Donald Trump convicted: Shares in Trump Media slump after former president found guilty in hush money trial

Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, the owner of social networking site Truth Social, plummeted Thursday after former President Donald Trump was convicted in his hush money trial, the Associated Press reported.

A New York jury found Trump guilty of falsifying business records in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through hush money payments to a porn actor who said the two had sex, the report added.

As per the report, Trump Media's stock fell about 9% in after-hours trading Thursday as news of the verdict emerged.

The stock, which trades under the ticker symbol "DJT," has been extraordinarily volatile since its debut in late March. It joins the group of meme stocks prone to swinging from highs to lows as small-pocketed investors attempt to catch an upward momentum swing at the right time.

Despite its volatility, the stock has tripled this year, often making double-digit percentage moves either higher or lower on a single day. It peaked at nearly $80 in intraday trading on March 26. For context, the S&P 500 is up almost 10% year to date, the report added.

Earlier this month, Trump Media reported a loss of more than $300 million for the last quarter, according to its first earnings report as a publicly traded company.

For the three-month period that ended March 31, the company posted a loss of $327.6 million, which it said included $311 million in non-cash expenses related to its merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp. DWAC is an example of a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, which can provide young companies with quicker and easier routes to getting their shares trading publicly but with much less scrutiny, the report added.

Trump Media & Technology recently fired an auditor that federal regulators charged with "massive fraud." On May 3, the media company dismissed BF Borgers as its independent public accounting firm, delaying the filing of its quarterly earnings report, as per the report.

Trump Media had previously cycled through at least two other auditors—one that resigned in July 2023 and another that was terminated by its board in March, just as it was rehiring BF Borgers.

Trump was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records at his company in connection with an alleged scheme to hide potentially embarrassing stories about him during his 2016 Republican presidential election campaign.

The charge, a felony, arose from reimbursements paid to then-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen after he made a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels to silence her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. Trump was accused of misrepresenting Cohen’s reimbursements as legal expenses to hide that they were tied to a hush money payment.

Trump's defence contended that the Cohen payments were for legitimate legal services.