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Shares of Trump Media rose more than 8% Tuesday after whipsawing in the company’s heaviest and most volatile trading day since going public.
The company majority owned by Donald Trump, which trades as DJT on the Nasdaq, experienced five separate halts within the first two hours of frenzied, high-volume trading.
The first five-minute halt occurred at 9:36 a.m. ET, when shares were trading up around 14%.
Trading was halted a second time at 9:42 a.m., with shares up nearly 9%. The company was halted again at 9:50 a.m.
When it was halted for a fourth time at 10:21 a.m., the stock was down more than 2%. Trading was halted again 10 minutes later.
The stock then turned positive, and closed up 8.76% at $51.51 per share.
Nearly 16 million Trump Media shares changed hands in the first 10 minutes of the trading day. By 10:15 a.m., the company had already surpassed its 30-day average trading volume of 35.1 million shares.
By 1:15 p.m., Trump Media’s volume surpassed 134 million shares — the highest level since October 2021, when the then-private media company announced plans to merge with the blank-check firm known as DWAC.
Trump Media (DJT) Stock Price
That merger was completed in late March, allowing the newly public Trump Media to trade on the Nasdaq. Trump Media’s current stock price remains below the company’s intraday peak from its trading debut.
Tuesday’s volatile session came after DJT stock had already surged more than 21% on Monday, also on extremely heavy trading volume.
Those gains added to a preelection stock rally that began in late September, after a monthslong sell-off that dragged the company’s share price below $12.
Just a few weeks later, Trump Media shares were trading at more than four times that price.
The stock as of Tuesday morning was up 224% so far this month, and is on pace for its best month since October 2021.
The company’s stock now far exceeds its recent peak in mid-July, when its share price soared after the Republican presidential nominee narrowly survived an assassination attempt.
Trump owns nearly 57% of the company, which operates the Truth Social platform. His stake at Monday’s closing price was worth upward of $5.4 billion, representing more than half of his on-paper net worth, according to Forbes.
At the closing bell Tuesday, the value of Trump’s stake had grown by nearly $500 million.
Despite losing hundreds of millions of dollars on scant revenue in recent fiscal quarters, Trump Media boasts a market capitalization above $10 billion.
Analysts believe the company’s many pro-Trump retail investors are buying its stock to support the former president, or bet on his odds of beating Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Monday’s surge followed Trump’s major campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday.
The company’s gains have also coincided with political betting markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, tilting toward Trump over Harris in recent weeks.
Odds and gambling platforms do not use the same methodologies used by traditional political polling, and therefore are not substitutes for political polls. Critics have raised concerns that the election betting markets are being manipulated.