President Donald Trump‘s new media venture has been a blessing for Digital World Acquisition Corp. The Special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) planning to merge with a Trump group venture soared on Friday amid another frenzy of trading.
Digital World Acquisition Corp’s stock nearly tripled in the first minute of trading before it was temporarily halted. It then fell, but still ended the day with a 107% gain to $94.20. At its highest point, the stock had climbed as high as $175.
It is not a one-off for the stock as it had more than quadrupled to $45.50 from $9.96 on Thursday after it said it would merge with Trump Media & Technology Group. The new venture, with Trump as its chairman, aims to challenge Facebook, Twitter, and even Disney’s streaming video service.
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Experts are mixed on the company’s prospects, and the deal announcing its merger with Digital World Acquisition was unusual in how few details it offered investors. The company was incorporated in February but has yet to publish an app, offer details about its financials, or say how much it plans to charge for its on-demand streaming and other services, according to the Associated Press.
All of that could be a buzzkill for any investor, but not enough to keep Digital World Acquisition Corp.’s stock from soaring.
Some investors appear to be believers in Trump’s ideology, while others see a chance for the company to quickly gain a big audience. A big chunk of investors, though, appeared simply to be grabbing for a chance at a quick profit.
Several threads on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, where millions of traders share their successes and failures, had users bragging about how much money they made by jumping in and out of Digital World Acquisition Corp. Others were asking if they should listen to the fear they were feeling of missing out. WallStreetBets gained fame early this year after its members helped drive GameStop and other formerly downtrodden stocks to extreme heights, levels that professional investors saw as dangerously untethered to reality.
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Trading in Digital World Acquisition Corp.’s stock was so furious, and swings in its price were so sharp, that it was temporarily halted a dozen times on Friday.
Digital World Acquisition is a special-purpose acquisition company, something that’s typically called a SPAC or “blank-check” company. It’s sitting on a little less than $300 million of cash that it raised in its own initial public offering before it went looking for a company to acquire.
SPACs can offer privately held companies a quicker and easier way to get their stocks on an exchange, by merging with them. They were wildly popular earlier this year, but activity had been receding as regulatory scrutiny on them and interest in them dimmed, at least until Wednesday’s Trump-related announcement.
Trump’s last publicly traded company didn’t end up well for investors. His casino company, Trump Entertainment Resorts, lost hundreds of millions of dollars over more than a dozen years and filed for bankruptcy several times, socking shareholders with big losses.
(With AP inputs)