The $DJT stock was back over $45 a share by noon today, up 25% from last week. Investment in Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company for Donald Trump’s social media platform Truth Social, has been driven heavily by individual investors who are betting on the stock as a personal investment in the Republican nominee for president.
Yet while $DJT is up over the past couple of weeks, it’s still down from where it opened at the end of March when the company went public at over $66 a share. Despite most of the slip in share price being explained by an earnings report which showed that Trump Media posted a $58 million loss last year, according to some posters in Truth Social’s highly active $DJT group, the backslide has only one possible explanation: coordinated action from short sellers.
“Good morning. Another week starting. Let’s keep holding and buying as able,” posted @risitodeplata just before 8 in the morning on Monday in the group. “Maybe we need to get a writing campaign going to push our House reps to start investigating Citadel and the other illegal shorts. Also get family and friends to open accounts and start posting.”
“Well, it looks like the left wing shorts are at it early this morning,” posted @loaderboy34 about ten minutes earlier. “2 instant drop. The dark market is such BS! It’s the only way they can try to stop us!”
The short sellers who Truth Social posters are worried about are traders who essentially bet that the stock will go down. They do so by borrowing stock from a broker, selling it on the open market, and calculating that when they actually have to fulfill the transaction by transferring the stock’s ownership to the buyer, they’ll be able to buy the stock themselves for cheaper now that the price has dropped.
According to a report from the Associated Press on Friday, investors trying their luck with this strategy have made “tens of millions of dollars over the past month.”
According to the AP report, investors have on-paper profits of a minimum of $200 million, absent the fees and interest required for short selling, which can often be high. For $DJT, the interest alone soared up to 565% a year at one point last month, reported AP, higher than all but three other stocks in recent memory.
Despite worries about the shorts, a good performance from the stock on Monday morning had posters jubilant about its prospects and crowing about the defeat of their enemies.
“Hold that line patriots..it’s a glorious day! The hell with the manipulative bastards. They got caught! Citadel is one of many,” posted @Amerikanwoman, referring to one of the brokerages driving some trading.
According to a letter Devin Nunes sent to Nasdaq on Apr. 18, “four market participants have been responsible for over 60% of the extraordinary volume of DJT shares traded.” Nunes, who’s the company’s CEO, cited “data made available to us,” showing that VIRTU Americas, G1 Execution Services, and Jane Street Capital were the other three companies responsible for the movement..
In an interview posters shared with Nunes from Real America’s Voice on Friday, Nunes warned against short sellers who sell shares before actually borrowing them, which is illegal. In the interview, Nunes said that if this is going on, RICO statutes would apply, and said that he’d asked Congress to look into it. RICO statutes are usually used to prosecute organized crime—Trump himself is facing RICO charges in Georgia over allegations that he conspired to overturn his loss in the state during the 2020 presidential election.
“We will defend our shareholders at all costs,” Nunes said in the video.
“Devin Nunes hinting that Truth Social going public on the NASDAQ via $DWAC and $DJT is a RICO sting operation to catch naked short sellers who have been manipulating the stock market for decades,” reacted @surfing4truth. “Let’s see what happens.”
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