These Trump bets boomed. Now they’re huge busts
By Matt Egan, CNN
New York (CNN) — Donald Trump’s return to the White House set off a gold rush on Wall Street and in the crypto world.
Companies and crypto projects linked to Trump and his family exploded in value as traders bet they would benefit from the president’s return to power.
A year later, some of those Trump-related bets have paid off. But many others have imploded, costing investors who rushed in during the initial boom dearly.
The crash back to earth for many of these assets reflects the fact that many of these bets were hard to make sense of in the first place.
“Sometimes irrational exuberance meets the brick wall of logic,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth.
Trump Media
Exhibit A is Trump Media & Technology Group, the owner of Truth Social, whose ticker symbol is DJT, the president’s initials.
Trump Media became a proxy for Trump’s election fortunes. Traders who sniffed out Trump’s looming victory gobbled up the stock, which tripled in value in the five weeks leading up to late October 2024.
Even though Trump Media had never made money and generated little revenue, the company was valued on Wall Street at a staggering $11 billion just days before the election.
Flash forward to today: Trump Media plunged below $11 a share on Friday, leaving it down roughly 80% from the pre-election peak and worth less than $3 billion.
Despite the fact that Trump uses Truth Social as his preferred platform for presidential communications, the social media network hasn’t become the go-to platform traders suspected it might be. Truth Social drew just 1.5 million monthly active US users on iOS and Android in November, a far cry from X’s 54.2 million and Reddit’s 59.8 million, according to Similarweb data shared with CNN.
Even Bluesky is more popular, with 2.4 million monthly active users.
Trump Media has pivoted this year to expand into financial services, crypto and artificial intelligence, but it’s too early to say if those moves will pay off.
Melania meme coin crashed 99%
Some other Trump-related bets have fared even worse than Trump Media.
For instance, the official Trump meme coin launched just days before he was sworn in, much to the dismay of ethics experts.
The Trump coin rapidly spiked to as high as $45.57 on January 19, giving it a $9 billion value, according to Coinmarketcap.
The gains padded Trump’s net worth, at least on paper, because 80% of the supply was held by Trump Organization-affiliates.
But today, the Trump meme coin is trading at around $5.60, or just $1.1 billion. It has lost 88% of its value from the peak.
First Lady Melania Trump’s meme coin suffered even steeper losses.
Melania coin peaked at $8.48 on January 19, giving it a market capitalization of $1.6 billion, according to Coinmarketcap.
But by February the Melanie meme coin fell below $2, and today it’s worth just 11 cents, valued at barely $100 million. That means anyone who bought at the top and held on has lost 99% of their investment.
More recently, American Bitcoin, a bitcoin miner backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, debuted on the Nasdaq in September after merging with Gryphon Digital Mining.
American Bitcoin’s share price initially popped, climbing to as high as $9.31 on September 9. But those gains have since vanished amid a broader crypto pullback, and American Bitcoin dropped below $2 last week.
Likewise, World Liberty Financial, a firm Trump and Steve Witkoff co-founded last year along with their sons, started trading a new token in September. It rose to 25 cents in late September but has yet to take off and on Friday fell to 14 cents.
Private prison stocks fizzle
Trump’s election also drove up shares of private prison stocks as investors expected looming immigration crackdowns would drive up demand for detention facilities.
For instance, shares of GEO Group, which operates immigration detention centers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), spiked to an all-time high of $35.35 days before Trump took office. That represented a 175% spike from where it ended the prior September.
But private prison companies haven’t experienced the surge in demand that many anticipated as the Trump administration has relied more heavily in deportations.
GEO Group’s share price has lost more than half its value from the peak.
“I’ve given up on private prisons,” said Matthew Tuttle, CEO and chief investment officer at Tuttle Capital Management. “A lot of people, myself included, thought ICE would round up people and they would sit in private prisons. I was not expecting sending people to El Salvador and other places.”
Bitcoin and European defense stocks boom
Some Trump-related bets did pay off though.
For example, European aerospace and defense stocks continue to fly high as they benefit from higher demand caused in part by Trump’s pressure on NATO allies to ramp up defense spending.
The Select STOXX Europe Aerospace & Defense ETF, a US-listed fund launched by Tuttle that invests in European defense companies, is up more than 70% so far this year.
Tuttle said the European defense contractors were “such an under-loved trade” prior to the election but the ETF received $1 billion of inflows shortly after Trump won.
“It was crazy,” Tuttle said.
Another big winner is bitcoin.
Bitcoin skyrocketed after the victory by Trump, who promised to make America the crypto capital of the world by launching a national stockpile and replacing Biden-era regulators who were skeptical of the leading cryptocurrency.
Even though bitcoin has pulled back sharply from record highs set this past October, its current price of around $90,000 is well above the $63,000 level it ended September 2024 at.
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