Trading of Trump Media shares was halted for volatility multiple times Tuesday morning as the company majority owned by Donald Trump ricocheted in early trading.
The company, which trades as DJT on the Nasdaq, was halted for five minutes at 9:36 a.m. ET, when shares were trading up around 14%.
Trading was halted a second time at 9:42 a.m., with shares up nearly 9%. The company was halted again at 9:50 a.m.
When it was halted for a fourth time at 10:21 a.m., the stock was down more than 2%. Trading was halted again 10 minutes later.
By 11 a.m., the stock was up more than 6%.
Nearly 16 million Trump Media shares changed hands in the first 10 minutes of the trading day. By 10:15 a.m., the company had already surpassed its 30-day average trading volume of 35.1 million shares.
The volatile session came after DJT stock had already surged more than 21% on Monday on extremely heavy trading volume.
Those gains added to a preelection stock rally that began in late September after a monthslong sell-off that dragged the company’s share price below $12.
Just more than a month later, Trump Media shares were trading at more than four times that price.
The stock is up 224% so far this month, and is on pace for its best month since October 2021, when the blank-check company known as DWAC announced its plan to merge with Trump’s then-private media company.
That merger, which took Trump Media public, was completed in late March.
The company’s stock now far exceeds its recent peak in mid-July, when its share price soared after the Republican presidential nominee narrowly survived an assassination attempt.
Trump owns nearly 57% of the company, which operates the Truth Social platform. His stake at Monday’s closing price was worth upward of $5.4 billion, representing more than half of his on-paper net worth, according to Forbes.
At the opening bell Tuesday, the former president’s stake was worth more than $6 billion.
Despite losing hundreds of millions of dollars on scant revenue in recent fiscal quarters, Trump Media boasts a market capitalization above $10 billion.
Analysts believe the company’s many pro-Trump retail investors are buying its stock to support the former president, or bet on his odds of beating Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Monday’s surge followed Trump’s major campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday.
The company’s gains have also coincided with political betting markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, tilting toward Trump over Harris in recent weeks.
Odds and gambling platforms do not use the same methodologies used by traditional political polling, and therefore are not substitutes for political polls. Critics have raised concerns that the election betting markets are being manipulated.
