQ qualifies although it’s not nearly as rigorous as the NYSE – the exchange guarantees liquidity. They do this in part by maintaining specialized brokers called market makers who step in when things become imbalanced. Their responsibility is to buy stock when no one else is buying, and sell out of their own holdings when no one else is selling. Of course there’s a limit to what they can do. If things get seriously out of whack, the exchange will halt trading. DJT is exactly the kind of stock where crazy things like this might happen.
But in general the big determiner is price. If no one wants a stock, the price drops until someone does. The rationale is that could still profit via the stock market phenomenon known as the Greater Fool Theory.
There are plenty of Saudi royals and Russian oligarchs in the sea.
And will happen if Trump tries to unload a significant part of his holdings at once. At which point, he gets on his gold-plated crapper and rages about the unfair, witch-hunting, fascist stock exchange.
that!
it is a completely legal form for russia/N-Corea/et al to transfer billions (AAMOF any amount they care) to who might be the next president of DJT …
Want a foreign-policy favor from the USA??? - glad you asked - just purchase 10.000.000 shares at $50 when the orange pelt starts selling off in september - and we’ll be talking.
completely legal and transparent, nevertheless… way better than the used-art-market or those tokens that were the latest craze a year or 2 ago…
This has come up before. It’s not an efficient or reliable way to transfer money between parties. My analogy is trying to bribe someone at a poker table. You ante and fold, but your target can only win every few pots. A chunk of your bribe is going to the other players.
There’s better, legal ways of passing money.
This stock is intended to fleece the rubes.
Technically correct though he didn’t buy them; he was gifted grifted them.
A larger more lucrative scam than the NFTs, T-shirts, Perfume, Vitamins, Wine, Vodka, Steaks, etc… which were a more penny-ante “Soaking of the Rubes”*.
*movie title - © ℗®™
In this case the “other players” are Trump supporters. If the stock tanks and wipes out the savings of a bunch of Joe MAGA loyalists, that’s not just bad for them; it’s bad because the story is about how all of these loyal Joes supported Trump and got burned.
That’s really bad. There aren’t lots of direct, tangible ways Trump has screwed regular MAGA folks.
Then there’s the whole “yet another failed business” narrative, which is also really bad.
So propping up the stock isn’t necessarily about enriching trump specifically, so much as it’s about helping his campaign in a more general sense.
It seems too indirect to me. If I had a pile of money and wanted to buy influence I’d want to make sure it got to my target and gave me some leverage. I wouldn’t get that propping up a stock for a few hours while sellers close out their positions.
I will concede that Trump would appreciate the effort though. If I wanted to make a deal with him, showing that I had shares of his stock could only help the approach.
Eh, I think “get the lunatic elected and do whatever we want while America eats itself” is probably a better value proposition than trying to get leverage over somebody as mercurial as Trump.
Who was propping up Gamestop? Who was propping up AMC Theaters? It’s a bubble. It can continue indefinitely.
As Matt Levine of Bloomberg has pointed out the idea that stock price should settle on intrinsic value (the discounted future cash flows, however you measure then) is a convention. After 1980 or so, there are profiteering market forces ensuring that price can’t be below intrinsic value for an extended period. But there’s no restraint on top, if investors treat stock ownership like a baseball card, a coin, or another collectable. In fact, Bitcoin should be conceived within the same framework: it’s a collectable. Yes I know what NFTs are. Bitcoin is another version of them: bitcoin is to stamps or coins, as NFTs are to paintings. Both are collectables. [1]
As noted upthread and now by Kevin Drum: Trump stock has been tanking ever since his guilty verdict. As such, it’s a decent proxy for Maga Vibes, one that abstracts away from their continual blovating, for as long as the stock is above say $3, an optimistic valuation. The passion of the faithful won’t decide the election: turnout and swing will decide that. But it’s still interesting.
[1] OBTW: all of this could be modeled mathematically I say. Some of it is being modeled by quants I assume. Some day these models will be part of the standard business school curriculum. But not yet.