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A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association annual convention in Houston, Texas, on May 29, 2022.
Callaghan O'hare | Reuters
Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.
The stock tumbled a whopping 72% in afternoon trading, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax's first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion, surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies such as Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.
Newsmax was listed on the New York Stock Exchange via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional initial public offering. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors. In this case, it was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors.
The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the "New GME" in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.
Newsmax has a small "float," or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.
The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans, although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.
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