And those who believe — perhaps rather quaintly, at this point — that share prices go up and down solely on the basis of fundamental factors, such as whether or not a company makes any actual money, are incensed about it.
“Why are you even talking about this?” media tycoon Barry Diller fumed on CNBC, calling the people who had been buying the stock “dopes”. “It’s a scam, just like everything [Trump] has ever been involved in is some kind of con.”
The facts are clear: the company is not only not making any money, it is losing a lot of it too. It managed to notch up losses of $US58 million last year, on revenues of just $US4.1 million.
If it were to trade around the same multiple as, say, Meta (whose current valuation, at around 10 times revenues, is still huge) it would be worth about $US41 million.
And yet, at the time of writing, the company has a market valuation of around $US5.7 billion, meaning it is trading — even after having fallen since going public — at a somewhat preposterous 1400 times its revenues.
But it’s not the facts or the fundamentals that matter here, it’s the feelings. And where Trump is concerned, the feelings — whether positive or negative — are always impassioned.
‘Untethered from reality’
There has been much talk of the stock price being “untethered from reality”, but that is only true if we are to imagine that the “reality” of free-market capitalism is that it is some kind of efficient and dispassionate wealth creation mechanism.
One only has to look to the crypto markets — in which many traditional investors now have skin in the game — to see this is simply no longer the case. None of these thousands of crypto coins have any revenues or cash flows; they trade solely on the basis of “sentiment”, a euphemistic word that is just a synonym for collective human feelings.
I have also seen many say that the reason people are buying “DJT” is as a way of backing their man, providing him with financial, and reputational, support.
I’m sure this is true for some, but I doubt it’s the case for most — indeed, of more than a dozen Reuters interviews with people who’d bought the stock, most said they were simply trying to make a quick profit from it.
Are these people really such “dopes”? I’m not sure they are — particularly those that cashed out after the initial surge. They wagered that a Trump-branded stock would surge when it hit the market because other people would buy it, and they were right.
In fact, the more an asset price is disconnected from its “fundamentals”, the more potential it has to go “to the moon”. Could a company trading at 10 times its revenues suddenly start trading at 20 times its revenues? Unlikely.
But could a company trading at a revenue multiple of 1400 suddenly trade at a multiple of, say, 3,000? Sure! Why not?
It is already disconnected from any traditional way of assessing its value, so from here, one price doesn’t make any more sense than another.
Likewise, it is precisely because crypto has no intrinsic value that its price can climb — and drop — so precipitously (which is why I make a point of never forecasting crypto price movements).
The funny thing is, the same is true of Trump himself. It is because he has said so much that is “untethered from reality” that it no longer matters when he says more of it.
What those who are perplexed by Trump’s continued popularity often fail to understand is that the four-times-indicted former president, like his money-losing company, is being assessed on a different set of criteria entirely. For the followers of DJT — both the stock and the man — feelings trump facts.
Financial Times
