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The Almighty Buck

Traders Are Betting Millions That Trump Media 'Meme Stock' Will Tumble (nytimes.com) 151

Many investors are lining up to bet on the collapse of former President Donald J. Trump's social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which made its stock market debut last week under the ticker "DJT." The stock has been called the "mother of all meme stocks" since it is highly volatile and there are no fundamental underpinnings. It's being valued at roughly 1,600 times its annual revenue, at Wednesday's closing price. "By comparison, the stock of Facebook's owner trades at about eight times revenues, and Google's owner trades at six times," notes Fast Company. The New York Times reports: Trump Media is the most "shorted" special purpose acquisition vehicle in the country, according to the financial data company S3 Partners. Short-sellers bet that the price of a stock will fall. They do that by borrowing shares of a company and selling them into the market, hoping to buy them back later at a lower price, before returning the shares to the lender and pocketing the difference as profit. The demand to short Trump Media, the parent company of the social media platform Truth Social, is so great that stock lenders can charge enormous fees, making it hard for short-sellers to turn a profit unless the shares fall significantly. Still, there is a lot of interest in taking the bet. "They are looking for this stock to crater and crater very quickly," said Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3. Last month, traders lost $126 million betting against Trump Media, according to S3.

On Monday, Trump Media published updated financial information, revealing little revenue, large losses and a statement from the company's independent auditor expressing "substantial doubt" about its financial viability. This appeared to galvanize investors betting against the company, as the stock slipped from its highs. But short-sellers are finding it difficult and costly to trade in Trump Media. There are roughly 137 million shares in the company, and only around five million of those are available to short-sellers. Mr. Trump owns about 60 percent of shares, and company executives also hold a chunk of the stock. Company insiders tend not to lend their shares to short-sellers. Big asset managers like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which regularly lend out shares, are not major holders of Trump Media, further crimping the supply.

According to S3, 4.9 million of the roughly five million available shares are already on loan. As with any loan, when share owners lend their stock to a short-seller, they charge a fee, usually expressed as an annual interest rate on the stock's current value. Typically, the fee for borrowing stock is a fraction of a percentage point. For Trump Media, it has risen to 550 percent, Mr. Dusaniwsky said. Trump Media's stock currently trades at around $50. That means that shorting it for a month would cost more than $20 per share. For a short-seller to break even, the stock price would have to fall by almost half by early May.

There is another wrinkle, too. One large broker said much of the short trading was not an outright bet against Trump Media. Since the advent of meme-stock trading and the vilification of short-sellers that win only if popular companies lose, large investors are wary of making such trades. Instead, the current trade driving demand is designed to capture the difference between DJT's stock price and outstanding "warrants," which will give the owners the right to new stock at a fixed price as long as regulators approve the new shares. Partly because of that uncertainty, those warrants currently trade below $19, with a list of hedge funds as recent holders. Even after the high cost to borrow stock is accounted for, they are still able to profit from the $30 difference between existing stock and what the warrants are worth, assuming the warrants become registered as shares.

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Traders Are Betting Millions That Trump Media 'Meme Stock' Will Tumble

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  • Don't do it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday April 04, 2024 @06:49PM (#64371030)

    There is a famous investment quote that goes "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".

    If you join in the pack shorting something like this, you open yourself up to the possibility some kind of irrational buying flood comes in and wipes you out.

    Remember that these days very few stocks are actually priced according to value, so it doesn't seem like a Trump based stock would be any exception.

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      At 550% you basically go broke if the stock doesn't crater, no irrational buying flood required. The people who bought this are Trump fans, and they're likely to hold onto their stock as a collectors item, not an investment.

      Sounds like the smart bet is to be the one lending your shares to the shorts.

      • Well the ones holding on to them don't affect the share price since they don't partake in the trading anyway.
        • Well they could be lending them out to be short sold.
        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          If you're making 550% you don't give a crap what the price does.

          • you are not making anything until you actually sell the share, all of those Trumpers that will keep on to their shares will just loose all their investments.
            • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              When someone shorts a stock what they actual do is borrow shares in it, sell them, then buy them back later in order to repay the loan. As the person lending the shares, you charge interest. You make that interest no matter what.

              Shorting a stock isn't a bet that the stock will go down. It's a bet that that stock will go down more than someone else thinks it will. That someone else is the one lending out their shares, and their expectation for how much it will go down is represented by the interest they char

              • yeah but we are not talking about the shorters, we are talking about the devote Trump cultists that bought the share at a premium as an offering to their god. They will for obvious reasons not lend out their stocks to any shorters.
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by quonset ( 4839537 )

        The people who bought this are Trump fans, and they're likely to hold onto their stock as a collectors item, not an investment.

        You don't get a stock certificate any longer unless you request it. Not sure why someone would hold onto their ten shares of a failed company considering once the price is below $1 it gets delisted.

