TRUTH SOCIAL #PRAVDASOCIAL & Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) NASDAQ:DJT - SPAC Digital World Acquisition Corp

[johnpcapitalist]

May 17-25 put options are going for 6.35 right now. Could spend a few bucks on some of those. If it drops to 20 you could probably clear an 80% to 100% profit by the end of the week. Making money on Trump losing money has a certain attraction too.

I tried to buy some 20 strike May 17 puts today at 4 but they were going up and my bid didn't get filled. The May 17, 25 strike puts I suggested were up 24% today. This puppy is going down.

I haven't been tracking the options market (I was never an options guy), but it's not surprising that puts are expensive right now. In light of your post, it sure sounds like the news release about a video streaming capability was an attempt to foment a short squeeze. An announcement like that might have a chance of lifting any other company, but it's clear that the pros who are short (or who bought puts) see right through the ruse, and the suckers who are buying the stock to support their Orange Jesus don't have the firepower to keep buying the dips.

[New Turtle]

Premarket.

32.59 USD 0.00 (0.00%)today
Closed: Apr 15, 9:10 AM EDT • Disclaimer
Pre-market 28.01 −4.58 (14.06%)

Idiots filed to dump more shares on the market:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... r-BB1lE0an

Its warrants, which trade under the ticker DJTWW and can be exchanged with cash for shares, closed down 15% at $11.62

I wonder will the actual DJT price ever falll below these ^^

Could be a race to the bottom.

[johnpcapitalist]

It should come as no surprise that the original, competent accounting firm hired to audit the books at Truth Social quit after only a couple of months on the job and was replaced by another firm that was so bad that they were terminated from the PCAOB's "double secret probation" program because every single public company audit it performed was found to have serious deficiencies by the SEC.

https://www.businessinsider.com/account ... ear-2024-4

[Reality Check]

This doesn't even qualify as a dead cat bounce (re: after hours trading). I might try to buy some puts tomorrow if there is actually an uptick.

Screenshot 2024-04-16 at 22-38-18 Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. (DJT) Stock Price News Quote & History - Yahoo Finance.png (267 KiB) Viewed 998 times

[raison de arizona]

Donald Trump’s company, Trump Media and Technology Group, has a diversity and inclusion policy, something he vows to eliminate across the country.

[johnpcapitalist]

Donald Trump’s company, Trump Media and Technology Group, has a diversity and inclusion policy, something he vows to eliminate across the country.

It'll be interesting to see if they end the policy after this is publicized, and whether the SEC then requires them to disclose in the "Risks" section that they are at increased risk for litigation without a DE&I policy and enforcement mechanism.

I remember that after the 1989 Santa Cruz earthquake, which affected a lot of Silicon Valley companies, the very next quarter, you saw any company with significant operations in Silicon Valley adding an extensive earthquake discussion in the "Risks" section, which usually went on for 20-30 pages. The SEC tends to scrutinize that section of registration statements (i.e., like the one they just filed to sell more shares) quite carefully. They look for the big ones specific to your company (like the "going concern" warning that $DJT carries) but also to make sure that you're listing all the nitpicky little ones like "increased risk of DE&I lawsuits."

[raison de arizona]

Someone is pumping hundreds of millions into propping up Truth Social's stock price today. This is not organic, it's market manipulation. If the SEC had any balls, they'd be pulling it.

[Luke]

Tomlinson is right, it's fishy. Apparently, $DJT has to stay above $17 for Trump to receive more shares.

[raison de arizona]

Trump Media warns Nasdaq of suspected market manipulation

Trump Media, the parent company of the former president’s Truth Social, alerted Nasdaq Inc. on Thursday of what the company suspects is illegal activity driving down the price of its shares.

In a letter to the exchange, Devin Nunes, the CEO of Trump Media (DJT), laid out what he believes could be deemed “naked” short selling.

Naked short selling involves someone selling shares they don’t own or have not borrowed. They will often then try to buy shares at a reduced price to cover themselves. This practice is generally illegal. Whereas legitimate short sellers, people who seek to benefit from declines in the value of a company’s shares, borrow the shares before selling.

The letter was made public Friday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Nunes also noted in the letter that shares of the company were on a list the Nasdaq maintains that’s “indicative of unlawful trading activity.”

“This is particularly troubling given that “naked” short selling often entails sophisticated market participants profiting at the expense of retail investors,” he said.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/markets/ ... index.html

[cjroberts]

I don't know if they should be using the words naked and short in such close proximity while the current New York trial in ongoing.

[johnpcapitalist]

Trump Media warns Nasdaq of suspected market manipulation

Trump Media, the parent company of the former president’s Truth Social, alerted Nasdaq Inc. on Thursday of what the company suspects is illegal activity driving down the price of its shares.

