That pocket has a big hole in it now.
But if it goes in Trump’s pocket none of it will be spent on supporting other GOP candidates.
Also, it occurs to me that those billions are paper profit with no underpinning if Trump doesn’t sell his shares, right? So either his multibillions disappear when the thing implodes, or he sells a big chunk which depresses the market and the thing implodes. The trouble with holding such a huge position is you can’t dump it all on the market at once without tanking the stock.
ETA: Or I suppose he could try to use it as collateral for a loan to pay off all those icky mean judgments, or as collateral for his appeal.
Yes, that’s why this is in the news - they are doing an IPO, they are going to try to sell some to the public and realize some of that paper value. The appreciation of DWAC stock with pretty good volume indicates demand, or at least speculation about demand. Who knows how much the MAGA marks will go for it. Nobody else is going to touch it, unless the Saudis or somebody want to just give Trump a chunk of money - it seems to me that it would amount to legalized money laundering if they bought stock, basically buying a worthless company.
Even if they can only sell 10% of the stock to the public before it collapses, that’s still several hundred million to Trump for a worthless company.
Or maybe this is the next Google, and we’re all missing out on the chance to get in on the ground floor.
No, I think he has to try to sell it. If he can’t sell it, nobody is going to accept it as collateral.
I think the $10B price tag is on paper and not anywhere near realistic.
It’s like if I were to make a drawing and declare that since it’s an original one-of-kind piece of art that it’s worth millions. Then I can brag about being a multimillionaire since I own something so valuable.
But unless someone agrees to buy it from me for that price it’s worthless.
An IPO? I’m not an investor myself, but my internal stereotype of a MAGAt rube susceptible to grifts doesn’t have a stockbroker or other financial professional with access to the investment market. OTOH, I’m also afflicted with the notion that only fabulously wealthy continent-hopping jet-setters get passports.
And that jet-setters are still a thing.
So take my incredulity with several grains of salt. Regular store-brand iodized salt, not the fancy-schmancy pink Himalayan stuff that idiots with more money than sense overspend on.
Michael Popok reads the DWAC S-4 filing to the SEC (5:00-12:00). A lifetime of Trump failures in 7 minutes.
I just looked and my bullshit bingo game only has “strategic fit”. I do like that better.
But it’s not just pulled out of thin air - it’s implied by the DWAC stock price (the IPO is by way of merger). And as I said, the DWAC rally is not looking totally fake on thin volume - it’s trading around $150 million a day. So people are betting significant sums in anticipation of demand at that valuation.
As far as I can tell the implied business plan is that if Trump is elected, he will be in a position to massively abuse his position for profit, some of which bounty will be directed toward loyal MAGA investors in this IPO. It’s half right.
Yes, this gives me some comfort too that the grift may just implode before Trump extracts any signifcant amount of money. It presumably can’t really be 10 million working class MAGA chumps buying $100 of stock. But are there 1 million MAGA chumps who have a 401(k) or something where they could each buy $1000 of stock? I really have no idea on what cross-section of MAGA fits the correct profile of stupidity and at least modest wealth.
I was getting ready to write a long post and realized this summed it up.
There was a surge in shorting DWAC. It also says this " Notice: This company has been marked as potentially delisted and may not be actively trading."
There are still people buying Bed Bath & Beyond stock.
That’s a dangerous game. To short it, you need to borrow it. If you can no longer borrow it you must buy it back at the current market price.
I’d guess total stock market index funds probably own 10-20% of it. (If you own such a fund, you can work out the dollar value of how much DWAC you shamefully own - it’s 0.0036% of US total market cap.)
Index funds will usually be willing to lend stock. As would normal investors like pension funds. But in this case the rest of it is owned by scumbags, so if short interest gets too large (it’s currently 11% of free float) you can fully expect them to cancel stock loans and try a short squeeze.
Knowing nothing about such things, your post sounds (to me) like Yondu talking to the Broker.
This is from 3 months ago but explains it in excruciating detail. Don’t click on it unless your trying to go to sleep.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04jIwwxQ7To
Honestly it doesn’t explain anything about the technical details of shorting a stock, so if you don’t already understand that, the video won’t help.
If you sell something, you have to deliver it to the person you sell it to. So if you want to profit from a stock price declining, what you must do is:
(a) borrow the stock from somebody who already owns it;
(b) sell it in the market, say for $100;
(c) later if you are correct and the price declines, buy it back in the market, say for $80;
(d) return it to the person you borrowed it from.
In that example your profit is $20, less whatever fee you pay to the person you borrowed the stock from. But if you were wrong and the price rose and you instead had to buy it back at a higher price of say $150, you would have lost $50.
Someone who owns a stock obviously wants the price to rise, so it seems a bit weird anyone would ever want to lend shares that they own to someone who hopes to profit from the price declining. But with “normal” stocks, investors like index funds and pension funds generally take the view that the average short seller is no smarter than the average person, so they will just collect the fees for loaning out all the thousands of stocks that they own and just let short sellers do whatever they want.
But in this case, most of the people who own the stock are not index funds or pension funds, they are Trumpy scumbags and speculators who are definitely likely to try to trap short sellers. They can do this by loaning their shares to short sellers without any long term commitment to the loan, then later cancelling the loans and demanding the return of their stock. If that happens, the short seller must either borrow the stock from somebody else, or if they cannot do so they must buy it back in the market immediately at any price available, however high the price. If a lot of lenders call back their loaned stock at the same time, a lot of short sellers are forced to buy back their short position in the market and the price spikes higher. That’s a short squeeze.
You took excruciating detail to the next level. I salute you. That’s why I come to the dope.
Actually I forgot the most important part, relating it to the video.
The video talks about 3 measures that might indicate an upcoming short squeeze:
- the percentage of the “free float” (publicly traded stock) that has already been borrowed and shorted;
- the current fee charged for stock borrows;
- the amount that has been shorted expressed as a number of days traded volume, indicating how difficult it would be for shorts to buy back (“cover”) their position in the market if they were forced to.
The link I posted from marketbeat had three tabs for performance. Short Interest, Days to Recover, Short percent of float. I’m guessing that has something to do with your three bullet points?
Short interest can be expressed in a number of ways - the number of shares already sold by short-sellers, the dollar value of those shares at the current share price, what percentage those shares are of the free float (my first bullet point), those shares expressed as a multiple of average daily trading volume (my third bullet point).
The Marketbeat link doesn’t show current fee for stock borrows, my second bullet point.