The precipitous fall that Wall Street is experiencing is eroding all hazardous assets. Including those with ties to the president.
As part of a larger selloff in the more speculative parts of the markets, the value of publicly traded investments associated with the Trump enterprise, such as the president’s memecoins and First Lady Melania Trump’s memecoins, as well as the president’s majority interest in Trump Media & Technology Group, has fallen since Inauguration Day.
Truth Social’s parent business, Trump Media, has seen a 36% drop in share price. Just days before taking the oath of office, the president and his staff released the cryptocurrency token $TRUMP memecoin. Since then, its value has fallen by 64%. From a peak of almost $13, the $MELANIA memecoin has plummeted. The price has dropped below $1.
Trump was a tremendous motivator for all of Trump’s associates, according to Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management. But what really occurs is that everything turns into a pin-seeking bubble, and in the end, the bubble always finds its pin. Gravity will eventually catch up with these items.
The falls highlight the change that has shaken up the US financial markets recently, robbing Trump of the kinds of record highs he loves to brag about.
Throughout much of the past two years, investors have been eager to put their money into a wide variety of businesses, from tech startups and cryptocurrency tokens to so-called memestocks, whose shares are often influenced by the excitement of traders. This includes firms like GameStop and Trump Media. In light of the current political and economic climate, they have started selling assets regardless of their ties to the owners.
Elon Musk’s Tesla, Nvidia, Meta, and the other powerful tech stocks that helped propel the S&P 500 to all-time highs in the past two years—the Magnificent Seven—are down 6% year-to-date and have just entered correction territory, which is defined as a drop of 10% or more. There has been a 23% decline in the value of the most valuable cryptocurrency token in the world after it reached a record high of almost $109,000 on Inauguration Day. The selloff could only be beginning, according to an increasing number of Wall Street veterans.
According to Julian Klymochko, who has been following Trump Media’s stock for a while and owns the Calgary-based investing business Accelerate Financial Technologies, “We’re past due” for a market-clearing event. “There’s a lot of extra foam that has to be sorted out.”
No one from Trump Media or the Trump Organization could be reached for comment. The president’s son, Eric Trump, wrote, “Buy the dips!!!” on Tuesday on X. (The usage of the bitcoin symbol as the “B” in “Buy” suggests that the post was a commentary on the recent crypto selloff.)
The markets’ woes could, however, be nothing more than a necessary recalculation that eventually levels out. On Friday, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge came in as predicted, allaying the fears of some investors who were worried about the impact of Trump’s economic policies, such as tariffs, on inflation. During the day, stock prices rose.
“Garden variety volatility” describes the recent stock market falls, according to Robert Ruggirello, founder of Brave Eagle Wealth Management.
Ruggirello pointed out that January saw advances and that February is known as a very turbulent month for equities. “We do not see the current market drops as heralding an impending more severe bear market.”
The bulk of President Trump’s fortune—an estimated $5.1 billion—is attributed to his real estate firm and his substantial ownership in Trump Media, according to Forbes. Due to the privately held nature of the Trump Organization, complete openness regarding his empire is severely constrained. However, due to the collapse in share prices, Trump’s holding in publicly listed business Trump Media has dropped from $4.6 billion when he was inaugurated to $2.8 billion today.
Since its launch last year, shares of Trump Media, in which Trump has a controlling stake, have frequently been subject to wild swings. Stock in the money-losing corporation has fallen back to earth after reaching a high of $79.38 in March of last year. (On Friday, shares in Trump Media were trading at $24.10).
Even though Trump’s own Wall Street authorities have admitted that memecoins are inherently volatile, some traders are upset about the drops in $TRUMP and $MELANIA.
Data released with AWN by crypto analytics firm Chainalysis shows that over 885,000 wallets have lost money trading $TRUMP and 301,000 have lost money betting on $MELANIA. Chainalysis discovered that the wallets have registered a total loss of over $2.5 billion, however it is unknown how many have cashed out.
Contrarily, Chainalysis reports that over $8 billion has been earned by 1.2 million wallets through token trading.
According to Chainalysis, the Trump family and its associates have amassed roughly $350 million in cryptocurrency via trading fees and the sale of memecoins and $TRUMP tokens.
The selloff is just another facet of the modern investor’s reality, according to Tuttle, whose business is trying to develop a fund that will provide returns on Trump Media shares that are twice as high. Before the COVID-19 outbreak, individual investors didn’t make much of a dent in the market. Now, they’re a major player, and they’re not afraid to jump back into hazardous assets even after suffering a major loss.
“They get so worked up about it and make it seem like everything is going swimmingly, but then they get their arse kicked — and then it happens again,” Tuttle said. Following the election, the prices of Trump names and other retail favorites skyrocketed. Everything got a little out of hand.