In a letter to the exchange, Devin Nunes, the CEO of Trump Media (DJT), laid out what he believes could be deemed “naked” short selling.

Naked short selling involves someone selling shares they don’t own or have not borrowed. They will often then try to buy shares at a reduced price to cover themselves. This practice is generally illegal. Whereas legitimate short sellers, people who seek to benefit from declines in the value of a company’s shares, borrow the shares before selling.

The letter was made public Friday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Nunes also noted in the letter that shares of the company were on a list the Nasdaq maintains that’s “indicative of unlawful trading activity.”

“This is particularly troubling given that “naked” short selling often entails sophisticated market participants profiting at the expense of retail investors,” he said.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/markets/ ... index.html

This is what slimeball management teams always say when their shitty operation gets to the top of the news. There was a big wave of hysteria over "naked shorting" circa 2008-2010, pushed by third-rate management teams huckstering their stock to unsophisticated "stock bros." Companies involved in this, IIRC, were people like Herbalife, Prepaid Legal Services (now LegalShield) and most notably, Patrick Byrne, chairman of Overstock.com, whose sleazy accounting practices and crappy business operation made him a favorite of hedge fund guys to short in their personal accounts.

If you've heard Byrne's name more recently, he's the election denier and conspiracy whack job that has been buddies with Trump and was involved in funding many of those election lawsuits. Unsurprising... And it wouldn't surprise me at all if Byrne was responsible for putting this idea in Trumps' and Nunes' ear.

In the wake of that ginned-up "scandal," the SEC passed Regulation SHO, which contained a number of provisions to curb the practice of naked shorting, to the small extent that it actually happened. Most of it was bringing to the forefront common practices that were already in place. It took only a few minutes for our compliance people to get us up to speed on what our traders needed to do, which was basically a slight tweak to our record-keeping systems. The SEC people who trained our compliance team were all but saying out loud that Reg SHO was just throwing a bone to the crazies to get them to shut up, and that it wasn't a big deal.

Market surveillance technology has advanced considerably in the intervening 15 years, as has the internal compliance mechanisms for the handful of order management systems that nearly everyone uses. So the odds that significant amounts of naked shorting are occurring today in $DJT are minimal.

The reason that a "naked shorting" idea has any chance at catching on among the rabble is that short selling seems vaguely seedy and disreputable practice to the average Joe/Josephine, where those "international bankers" (wink, wink) are ganging up on decent, hardworking American executives like Devin Nunes and Donald Trump to steal the profits generated from all their hard work, which they use to feed their children. It's nirvana for populist leaders to exploit.

However, the reality is different. Academics who study market structure will tell you that there has to be symmetry in buying and selling to ensure optimal market efficiency. While restrictions on short selling will damp out short-term market volatility to the downside over the short term, it will ultimately work to the detriment of investors because short sellers function as "buyers of last resort," buying stock during a wipeout because they have to cover their positions in order to get paid. Were there no buyers of last resort, this stock would have dropped further, faster than it has.

Inefficient markets ultimately lead to rotation out of that asset class into something else, ultimately making it harder for equity markets to do their main job: raising capital to fund economic growth. The average professional worker in China knows their markets are rigged on the long side, which is why they invested all their savings into the real estate market.

I don't have data to support this, but I would suspect that far more criminal market manipulation schemes are of the "pump and dump" variety than of the "short and distort" variety. Market manipulation on the short side for large-cap stocks (which, amusingly, includes $DJT these days despite its $4 million trickle of revenue) is extremely difficult to accomplish in general, because hedge funds now soak up so much stock on the short side that they can't profit from advance knowledge of bad news the way they used to when I got into the business ~30 years ago.

Most "short and distort" scams focused on small-cap, micro-cap and penny stocks in an era where there were few practicitioners of these scams and where news didn't move as fast. The leading practitioners of this type of nonsense were the three Feshbach brothers, among the biggest contributors to Scientology because they thought L. Ron Hubbard's investment advice made them successful. They were among the few short funds in their 1970s and 1980s heyday. They made out like bandits on small and micro-cap stocks but went bug-on-a-windshield when they tried playing with the big boys and were crushed almost immediately.

But I digress. A significant percentage of the buy orders in $DJT at this point are short sellers covering their positions. A lot of professional investors who are casually short this piece of s$&# in their personal accounts will be able to close out their position at current levels, more than doubling their money, and brag about how much of Trump's money they "stole." Good, clean fun.

