Here’s A Fun And Profitable Way To Screw Trump’s New Business
It’s a little bit complicated and potentially risky, but it can work. Oh boy, can it work.
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC -- I figured out a great way to screw over Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene at the same time.
It’s a little bit complicated and potentially risky, but it can work. Oh boy, can it work.
As we’ve learned over the years, Trump loves to manipulate the stock market. I have a theory that during his one term as president, Trump routinely used his trade war with China as a means of driving markets up and down, depending on how he invests immediately prior to the announcements. In other words, it’s possible that Trump either invested himself, or passed along insider information to allies, just before saying something publicly that would move the markets to benefit those investments. And, naturally, whenever he’d make an announcement about the trade war, the markets would invariably spike or collapse.
To be clear: there’s scant evidence of this scam, though journalist William Cohan tracked down some interesting leads along the way. Additionally, we know through The New York Times that Trump has historically engaged in manipulating the investment markets -- pump-and-dump scams called greenmailing in which Trump would leak to the press that he intended to buy controlling interest in a stock, only to drive up the price and then drop it, dooming the stock to crash and burn.
This brings us to Trump’s latest corporate endeavor: the formation of a media company called Trump Media & Technology Group, or TMTG for short. The first prong of his business plan is to roll out a social media platform called Truth Social, to compete against Twitter and Facebook. Already, the platform has been hacked and defaced. Plus, there’s a licensing conflict on the back-end tech that could cause Trump to start over from scratch with all new programming.
Can you smell the Trump Steaks? Anyone remember Trump University?
So, as part of the roll-out of the various TMTG platforms, Trump entered into a deal with a placeholder company listed on the Nasdaq as Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC). Through this merger, Trump’s TMTG has gone public.
And here’s where we can stymie him.
There’s a rather risky means of investing known as short-selling. Shorting a stock doesn’t mean a short-term investment, which is a different thing. Short-selling is a bet against a stock and a way to make money when the stock price goes down.
Here’s how shorting a stock works. Let’s say for the sake of this example that Trump’s stock is worth $100 per share, but you have a hunch it’s going to drop in price -- see also Trump Vodka, Trump Casinos, and the Trump presidency. There’s a long track record of failure as precedent here. Anyway, you can borrow a share of DWAC from your broker, and then sell the share for $100. If the stock drops to $50, you can buy the share back for $50, return the share to your broker, and make a handy-dandy profit of $50. But if the price of the DWAC stock goes up, say to $150, you’d lose $50.
In addition to potentially making money on the decline of Trump’s stock, short-selling also has a tendency to drive the price down by the very process of shorting it.
This is the part of the article when I mention that I’m neither an investor nor a stock market expert, and the risk is on you. But I know enough to grasp that it’s possible to make a little money by dooming Trump’s stock and, yes, humiliating him with yet another failed business. Meanwhile, investment firms also smell the putrid scent of failure:
Iceberg Research said in two tweets Monday that it was betting against Digital World Acquisition Corp., the blank-check company that announced last week plans to merge with Trump Media & Technology Group.
"We are short $DWAC," Iceberg said in a tweet. "Now that initial excitement has passed, we see only risks for investors in near future.”
Smart move since Trump’s stock price dropped a catastrophic 11 percent on Monday and another 30 percent on Tuesday. So, if we had shorted the stock on Friday of last week (after I recommended it on my Thursday show), we’d be swimming in piles of cash like Scrooge McDuck, while Trump watched in horror.
And here’s more good news. Majorie Taylor Greene reportedly invested upwards of $50,000 in DWAC stock since the announcement. Good timing, idiot. Given the crash-and-burn price of the shares, she’s earned herself a collective womp-womp. Let’s assume, too, that she’s long on the stock -- that she intends to stick with it for the long run. If shorting DWAC forces the price down even further, Greene becomes collateral damage from Trump’s latest corporate disaster.
So, yes, if you have some disposable income and you’d like to screw Trump and Greene with their pants on, short like the wind.
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The Ugly, Desperate Embrace Of Trumpism In Virginia
Glenn Youngkin is using a disgusting anti-semitic trope to rally MAGA voters in the gubernatorial race in Virginia.
by Justin Rosario
Four years ago, Republican Ed Gillespie was losing the Virginia gubernatorial race to Democrat Ralph Northam. Faced with defeat, Gillespie got desperate in the weeks leading up to election day. That desperation took the form of some of the ugliest campaigning in modern Virginia history. His campaign ran ads that had to be seen to be believed.
In the end, he pissed off enough Democrats that he was utterly crushed, 53.9% - 45%. Despite this fairly recent history, Republican Glenn Youngkin is pursuing a similar course of action with just two weeks until the election. This suggests he’s not doing as well as the polls would have us believe and we should all hope that’s the case. Another crushing loss for the GOP is a necessary step to containing the Trumpist fascism consuming the Republican Party. But even in defeat, Republicans leave behind nothing but hate and violence.
They always get to the Jews
After the election of 2016, I sat down with my wife Debbie to explain why I would never again speak to her Trump-voting mother and stepfather. The main point I made was that as an increasingly white nationalist movement, it wouldn’t be long before Republicans started attacking Jews….
To continue reading this piece, go here.
Like George Costanza, I'm betting on 'the opposite.' The one thing Dump excels in is selling crap to people who are stupid enough to buy it--with his name on it. Dump, a malignant narcissist of the highest order, is a highly successful demagogue, and there's a market for that. Despite having completed overtly the worst presidency in US history by the most unqualified person ever to hold office, he got 74 million votes and lost by just a few percentage points (Dems were smart to ensure every ex-con registered and voted 'D'). Trump's losing will be a winner for him. It always is.
If it's all fine by you Bob, I'd much rather not put so much as a penny into this endeavor, and instead continue with the traditional method of letting Drumpf be Drumpf. This latest scheme of his will quickly and spectacularly blow up, like everything else he touches!