Did short selling for Trump Media "more than double" between July 1 and July 12, 2024, making the stock "plummet one day before the assassination attempt" against the company's co-founder, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump? No, that's not true: The company, which owns the Truth Social platform, saw an upward trend that started on July 10, 2024 -- three days before the shooting at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania. Posts on social media recycled erroneous financial filings that covered June, not July, and did not show any data specific to short selling.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on July 17, 2024. It included a retweet of an early post from that day from the same account, which said:
Soon-to-be unmasked entities bet that President Trump's $DJT stock would plummet ONE DAY before the assassination attempt. Shorts against the Truth Social stock more than doubled from July 1 -July 12, meaning, people or large organizations were predicting that by Monday the stock would plummet, something that undoubtedly would have occurred had President Trump died in Pennsylvania.
DJT is the ticker symbol for Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., or Trump Media, a NASDAQ-listed company launched in 2021.
The post above was shared with a comment:
REVEALED: The firm that took the suspicious and enormous bet against President Trump's Truth Social stock ($DJT) ONE DAY before the assassination attempt is Austin Private Wealth LLC ...
This is what the claim looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Jul 19 13:14:19 2024 UTC)
The company mentioned in the post, Austin Private Wealth, firmly denied the accusations that it had taken "a suspicious and enormous bet against" DJT stock. On July 17, 2024, it issued a statement (archived here) that explained that what was perceived as "suspicious" was only a clerical error that occurred on paper, not in real life:
The SEC filing which showed that Austin Private Wealth shorted a large number of shares of Trump Media & Technology Group Corp (DJT) was incorrect and we immediately amended it as soon as we learned of the error.
No client of APW holds, or has ever held, a put on DJT in the quantity initially reported. The correct holding amount was 12 contracts, or 1,200 shares -- not 12 million shares, as was filed in error. In submitting the required report for the second quarter of 2024, a multiplier was applied by a third-party vendor that increased the number of the shares by a multiple of 10,000 for all options contracts (not just DJT). We did not catch the error before approving the filing.
We filed the report on July 12 to reflect our positions on June 28. We amended it on July 16.
The documents (archived here) on the website of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) confirmed that Austin Private Wealth filed the amended report on the day the firm said and that it covered a period that ended in June 2024. Therefore, the mistakenly submitted data cannot be used to draw any conclusions about stock market dynamics between July 1 and July 12, 2024.
(Source: SEC screenshot taken on Fri Jul 19 13:53:15 2024 UTC)
The error concerned information about put options, but the claim on X addressed shorts. The two are not the same. With a put option, a seller gives a buyer the option to purchase a stock when it reaches an agreed-upon price, according to the investment guide Investopedia. In short sales, traders sell stocks while the price is high and then wager that the price will fall to a point that they can buy the stock back and make a profit.
In response to a Lead Stories email on July 19, 2024, Austin Private Wealth's chief information security officer, Sarah McNutt, denied that the firm had used short selling or put options for Truth Social in the 12 days predating the assassination attempt on Trump beyond what it had already acknowledged in the corrected filing:
I can confirm that we did not buy any Truth Social stock shorts or put options in amounts that exceeded what we reported in the corrected filing for the period ending June 2024 from July 1-July 12, 2024.
An image of what looked like a graph depicting changes in the stock prices that was attached to the post on X implied that it was not only a "bet" that Trump's Truth Social shares "would plummet ONE DAY before the assassination attempt" but also that it did happen in real life.
On such graphs, price changes seen within a shorter period (for example, one day or one week) may appear to be graphically more dramatic than the overall dynamic observed within a longer time frame.
A NASDAQ screenshot representing price fluctuations within the past month tells a different story. The DJT shares did not plummet sharply on July 1 or on July 12, 2024. A downward trend started in June shortly after a significant price increase. But it's not a sharp descending line -- there were ups and downs.
(Source: NASDAQ screenshot taken on Fri Jul 19 18:27:45 2024 UTC)
Contrary to the claim on X, an upward trend began after July 10, 2024, culminating in a sharply ascending line following the July 13, 2024, shooting at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania:
(Source: NASDAQ screenshot taken on Fri Jul 19 15:57:37 2024 UTC)
In the United States, stock exchanges publish the number of shares that have been sold short on a biweekly basis. The dissemination date is typically several days after the filing deadline. Thus, the information concerning the first half of July 2024 will be released on July 24, 2024, according to the schedule on the NASDAQ website (archived here).
A Bloomberg Terminal user provided Lead Stories with information that showed that that the most recent update on DJT short sales was still June 28, 2024. The last known change between that day and the previously reported data was a decrease in the number of short sales, not an increase. Lead Stories cannot provide a screenshot of this information for copyright reasons.
Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. did not issue any statements (archived here) confirming the claim that is the focus of this fact check. As of this writing, its last published press release (archived here) was posted on June 13, 2024. It said nothing about Austin Private Wealth.
Lead Stories contacted Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. If we get a response, this article will be updated as appropriate.
The Kremlin-funded propaganda website RT, citing anonymous X accounts as sources, boosted the claim on X. However, even RT incorporated the update about the clerical error in its English-language article (archived here).
Other Lead Stories fact checks about Donald Trump, who accepted the Republican nomination on July 18, 2024, are here. Fact checks of claims about the 2024 U.S. presidential election are here.
