After a surprise announcement, a Trump-linked stock skyrocketed \u2014 tripling in price and drawing in waves of retail investors.<\/b>
\nThe news that Donald Trump is launching a social-media platform through a SPAC \u2014 the trendy shortcut to going public, in which a shell corporation merges with a private company \u2014 came as a surprise to almost everyone. It certainly happened quickly. While hundreds of SPACs are searching for merger partners (a process that can take more than a year), the deal struck between Trump Media & Technology Group and publicly traded Digital World Acquisition seems to have taken only a few weeks. The deal became even more intriguing after shares in the SPAC more than tripled once the deal was announced. Retail investors \u2014 no doubt many of them fervent Trump supporters \u2014 have poured into the stock. It was all the chatter on sites like Reddit and Twitter, and Fidelity reported that Digital World Technology was the No.1 traded stock by its customers during the day. Trump, despite being besieged by legal troubles, wasted no time crowing about his new venture. \u201cI created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech,\u201d Trump, the chairman of TMTG, wrote in a statement. (He plans to call the network TRUTH Social.) \u201cWe live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable.\u201d Trump\u2019s interest in having his own media company is no surprise, of course. When he first ran for president in 2016, there was considerable speculation that it was just a branding exercise that would eventually end with the launch of a media company. But details about his latest plan are sketchy. The TMTG website has a 22-page deck filled with graphics about Trump\u2019s Twitter following and the platform\u2019s plans to disrupt everything from Facebook to Disney, but there is no financial information. Digging through the paperwork filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the SPAC provides some intriguing details. Here are few features of Trump\u2019s deal that, as someone who has covered SPACs extensively, jumped out at me: The initial Digital World investors who may not want to be involved in a Trump media platform will likely have a chance to do much better than $10 a share, though. As of 2:30 p.m., the stock was trading at close to $44 per share \u2014 up 345 percent for the day. It closed around $35.<\/p>\n