The big pop in the stock the other day as noted above might have been someone trying to foment a "short covering rally," getting the shorts to panic and buy in so they could generate enough liquidity to sell a big long position. Or, it could indeed be a shady infusion of cash to try to prop up the stock as noted above, but one couldn't say for sure without doing a detailed study of oceans of Level III trading data, looking for blocks of unusual size moving.

Regardless of what caused the pop the other day (and the stock's making another test of resistance to the upside today), any more bad news and the retail MAGA yahoos that have been propping up this piece of garbage won't have the firepower to defend it if some more bad news comes along, where it will resume its stately whistling plummet towards $0.00.

[raison de arizona]

Interesting, thanks for the inside baseball!

Here is the letter Nunes sent:

► Show Spoiler

[p0rtia]

[raison de arizona]

[johnpcapitalist]

Interesting, thanks for the inside baseball!

Here is the letter Nunes sent:

► Show Spoiler

The criterion to get on the Reg SHO list is 10,000 shares or 0.5% of the average trading volume for five consecutive days. That could be a single block that got snagged in a DK (where the counterparty can't find the trade record) when they tried to settle.

Of course, Nunes makes being on the list sound like this is sufficient to prove naked shorting, which it most certainly is not. Only way to know whether it's naked shorting is if the SEC investigates and sues/brings charges for specific acts. Politically, given that there's a chance that Trump wins the election, I'd be certain that they're working hard to chase this down to curry favor with TFG in case he wins.

I have a funny feeling that when $DJT falls off the list, Nunes is not going to put out a letter acknowledging that fact. I'm not going to monitor the SEC web site to see how long $DJT stays on the Reg SHO list.

[Luke]

Always great JPC, thanks buddy.

Seeing what looked like manipulation this week, Patrick Byrne came to mind.

Yeah, it's naked shorts, not the 1000X premium, the $4M in revenue, the $50M loss, the lack of users or the mismanagement since DWAC and Trump Media started this dud.

Even with the RALLY, still down 40%.

DJT 4-19.JPG (75.4 KiB) Viewed 570 times

[bob]

CNN: Donald Trump is on the verge of another $1 billion Truth Social windfall:

Former President Donald Trump is on the cusp of scoring a major financial bonanza – at least on paper.

As long as Trump Media & Technology Group’s share price doesn’t spectacularly implode before Tuesday’s closing bell, Trump is on track to receive another 36 million shares as the owner of Truth Social.

This milestone is on track to be hit after the market closes on Tuesday.

Even though Trump Media is losing money and Truth Social is very tiny, those new shares Trump is in line to receive would be valued at about $1.3 billion at current prices.

* * *

According to SEC filings, Trump Media can issue additional shares to pre-merger shareholders such as the former president if the dollar volume-weighted average price equals or exceeds $12.50 for any 20 trading days within any 30 day trading period beginning on March 25.

* * *

Tuesday marks the 20th trading day and Trump Media’s share price has not traded below the $17.50 level at any point since the clock started on March 25.

It would be foolish not to speculate whether the market is being manipulated with the expectation of a kickback.

[Flatpoint High]

his "wealth" has ALWAYS been paper, not "liquid"

[Suranis]

Are they going to keep creating shares to keep his Paper wealth above a certain level?

Sorry "issuing."

[raison de arizona]

Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes said he has experience from his days in Congress doing investigations, and he is going to find out which nefarious actors are causing his stock to plummet: “If they think we’re not gonna figure it out I got news for them - we gonna come after them.”

[zekeb]

So Nunes' cows are the ones who are short selling Truth Social?

[johnpcapitalist]

Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes said he has experience from his days in Congress doing investigations, and he is going to find out which nefarious actors are causing his stock to plummet: “If they think we’re not gonna figure it out I got news for them - we gonna come after them.”

Nunes is, unsurprisingly, full of it. He's great with the bombastic sound bites, but I'm sure he will find that the SEC treats him these days as just another guy running a soon-to-be penny stock. He's never going to return to public office, so his leverage over the organization or over individuals at the SEC that he may have had a relationship with in the past is nil.

Nunes will discover, as many former people of power have, that the power belongs to the chair he sat in, not to him personally.

[bob]

Investigations are easier when you have governmental subpoena power and an army of staffers.

A failing company (controlled by someone known to stiff contractors)? Not so much.

[Flatpoint High]

20240423160526.png (46.38 KiB) Viewed 179 times

[RTH10260]

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/stat ... 8786395375

Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes said he has experience from his days in Congress doing investigations, and he is going to find out which nefarious actors are causing his stock to plummet: “If they think we’re not gonna figure it out I got news for them - we gonna come after them.”

Psssst... I have a tip for you

► Show Spoiler

the guy goes by the initials of djt and also cheats with orange war paint and a critter on his head