        Then again, these are the same people who keep giving their money to a billionaire who keeps asking for money, so what do I know.

        Hans Kristian Graebener = StoneToss

        • Politics aside, buying right now isn't a terrible idea.

          All these shorts are going to have to buy back and there's a very small pool to buy back from which will very likely trigger a big rise in the stock price.

          Shorting this or any other stock is a terrible idea for small investors, though. I suspect a lot of people are going to get creamed shorting this.

          • The phrase you are looking for is "short squeeze" However, it takes more than a large short interest to generate a squeeze. Short positions can be rolled over. A squeeze only happens when there is positive price movement due to positive financial news followed by people being forced to close short positions due to losses. If the underlying company doesn't make money, even if the short-term trading price goes up, the institutional shorts will just stay short rolling over if they have to. Buying shares o
            • It's a volatile stock with a small pool of available shares. It only has to go up nicely on one day to trigger some shorts into buying back which will increase the price, trigger more, and so on.

              The underlying value is much lower than the current ask price but that's also irrelevant here in the short term.

              Shorting this is extremely risky. Buying some for kicks has limited downside. It can only go to zero. While the shorts can take a blood bath if it goes up a few points on a random day for any random un

              • I don't know the exact composition of the current shorts. Or at least I don't know anything that's not public. That wasn't my point. You are right that if the price goes up a little, some shorts will have to close out their positions in panic. Those will be the retail shorts. The institutional will just ride it out. So, over time, the percentage of shorts who are institutional will go up just because they have the financial means to hold onto the position.
                • Oh ok, yeah, total agreement. I'd assume any big investor shorts have their calls in place to keep the damage from going too high although I do wonder if any of them would bother getting into such a tiny stock anyway. I'd didn't work that close to the finance guys so I'm just assuming they'd do something sensible.

                  But DJT is very small cap. Much too small for the typical 401k or other large investment house to bother putting in more than a trivial amount of play money in the high risk section of their por

                  • Yeah glad we could make that clearer. The institutions (probably hedge funds because, as you said, the biggest players will stay away) will be net shot but will own calls. If there's a short-term pop, they will sell the calls (at a profit) and increase their short position. Sort of a reverse dollar-cost-averaging and when the stock drops (which it obviously will), they will make good money. The hardest part of this type of short is not the short squeeze but rather it's covering the short position withou
                    • It's going to be interesting to watch this play out either way. I added DJT to my stock watcher app at the bottom for kicks.

                      I also recently added Reddit, planet fitness, and my retired BIL's former company where he literally has his entire net worth in that one stock which is down 30% from their high. If it drops too much he'll have to go back to work and possibly sell his house. If he moves to another area (he's been looking in another state) then my SIL will have to move in with us. They're long term

            • "Short positions can be rolled over."

              If the stock goes up, you are welcome to maintain your short. However, you will have to put up money to cover your loss to this point. If you don't pony up, you *must* unwind your position. The broker will let you gamble your money all you want, but you don't get to gamble his.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          A lot of them probably have requested stock certificates. There was a conspiracy theory going round which claimed that there was some kind of trickery with non-paper stocks. I forget the details, but the gist of it was that they thought the federal government would wipe out all their meme stocks, or sell more than really existed, or something like that, and that if they had the paper certificates they could still claim the billions of dollars they would be worth.

          • by Asgard ( 60200 )

            Not the feds per se, but "Naked, Short and Greedy: Wall Street's Failure to Deliver" is a book that talks about how shenanigans in how trades are settled can result in phantom shares where the number of shares held exceeds the number of shares that actually exist.

        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          You still own a share of DJT. Even if it's delisted. I don't understand why that would matter to someone, but it does.

      • Is that the current interest rate on a short position for that stock? It may make sense to buy the damn thing just to lend it at those rates.
    • You are quoting the clean version, the 1983 version from Gary Shilling.

      Since this is a meme stonk, it would be more appropriate to use the meme version of the quote from 2021. As seen on r/wallstreetbets [reddit.com], "We Can Stay Retarded Longer Than You Can Stay Solvent"

      Just one percent of the people who voted for Trump could spend their entertainment money for the week and crush some Wall Street douchbags. I voted for Trump, and I think the valuation on this is insane, er, retarded. I think that the shorts will wi

    • Yup. The stock will decline. By a lot. But the "tumbling" part is a big unknown. For everyone trying to purposely collapse it (for the team!), there is someone trying to prop it up (for the team!).

      Like the Gamestop fiasco, a bunch of newbs intentionally wanted to screw things up, a little money here and there, money they were fully willing to lose, and the professionals (not evil people) don't have a plan on how to realize this or how to deal with it but with no time to figure it out either. Sort of li

  • maybe, maybe not (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Local ID10T ( 790134 ) <ID10T.L.USER@gmail.com> on Thursday April 04, 2024 @06:50PM (#64371034) Homepage

    Sure, the company behind the stock is worthless. But that is not what people are investing in.

