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The price of Trump Media shares closed trading Friday down nearly 20% for the week.
DJT shares, which dropped by more than 8% within the first hour of trading Friday, eked out a slight gain by the end of the day.
Shares closed up 18 cents at $32.59, an increase of around .5%.
But that closing price still was more than $38 lower than what Trump Media shares first sold for when the social media company began public trading on March 26.
Shares of the company, which owns the Truth Social app, have dropped by 47.4% so far in April wiping out billions of dollars in the company’s market capitalization.
Former President Donald Trump is the biggest shareholder in the company, owning nearly 60% of its stock.
On Monday, Trump is set to start jury selection for 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 on March 26 opened its first day of trading with a price of $70.90 per share, hitting a high of nearly $80 later that same day. During trading that day, the company’s market capitalization topped $9.5 billion.
By Friday’s close, Trump Media’s market cap stood at $4.45 billion — a whopping $5 billion lower than the high it hit more than two weeks ago.
Trump Media began public trading a day after it merged with the shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp., which was created to help a private firm 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 relatively high price of the company’s stock have drawn keen interest from short sellers, who make trades that are effectively bets that a company’s share price will drop.
As of this week, so-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…
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