By Shreyashi Sanyal and Anisha Sircar
(Reuters) -Shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp, the blank-check company looking to take Donald Trump’s social media venture public, rallied on Monday over the former president’s possible run for the 2024 presidential election.
Trump is considering launching a third bid for the White House this month, three of his advisers said last week, while media reports over the weekend pointed to a campaign starting before the end of November.
Shares in Digital World Acquisition Corp jumped more than 24% to $21.55, and were set for their best day in nearly a year, bringing down year-to-date losses to 58%.
“The prospect of Donald Trump seizing the political spotlight again appears to have put a rocket under the share price of DWAC amid expectation there could be a sharp increase in users on the former President’s highly controversial social media platform,” said Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.
The rally in DWAC, which was also the fifth most trending ticker on retail investor focused social media forum Stocktwits, helped lift shares of other Trump-linked companies.
DWAC on Thursday extended the deadline to Nov. 22. for investors’ approval to complete its merger deal with Trump Media and Technology Group.
This move comes as Americans prepare to vote in the U.S. midterm elections, with analysts expecting Republicans to win control of Congress.
Software developer Phunware Inc, which was hired by Trump’s 2020 presidential reelection campaign to build a phone app, jumped 18.3%.
Rumble Inc, a Canadian video platform popular with conservatives, however, slipped 3.5%. Trump’s social media venture Truth Social announced in August it would join Rumble’s new ad platform as its first publisher in August.
Artificial intelligence solutions company Remark Holdings, which has been linked to the former president on social media sites, gained 8.6%. Reuters could not independently verify the link between Trump and Remark.
(Reporting by Shreyashi Sanyal, Akash Sriram and Anisha Sircar in Bengaluru; Editing by Vinay Dwivedi)