    They are trying to buy favors with Donald Trump. If he loses the election, those favors may not be worth anything. If he wins, he may just laugh at anyone trying to call in a favor.

    • by LordofWinterfell ( 90845 ) on Thursday April 04, 2024 @07:23PM (#64371104)

      Unfortunately, they can pay DJT $70 for a favor, but as the week went by, that $70 you gave is now only worth $46. By next week it should be less than what it was pre IPO.

      Trump will never repay that favor.

      • It's not the individuals throwing away $70 that matter. It's MBS or Elon or Vlad throwing in a $ Billion. They are the ones hoping for a return on their investment from the POTUS.

        • Re:maybe, maybe not (Score:4, Interesting)

          by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Thursday April 04, 2024 @08:55PM (#64371288)

          No, this whole scam only took about $200 million to pull off. It is really just the 5 million shares that anybody paid actual money for. ...Which is why it is really stupid to try to play this stock on either end. It only takes $200 million to prop up the value of the stock (until the lock-up period ends in 6 months and the shares are all free for sale). So, for $200 million or so you either tank the stock or maintain its value. If you have two parties on either side of the equation with that money then it becomes a matter of who blinks first. ...But, come 10/15/2024 I doubt the stock will be worth anything.

          • At 6 month, probably worthless but before then all these short sellers are going to have to buy back from a small pool which will drive up the price.

            Buying now for the short term isn't an unreasonable decision.

            • You have mostly retail investors involved. If the cash invested in DJT was meaningful to them then they are likely to sell if it is pushed low enough. If it is $200 x 1 million people then they are unlikely to sell ever. If the SEC starts an investigation then things get interesting.

              Not worth putting money at risk on either side of the bet.

              • You mean retail shorts or retail buyers? I agree retail buyers can sit on $200 forever and eat the loss if it hits zero but if they're shorts that could cost them some money. Not enough to bankrupt 99% of them but still, losing $500 on a $200 short would suck.

      • I do wonder who he will blame if the stock becomes worthless. I mean, he obviously is a great smart business man. Who made him fail?
    • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Thursday April 04, 2024 @07:28PM (#64371118)

      Trump is already suing the investors. https://www.nbcnews.com/politi... [nbcnews.com]

      Guess they thought it would be different this time and they're special and won't get screwed over.

      • Re:maybe, maybe not (Score:5, Informative)

        by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Thursday April 04, 2024 @07:52PM (#64371164)

        Trump is already suing the investors. https://www.nbcnews.com/politi... [nbcnews.com]

        Guess they thought it would be different this time and they're special and won't get screwed over.

        Not investors, co-founders.

        It sounds like they had the idea and did the work and so Trump naturally tried to dilute them to near zero. They sued to stop him and now he's suing to take away their shares entirely.

        Trouble with doing business with a con-man, you keep finding yourself on the wrong side of the con.

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      It gets better, most of the principals behind Truth Social and the SPAC that "bought" them are now in court cases claiming the former alleged president screwed them. He promised the court in Delaware that the other major investors in Truth Social could rest assured that their stake was safe. Then after the SPAC deal went though, he filed a court case in Florida to claim those shares of theirs. Even the "insurance" company backing his bond in the NYS case to the tune of about $175 million has now been called

  • Expect his supporters to prop it up similarly.

    • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Thursday April 04, 2024 @07:37PM (#64371142)

      The real skill in this whole debacle is the ability to talk the people who have nothing into giving their money to a man who constantly brags about how rich he is.

    • Institutional supporters with institutional money or do you think that's going to come from retail?
      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Can'tNot ( 5553824 )
        I think retail. With so few shares available it makes the stock easy to prop up, and if he promotes it a bit his sycophants will lap it up. The question is, how does he intend to cash out? He can't sell or the stock will crater. I could picture that part coming from "institutional" investors. i.e.: interested parties who are willing to give him loans against the collateral from his shares in exchange for favors.
  • Easy bet (Score:4, Interesting)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Thursday April 04, 2024 @07:12PM (#64371076)

    Knowing the history of the con artist, failure is his signature move. Next to grifting. Which is what this is really about. He stands to gain millions of more shares (he already has 58.1% ownership) if the stock remains above certain dollar amounts for so many days. This Forbes article [forbes.com] goes into a bit more detail on the price points. He just needs to hang on long enough to cash out and leave everyone else holding the bag.

    In addition, he has filed a lawsuit [cnn.com] (quel surprise) against two people who helped set up the company and who were also on some show called The Apprentice, claiming "they made a series of “reckless and wasteful decisions” when they tried to set up the company that caused significant damage."

