(Bloomberg) — Newsmax Inc. shares skyrocketed as much as 683% in their debut session, as individual investors piled into the conservative media outlet after its initial public offering.
Most Read from Bloomberg
The stock price pulled back to $72.24 apiece at 1:29 p.m. in New York, after popping as high as $78.27 each, in a first session as a public company that saw shares repeatedly halted for volatility. Newsmax raised $75 million in the offering, selling 7.5 million shares for $10 apiece.
Individual investors appeared to be pushing into the stock, with the company among the 30 most actively traded on Fidelity’s platform, one of the most popular brokerages. Orders to buy shares outpaced those to sell at a three-to-one clip through 1:01 p.m. in New York.
The mania for a loss-making cable news network stands in dramatic contrast with the year’s biggest and most high-profile IPOs, after Venture Global Inc. and CoreWeave Inc. realized valuations far less than initially proposed and have traded down in the days after their debuts.
Newsmax’s spiking share price drew comments across popular retail trader forums, with one Reddit user comparing it to GameStop Corp. via a nod to sending shares to the moon — a reference that was common among investors piling into speculative assets like the video-game retailer and Dogecoin. The ticker was the top trending symbol on Stocktwits, a popular chatroom website where individual investors often promote stocks.
Newsmax’s opening-day surge is reminiscent of the meme stock craze from 2020 and 2021 when day traders stuck indoors due to the pandemic would send shares of beaten-down or heavily-shorted companies soaring despite poor underlying fundamentals. At the time, so-called “Reddit Raiders” helped spark a more than 2,000% surge in shares of GameStop, and new meme stocks seemed to crop up every week.
The gains typically were short lived, with the most well-known examples ultimately faltering. GameStop shares have wiped out three-quarters of their value from a January 2021 peak while AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., another meme stock poster-child, is down 99% from a June 2021 high.
For the companies to post red-hot debuts over the past five years, gravity came swiftly. There are two dozen stocks which ended their debut sessions up more than 300% after a US IPO, delivering returns to well-timed trades. They’ve been losers in the long run, however, with shares of the average company in the group down 85% from their IPO prices with crashes from their respective peaks sitting closer to 99%.
Despite a market capitalization of about $9 billion, based on the outstanding shares listed in a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Newsmax lost more than $55 million in the first six months of 2024 on revenue of roughly $80 million, a regulatory filing shows. The company tallied $142 million in total liabilities compared to $69 million in assets, the filing showed.
The stock’s first-day spike came as more than four million shares changed hands. Company share prices can be volatile in their debut sessions given a lack of liquidity and potentially pent-up demand — that’s the case particularly in smaller IPOs or for companies with less scale.
The company previously completed a private preferred offering in February 2025, raising $225 million.
Newsmax settled a defamation lawsuit with Smartmatic Corp. over broadcasts claiming that the voting technology company rigged the 2020 presidential election against Donald Trump, according to an announcement in September.
The IPO makes Newsmax the latest company with ties to conservatives to list publicly, joining video network company Rumble Inc. and president Donald Trump’s media venture. Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., the owner of Truth Social, announced on Monday that warrants tied to its stock will trade on the upstart New York Stock Exchange Texas.
Newsmax’s offering was led by Digital Offering LLC, the filing shows. The shares trade under the symbol NMAX.
(Updates throughout with latest trading, additional context throughout. A previous version of the story corrected the share price in second paragraph.)
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
