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The price of Trump Media shares closed Friday’s trading down nearly 20% for the week.
Shares of DJT, which were down more than 8% during the first hour of trading on Friday, eked out a slight gain at the end of the day.
Shares closed up 18 cents at $32.59, an increase of about .5%.
But the closing price was more than $38 less than what Trump Media first traded for when the social media company began public trading on March 26.
Shares of the company, which owns the Truth Social app, have fallen 47.4% so far in April, wiping billions of dollars off the company’s market capitalization.
Former President Donald Trump is the largest shareholder in the company, owning nearly 60% of its stock.
On Monday, Trump is scheduled to begin selecting jurors for his criminal trial in Manhattan Supreme Court on charges of falsifying business records related to a 2016 cash payment to porn star Stormy Daniels .
Trump Media opened its first day of trading on March 26 at $70.90 per share, reaching a high of nearly $80 later that day. During that day’s trading, the company’s market capitalization topped $9.5 billion.
As of Friday’s close, Trump Media’s market cap stood at $4.45 billion — a whopping $5 billion less than the high it hit more than two weeks ago.
Trump Media began public trading a day after it merged with shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp., which was created to help a private company go public.
Trump Media last year had revenue of just $4.1 million, and reported a net loss of $58 million.
That performance and the company’s relatively high stock price drew strong interest from short sellers, who made trades that effectively bet the company’s share price would fall.
This week, called short interest in DJT was $208.7 million, with 5.44 million shares shorted, according to Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3 Partners, a leading financial data marketplace platform.
There are fewer than 100,000 shares of Trump Media available to borrow to sell short. Traders who want to sell a stock short must borrow shares to sell, with the expectation that they will buy back the same number of shares at a lower price to return them to the lender, pocketing the price difference between trades.
Trump Media has 136.7 million shares outstanding.
A week ago, traders wanting to short shares of Trump Media had to pay up to 900% in annual funding costs, meaning they would need a $30-per-share drop within a month to break even their trade, said Dusaniwsky.
Since then, however, funding costs for short trades on Trump Media have fallen dramatically, as much as 200%.
Trump Media was launched after social media giant X, then known as Twitter, banned Trump from that app on the heels of Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by a mob of his supporters.
Trump, who is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, posts frequently on Truth Social. He used the app to condemn the four pending criminal cases he was facing, along with civil cases that resulted in judgments against him that topped $500 million.
Trump this week hosted a party at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, to celebrate the Trump Media.
“I think that Truth has become so important. It’s strong, it’s dedicated,” Trump told those in attendance, according to a report in RSBN news site.
“Remember we have no debt, and we have over $200 million dollars in cash, which is very liquid,” Trump said of the company, whose CEO is former Republican congressman Devin Nunes.
— Additional reporting by CNBC’s Nick Wells
