My Trump trade went bust — with a consolation prize

In the final days of the 2024 US election, the “Trump trade” was getting woolly. Investors who thought Trump would win or lose the presidential race were betting for or against the impact his economic policies might have. New tariffs on imports might be bad for shippers and good for domestic producers. Tax cuts could generate larger deficits and higher interest rates. Deregulation could yield more corporate mergers.

The most direct Trump trade was a bet on the shares of Trump’s own company, Trump Media & Technology Group, known by its ticker symbol DJT. A Trump win could boost the fortunes of the flagging Truth Social network, while a Trump loss could doom the money-losing venture. The stock price was yo-yoing based on every hint that Trump was up or down in the polls.

I decided to sample the action. I wanted to place an options trade on DJT, because that’s the way many other Trump traders were playing it. I’m a plain vanilla investor, so I asked Eric Hale, founder and CEO of Trader Oasis, to guide me through an options trade. I didn’t know if Trump would win or lose, but I thought shares of DJT, which had been trading around $50, were seriously overpriced. The company was a social media pipsqueak with barely any revenue, yet the stock price gave it a market value of $8 billion. That seemed way too high under any election outcome.

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