DJT Is Just Perfect

Have you ever seen a more perfect match up between public company Trump Media & Technology Group Corp – aka DJT the stock – and the public persona of Donald J. Trump, the man and leader? It’s beautiful.

DJT post merger through April 2024

It’s huge, and some people still don’t get it. The people who don’t get it should be fired. I would just say that to them: You’re fired! 

Or rounded up and deported. Or worse. It could be a bloodbath. Financially, I mean. Or I don’t know, maybe some other way? 

The fake media will try to focus your attention on the “fundamentals” of DJT the stock: $4 million in revenue in 2023, on a $58 million net loss for the year, followed by a $8 billion value when the merger was completed. Later, the company bounced in value between a $4 and $5 billion market capitalization. 

Did the stock drop in April because it was trading at a valuation of 2,000 times its annual revenue? No, you should not try to apply the low energy rules of traditional finance to DJT. 

DJT is a perfect meme stock

To try to describe DJT from a fundamental perspective is to live in the old boring world.

Meme stock investing – which is what drives interest in DJT the stock – is about the grassroots. It’s about real, American people who don’t need experience with the stock market to stick it to the man.

Yeah sure, DJT the stock is volatile. Over the course of a week in mid-April it’s gone up or down by at least 15 percent a day, multiple times. That’s what keeps people talking about it, like its namesake. People can’t get enough of Trump, it’s exciting.

The Wall Street elites can talk about fundamentals until they are bleeding out of their eyeballs or their wherevers. 

unhappy_trump

As a meme stock, the point in buying DJT is not to turn a profit. The point is to band together in a show of solidarity against the enemies of Trump, who are also incidentally the enemies of grassroots real Americans. What matters is faith. If everyone works together and buys DJT, it can’t go down. It’s as simple as that.

When everybody is against him, that’s the point of maximum power for Trump. Because if the stock begins to rise, the elites have to cover their shorts, and they can lose, literally, an unlimited amount of money. That’s how it works with heavily-shorted stocks. When all the hedge funds and big boys are short, that is when grassroots real Americans show their faith in Greatness, and Trump. We saw that with meme stocks like AMC and Gamestop in 2021. We’ll see it again with DJT. Can you imagine if it comes out that Nancy Pelosi and George Soros have shorted DJT? I’m not saying they did. I’m just saying that would be a sweet day of reckoning.

Trump-Miss-Universe-Moscow
Trump in 2013 with Aras Aragalov, Putin-linked billionaire, for Miss Universe Moscow

Next they’ll say the Russians are buying DJT. The Russians, the Russians! Always the Russians. They probably are, who cares? That’s a big beautiful country too. Beautiful women. Christians, I’m told. Trump even hosted a Miss Universe pageant there in 2013 and met all the important leaders then.

DJT built on fraud?

Like its namesake, DJT the stock has been in a series of byzantine legal tangles. 

When DJT’s predecessor company was just a blank-check company called Digital World Acquisition Corp prior to the merger with Truth Social, the company and people around it allegedly broke some laws. 

In July 2023 the SEC settled accusations that insiders had fraudulently purchased DWAC shares with knowledge of a merger with Trump’s Truth Social business for $18 million. 

Three other investors were accused in June 2023 of making $22 million of illegal profit from insider trading on advance knowledge of the merger. That’s a lot more illegal profit than the company had revenue in 2023.

If supporters of the Law and Order party regularly dismiss accusations, arrests, settlements, and convictions for fraud, does that mean we should doubt the sincerity of either DJT the stock or Donald Trump the leader? No. It just means that we need to root out the deep state swamp things in the SEC and FBI who have a not-so-hidden agenda. Law enforcement officers will do anything to try to attack Trump, which is very unfair.

Under the next Trump presidency, those very nasty prosecutors at the SEC and FBI will hopefully be taken care of, so we can get back to backing the blue and having Law and Order again.

The stock swoons in mid-April as more shares will trade soon

Now, as is only correct, Trump the man currently owns nearly 60 percent of DJT the stock. This briefly gave him in March 2023 a 4.8 billion net-worth bump, on paper. 

