Trump Media stock ended Friday trading down nearly 20% this week.
DJT stock, which fell more than 8% within the first hour of trading on Friday, rose slightly by the end of the day.
The stock closed 18 cents higher at $32.59, or about 0.5%.
The closing price was more than $38 lower than the initial share price on March 26, when the social media company began public trading.
Shares of Trump Media, which owns the Truth Social app, have fallen 47.4% so far in April, wiping out billions of dollars in market capitalization.
Former President Donald Trump is the company’s largest shareholder, owning nearly 60% of the company’s stock. President Trump is scheduled to begin jury selection Monday in his criminal trial in Manhattan Supreme Court on charges of falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Trump Media opened its first day of trading on March 26th at a price of $70.90 per share and hit a high of nearly $80 per share later in the day. With today’s trading, the company’s market capitalization exceeded $9.5 billion.
As of Friday’s close, Trump Media’s market capitalization was $4.45 billion, $5 billion below its all-time high reached more than two weeks ago.
Trump Media began trading publicly a day after merging with Digital World Acquisition Corporation, a shell company created to help private companies go public.
Trump Media reported revenue of just $4.1 million last year and a net loss of $58 million.
This performance and the company’s stock’s relatively high price have attracted strong interest from short sellers, who are effectively betting that a company’s stock price will fall.
As of this week, DJT’s so-called short interest was $208.7 million, with 5.44 million shares sold short, according to Ihor Dusaniowski, managing director of predictive analytics at S3 Partners, a leading financial data market platform.
Less than 100,000 Trump Media shares were available for short sale. A trader who wants to short a stock must borrow and sell the stock with the hope of later buying back the same number of shares at a lower price and returning them to the lender, pocketing the price difference between the trades.
Trump Media has 136.7 million shares outstanding.
Dusaniwski announced a week ago that traders wishing to short Trump Media stock would have to pay up to 900% of its annual financing costs and would have to sell one share within a month to break even on the trade. He said it needs to fall by $30 per month.
But since then, the cost of financing Trump Media’s short sales transactions has plummeted by 200%.
