Should be the latter, as long as it doesn’t close below $12 today or tomorrow, which is not very likely at this point.
The way it was written, as long as it trades above that mark for at least 20 of the 30 trading days beginning on Aug 22, he can start selling. The 20th trading day of that period is tomorrow, and it’s been above $12 the entire time.
But failing that, the lockout period ends on the 25th (last day they can’t, not first day they can) since it’s been 6 months since the merger closed on Mar 26.
I just read that the shares have dropped to $13. There are others besides Trump who might want to get out while they can. And the speculation in the Times was that more shares on the market would make shorting easier and who knows what that would to the price.
Investors are increasingly wary of the price/revenue valuation of Trump Media. To put things into perspective, Reuters points out that the company’s most recent revenue (of $836,900 in the second quarter) was the same as two Starbucks coffee shops. (It’s worth noting that those are two very different sorts of businesses with different margins – and Trump Media has significant cash holdings of more than $344 million.)
The company is trading at over 1,000 times its revenue. Compare that to Nvidia, which trades at 24 times its revenue, or Tesla, which trades at just 7 times its revenue. Some have dubbed Trump Media a “belief stock,” meaning it’s driven more by the personalities behind it than the fundamentals. Any sale of a major stake in the company is likely to cause significant damage to the stock price.
It wasn’t as exciting as I thought it might be, but at $13.52, it’s significantly lower than when the original SWAC first merged with Truth Social. Also, the 21.66 million shares traded was more than double the average of the last 65 days. It’s up a few cents in after hours trading, but we’ll have to wait until Monday to see what happens. Will it get a second wind or will be people start panicking over the weekend and finally be ready to cut bait?
Shares of Trump Media on Monday sank to their lowest pricein more than a year, days after majority owner Donald Trumpand other company insiders got the green light to start selling their stakes in the Truth Social maker.
A graph on the page, which appears to be updating, currently shows a price of $12.70 per share.
I’m seeing it’s dropped $1.20 today. That means that, today, Trump has lost more money than I’ll earn if I work at my current job for a little more than 2,000 years.
The majority of today’s drop was within minutes of the opening bell. It does look like there were at least a certain number of people who were stewing over the weekend and decided it was time to get out of Dodge.
I’m trying to understand shorting based on the Barron’s numbers. They show 13.01 million shares under “Short Interest”, which seems to mean that many shares are borrowed in order to short them and the contracts are not yet closed. They then show “Short Interest Change” of about 27%, but I don’t know what that is. I see that short interest is usually shown as a percentage of shorted shares divided by total outstanding shares, but that would work out to about 6.5%, so that’s not it. Is it an increase in the borrowing costs for would-be shorters?
They also show “Percent of Float” at 19%, which I see in some places defined as percentage of stock owned by the public as opposed to insiders. I guess that means Trump’s shares are counted as owned by insiders.
If you’ve ever seen the TV game show “The Wall” on NBC, people can rack up a lot of money (often over a million) then watch it get chipped away or lost in huge chunks (or all at once) either through random chance (literally a ball dropping a la Plinko) or failed trivia answers. Seeing a person’s face as they watch that money draining away can be heartbreaking.