A deluge of Donald Trump-related investments made in the aftermath of his victory last November have now ended in disaster more than a year later.
“Sometimes irrational exuberance meets the brick wall of logic,” Art Hogan, chief market strategist at investment management platform B. Riley Wealth, told CNN in summing up the downward trend.
According to the network’s analysis, perhaps the most devastating market turn has been in the value of the president’s very own meme coin, $TRUMP.
The value of the digital asset, launched shortly before the MAGA leader assumed the presidency for the second time in January, initially rocketed up to $9 billion before steadily declining to $1.1 billion, representing a loss of 88 percent.
Investors in First Lady Melania Trump’s coin, MELANIA, will have suffered worse, with the crypto having faceplanted so spectacularly that the coin is now worth just 11 cents. Valued at just under $100 million, it’s down almost 99 percent on its value of $1.6 billion in February.
Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns the president’s favored social media platform, Truth Social, has also apparently lost much of its appeal for traders.
They reportedly flocked to the firm, which has never turned a profit, in the weeks leading up to last year’s election, more than tripling its value to $11 billion.
But today, it’s worth less than $8 billion, representing an 80 percent decline.
Even among investments only tangentially related to Trump and his associates, the markets have reportedly not fared much better.
Investors were apparently hungry for shares in private prison companies in anticipation that the president’s promised anti-immigration crusade would bring a boom in their value.
Stocks in detention facility giant GEO Group, for instance, rocketed up by more than 175 percent in the days before Trump was sworn in. Since that time, however, they’ve lost more than half of that value.
“I’ve given up on private prisons,” Matthew Tuttle, chief investment officer at wealth management group Tuttle Capital Management, told CNN. “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,” he added.
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