Shares of Newsmax continued to rise on Tuesday following a massive public debut on Monday, in which shares shot up more than 700% for the best-performing first day since 2022.
Investors who bought in at the $10 IPO price are reaping a massive potential return. When trading opened on Monday morning, Newsmax shares, trading under the NMAX ticker, rose from $10 to close at nearly $78. After hours, values continued to rise, and when trading opened on Tuesday, the stock saw another surge.
As of roughly 2 p.m. ET, shares were trading at around $215, an increase of almost 160%.
The trading has been intense, and was even halted numerous times on Monday due to volatility. That volatility has evidently caught the attention of retail investors, some of whom, on social media and trader forums, are comparing it to the GameStop meme stock mania from a few years ago.
Newsmax may also have some other similarities to GameStop—notably, that it’s a company that’s been losing money (it lost $55.5 million during the first six months of 2024), and as a cable news network, is competing in a field that is losing steam, similarly to GameStop’s physical video game retail model.
Newsmax is also a competitor to Fox News, which has been able to beat its chief competitors MSNBC and CNN in recent years and recently had its best February on record, averaging 3.1 million primetime viewers for the entire month. Newsmax—which tends to offer programming that is often even further to the right than Fox—is hoping to tap into that audience and pilfer some of those viewers for itself.
As for what’s playing out in the markets? It’s something of a cherry on top for Newsmax. The company was founded by Christopher Ruddy in 1998 and its cable news network launched in 2014, and now appears to be flying high with Trump back in the White House.