    Which is interesting because back in February those same two people filed their own lawsuit [forbes.com] claiming the con artist was trying to dilute their share of company stock. Coincidence?

    We know the company is burning money [cnn.com] like WeWork did, and as a result the stock is plunging [marketwatch.com]. Further, there is no foreseeable way it will ever make money. Which leads to the inevitable conclusion this company, like all his other companies, will go bust. Who wouldn't take such an easy winnable bet?

    Hans Kristian Graebener = StoneToss

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Next to grifting. Which is what this is really about.

      This is what really baffles me about TFG. I can accept that many, many people listen to him ramble and meander through a speech and still think "yeah, he gets my vote". God knows, stupidity abounds, but are they really so fucking stupid that it never occurs to them to wonder why such a self-proclaimed billionaire business genius is always asking for money?!

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        but are they really so fucking stupid that it never occurs to them to wonder why such a self-proclaimed billionaire business genius is always asking for money?!

        These are the same people who believe that prophets need their donations (just predict the # for the lottery) and don't question a faith healer going to the hospital as a patient. They are used to accepting conflicting things.

        • by shilly ( 142940 )

          I would argue that they *revel* in their cognitive dissonances. Once they embraced the idea of believing multiple contradictory things at the same time, they found it a liberation -- an ability to be totally flexible and just go with the most self-affirming bias for any particular moment. They discovered that being stupid and ignorant really truly is blissful.

      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        Similar to that, Evangelical Preachers are always asking for money. G-d, Master of the Universe, apparently cannot manage money. (paraphrase of George Carlin).

  • Billionaire buddies. The stock has a market cap of around 5 billion. It would not take more than 1 or 2 right-wing billionaires to prop up the stock price just to troll the short sellers. Hell, Musk could do it with the spare change in the cupholder of his cybertruck. A LOT of short sellers could lose a LOT of money. And Trump and his buddies would be the ones making it, right? Hmmmmmmm

    The stock will eventually crater because the only people who would ever be caught dead on TS are the most rabid quartil
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by quantaman ( 517394 )

      Billionaire buddies. The stock has a market cap of around 5 billion. It would not take more than 1 or 2 right-wing billionaires to prop up the stock price just to troll the short sellers. Hell, Musk could do it with the spare change in the cupholder of his cybertruck. A LOT of short sellers could lose a LOT of money. And Trump and his buddies would be the ones making it, right? Hmmmmmmm

      That's an interesting question. If it could be shown you were just trying to screw with short-sellers or even propping up the price to stay in Trump's good graces would that count as market manipulation?

      The stock will eventually crater because the only people who would ever be caught dead on TS are the most rabid quartile of the GOP and Fox already has a solid lock on most of those people. But it’ll probably take longer than expected. If I was gonna short the stock, I would do it in about 6-12 months. Right about when Trump and his buddies start thinking about dumping his shares. But the real smart move is to stay the hell away from anything and everything Trump. That dud is toxic to the core.

      December. A cratering stock is obviously bad for his campaign, so rich folks/countries hoping to influence Trump will prop it up through the election.

      I wager Trump loses, but MAGA GOP legislators in states Biden won might keep things interesting for another month trying to reassign their EC votes to Trump.

      Bu

      • > That's an interesting question. If it could be shown you were just trying to screw with short-sellers or even propping up the price to stay in Trump's good graces would that count as market manipulation?

        Absolutely not. Someone's reason for buying and selling on the public market is not a form of manipulation. When an executive or other with insider knowledge says shut in public they shouldn't be talking about, that can be manipulation. Using insider knowledge to buy or sell in an abnormal trading pa

  • Even if it's to short a stock that's sure to fall...you're asking for trouble. A lot can go wrong, shorting a stock. In some cases the lenders go belly up, and you still lose your investment.

    • Lenders go belly up? What are you talking about? Lenders aren't at risk in short position that's what margin calls are for. What lenders are you talking about? You're betting the lenders to the company who's stock you shorted are going to go belly up on their investment but that's just a win on your investment.

      You lose if the stock goes up or trades sideways so you get stuck paying interest for an extended period. In either scenario you can set a stop loss to cut your losses.
  • Logically it makes sense as the assets of the company don't remotely make sense for the share price. BUT, the market is not always rational and when it comes to MAGA supporters that irrationality is magnified exponentially so I certainly wouldn't be taking this gamble even though every financial analysis says it should collapse.
  • Careful there (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday April 05, 2024 @02:00AM (#64371562)

    Never bet against the insane. You think that his dupes wouldn't bet the farm and life savings on saving their idol and messiah and to "stick it to da man" and wallstreet?

Do you suffer painful recrimination? -- Nancy Boxer, "Structured Programming with Come-froms"

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