As of this writing, the stock is sharply down to $5 billion from an approximately $8 billion valuation, after it merged with Truth Social. 

[****Ric – we can check this market cap mid-week before publishing? It’s been super-duper volatile.]

Company filings on April 15 described a large supply of additional DJT shares that may soon become available to trade. 

As of now, less than 29 million shares of DJT freely trade in the marketplace. 

By September 2024 there will be roughly 200 million tradable shares of DJT. Trump the man owns 79 million total, with rights to acquire another 36 million. Other insiders own 30 million with rights to acquire another 4 million shares. 

Under ordinary rules for a company going public, Trump and the other insiders cannot sell any of their stakes in the company until September, after a 6-month lockup. Should those rules apply to Trump? Is it fair to apply rules in an extremely unfair-to-Trump world? You tell me. Maybe the board of directors can look into this.

Does this have all the makings of a classic pump and dump stock fraud? What makes you think that?

A recent filing by DJT the company notes that “Because President Donald J Trump is a candidate for President, he may, subject to the Lock-Up Period, divest his interest in Truth Social.” I have long admired his willingness to divest his business interests to avoid any possible conflict of interest, so it just makes sense that he may need to abruptly sell his company shares in September 2024 due to his imminent election to the Presidency. 

Did the stock drop in April because of the expectation that Trump will sell his shares, cleverly taking advantage of the blind faith of his supporters and leaving them holding an empty bag? Why would you say that?

Trump’s ability to shift losses onto others while preserving his own financial viability is interpreted by his supporters as entrepreneurial cleverness rather than recognized as venal.

This assumption of cleverness rather than venality covers a lot of Trump history, such as the bankruptcy of Trump Taj Mahal in 1991, Trump Plaza in 1992, Trump Hotel and Casino Resorts in 2004, and Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009. Plus, the failure of various brands – steaks, wine – and the fraud settlement for Trump University.

What part about Trump’s long history of bankruptcies, plus refusing to pay workers and creditors, makes you think he would abruptly offload his stock on his most loyal supporters now? I just can’t believe he would do that to them. Literally in September 2024. Or sooner, if the company’s directors allow him.

If the end result of sticking it to the man by disregarding any rules about earnings or profits or an authentic business is that regular real grassroots Americans are eagerly fleeced, and the self-marketing genius who inherited his real estate fortune from Daddy gets his net worth inflated by a few billion dollars in the process, well that’s just further evidence of his cleverness, no?

This DJT meme stock is just perfect.

A version of this post ran in the San Antonio Express News and Houston Chronicle

Please see related posts

Trump – A Threat To Democracy I

Trump – A Threat to Democracy II

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Backed The Wrong SPAC

Bubble

Nominations are still open for the craziest frothy finance stories of 2021. Strong cases can be made (and I have made them!) for bitcoin and RedditBro GameStop short-squeezes. But maybe the uber example of frothy finances this year are SPACs.

Bubble
Picture of South Sea Bubble or really any SPAC you’d like it to be

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) existed before this current era, but really on the fringy margins of Wall Street. Now they are front and center.

SPACs are known as “blank-check” companies. You buy shares in a company that is just an empty shell. The shell sells 100 million shares for, say $10, raising a billion dollars. In the future – specifically, typically by next year – the managers of the SPAC promise to purchase a private company. At that point you find out what you, the shareholder, own! 

Now, owning shares in a pile of cash worth approximately the pile of cash is ok, I guess. 

You’re really trusting in the SPAC management’s private-company-purchasing skill. For that reason, SPAC managers like to put famous people on their team to build this trust. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan recently joined the management team of a SPAC run by Mitt Romney’s son. I have strong feelings about the trustworthiness of Paul Ryan, but that’s an earlier column.

paul_ryan_workout
Your favorite SPACbro, former House Speaker Paul Ryan

The weird thing that’s been happening sometimes lately is the fact that shares go up when they are just a pile of cash, without any company purchased yet. Sometimes they go up a little, which is ok if you really believe in the Paul Ryans of the world and their ability to buy undervalued private companies. 

But sometimes they go up a lot. Which is nuts. A SPAC that just bought an electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors in mid-February – a company that incidentally has never delivered a single vehicle to a customer – briefly climbed from $10 a share to above $50 a share. The Venn diagram of overlapping investors who like speculative electric vehicle startups and blank check companies apparently produced this briefly delightful mad rush to own the SPAC at $50 per share, when the cash value of the empty shell was still $10 per share. (They should have put the name bitcoin in there somewhere so that shares would reach $90.)

For historians reviewing the South Sea Bubble era, a classic headslapper description of a proposed venture was that it was “an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”  Haha that’s always a great laugh for financial historians – and the description is possibly apocryphal – but it is also a true and precise definition of exactly what is a SPAC.

While SPACs are not entirely new, they are definitely the new new hotness on Wall Street this year. SPACInsider.com reports a total of 226 SPAC transactions in the eleven years between 2009 and 2019. It’s been a slow build, with the years 2016 to 2019 seeing upticks of 13, 34, 46, and 59 SPAC transactions per year, respectively. 

In 2020, we saw 255 SPACs announced. 

2021 is shaping up as the year of the SPAC, with 348 total announced in just the first two months of the year.

SPAC

On February 26 2021, the final trading day of the month, 13 SPACs launched. That’s as many in one day last week as we saw in all of 2016. In 2021, everybody loves backing blank check companies, undertakings of great advantage but nobody to know what they are! 

The interesting feature of the South Sea Bubbles of 1720 was that the English press of the time understood that many of the new speculative schemes were somewhere between frauds and lottery tickets. The investing crowd in its wisdom did not seem to care what the press thought. Can you blame them? There was too much money to be made.

From 2004 to 2007 a lot of smart guys enjoyed buying condos in Florida “on spec.” Not to live in, but to flip to another buyer. Sometimes these condos hadn’t even been built or finished yet, so a $25 thousand deposit got you the right to pay $400 thousand for the finished condo. But then those smart guys would flip their purchase option rights for $75 thousand and keep the quick profit because the end price of the unbuilt condo was upped to $450 thousand, and there was no need to wait for the condo to be built in order to cash in. Anyway, some people made money doing this for a while.

In the dotcom bubble of 2000 or the housing bubble of 2008 it is simply not true that people did not find the market ridiculous. On the contrary, people thought that Pets.com was stupid in 2000, as was flipping unbuilt Florida spec condos in early 2008. It doesn’t matter. Other people were making money on it. Up until the point when they didn’t make money anymore.

Now, some froth at the creative end of capitalism is arguably good. If we collectively torch $1 trillion in investment capital on electric vehicles but end up also igniting a technological revolution that slows climate change, that’s maybe fine, even if it is painful for the folks who backed the wrong SPAC. (Incidentally, “Backed The Wrong SPAC” is the title of the first poem in my new book of financial slam poetry/rap that I just started working on right now, today.)

The internet boom of 1999 and 2000 ended in tears for many, including backers of Pets.com and Webvan, but overall that episode of financial frothiness probably helped raise buckets of useful capital for scrappy startups like Amazon and Google.

The same capital obliterated by telecom failures WorldCom and Global Crossing may have helped spur a lot of excessive investment in fiber optic cable. That bandwidth is essential to watching the massive volume of cute cat videos on Reddit that we all now consume.

SPACs are ridiculous investments, but sometimes you have to wait and see whether some financial ridiculousness and tragedy for speculators ends up with a silver lining for the broader economy and society.

And by the way, please do not misinterpret me. Do I mean you should sell your stocks because everything is going to crash? Of course not, never sell. Take the multi-decade view.

But also, please, please don’t buy stupid things.

A version of this post ran in the San Antonio Express News.

Please see related posts:

RobinHood is not your friend

Bitcoin (hopefully for the last time)

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