This illustration shows an image of President-elect Donald Trump next to a phone screen that is displaying the Truth Social app, in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 21, 2022.
Stefani Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images
Trump Media and Technology Group is expanding into financial services, including investment vehicles, the firm announced Wednesday.
Shares of the Truth Social parent company, which trade under the ticker DJT, jumped more than 10% in premarket trading. President Donald Trump indirectly owns 114,750,000 shares of the company, held in a revocable trust.
The financial services division will be known as Truth.Fi, and it will be started with up to $250 million from the company that will be custodied with brokerage firm Charles Schwab, according to a news release. That money will be allocated to customized exchange-traded funds and cryptocurrencies, among other investment vehicles.
The company said it expects to launch products and services, including its own investment vehicles, later this year.
“Truth.Fi is a natural expansion of the Truth Social movement. We began by creating a free-speech social media platform, added an ultra-fast TV streaming service, and now we’re moving into investment products and decentralized finance,” TMTG CEO and Chairman Devin Nunes said in the release.
“Developing American First investment vehicles is another step toward our goal of creating a robust ecosystem through which American patriots can protect themselves from the ever-present threat of cancellation, censorship, debanking, and privacy violations committed by Big Tech and woke corporations,” added Nunes, a former congressman from California.
The release did not specify what types of investment vehicles Truth.Fi would offer, but said Schwab would “broadly advise” the company’s investments and strategy. The products would focus on “American growth, manufacturing, and energy companies as well as investments that strengthen the Patriot Economy,” according to the release.
Samantha Schwab, the granddaughter of the namesake founder of Charles Schwab, recently became the deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
The announcement comes after complaints from Republicans that banks have treated some conservatives unfairly. During a remote appearance last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump complained to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan that the firm was locking out and de-banking conservatives.
“I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives because many conservatives complain that the banks are not allowing them to do business within the bank, and that included a place called Bank of America,” Trump said.
The president also took on Jamie Dimon, CEO at JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank by assets.
“You and Jamie and everybody, I hope you’re going to open your banks to conservatives because what you’re doing is wrong,” Trump said.
The remarks continued a simmering feud between Republicans and the nation’s largest banks, with a flashpoint coming last year when a group of state attorneys general filed a complaint alleging that the institutions were discriminating against customers based on religious and political affiliations. Officials at the banks have denied wrongdoing.
Complaints about de-banking are also common among the crypto community, which was aligned with Trump during his presidential campaign.
Truth.Fi comes on the heels of the Trump memecoin, which launched shortly before the inauguration and resulted in on-paper gains of billions of dollars for the Trump Organization and its affiliates.
The new financial services firm may end up being a competitor to Elon Musk’s X, which announced a deal with Visa on Tuesday as part of its push to expand beyond social media. Musk is a close adviser to President Trump.
David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, testifies during a Senate Banking Committee hearing at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 6, 2023.
Win Mcnamee | Getty Images
Goldman Sachs is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings before the opening bell Monday.
Here’s what Wall Street expects:
Earnings: $12.35 per share, according to LSEG
Revenue: $14.81 billion, according to LSEG
Trading Revenue: Fixed Income of $4.56 billion and Equities of $3.65 billion, per StreetAccount
Investing Banking Revenue: $1.94 billion, per StreetAccount
Goldman Sachs may prove to be a beneficiary of the recent market environment.
On Friday, rivals JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley each topped expectations for first-quarter results on booming equities trading.
Equities trading revenue surged 48% and 45% at the banks, respectively, thanks to volatility in the opening months of President Donald Trump’s tenure amid his efforts to reshape global trade agreements.
Buoyant markets during most of the quarter, which ended March 31, should also support the bank’s wealth and asset management division, which CEO David Solomon has called the growth engine of the bank.
But markets have churned since Trump escalated trade tensions last week, sowing uncertainty across the world’s largest economy. Goldman shares have dropped 14% this year through Friday.
Analysts will be keen to hear what Solomon has to say about his conversations with corporate clients and institutional investors during the tumult.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
While U.S.-China trade tensions escalate , analysts predict a handful of Chinese companies could win out on Beijing’s efforts to double down on generative artificial intelligence. “We expect AI demand to stay strong as deepseek cost improvements have driven application development such that companies are seeing AI development as critical for growth and for competition,” Bernstein analyst Boris Van and a team said in an April 7 note. “We also expect the development for the AI+chip ecosystem to be a key push from the government to offset tariff impacts,” the analysts said. Chinese companies have rushed to try out DeepSeek’s generative artificial intelligence capabilities in the last few months. Some businesses have reported cost savings , and strategists expect that could help corporate earnings finally turn around. Bernstein’s two outperform-rated plays are Shanghai-listed Kingsoft Office, operator of word-processing app WPS, and Hong Kong-listed Kingdee , which sells software services for business management. The investment analysts pointed out that during the escalation in U.S.-China tensions during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, Chinese spending on local information technology increased as localization policies were announced, partly to offset tariff impacts on trade. “We could likely see a scenario where AI is the new critical technology that China will use to sustain further growth,” the Bernstein analysts said, noting that locally created systems such as the Huawei ecosystem could be promoted. The AI-integrated version of WPS reached 19.68 million monthly active users in mainland China last year, Kingsoft Office said in an annual report last month. The company has released a version of WPS for Huawei’s HarmonyOS Next operating system that claims to be independent of Android. Kingdee said in its annual report last month that it planned “a full pivot into an Enterprise Management AI company” this year. The company said in a filing last week that it gained new customers in the first quarter, including automaker Geely, spirits company Kweichow Moutai and 01.AI, an AI start-up founded by former Google China head Kai-Fu Lee. The Economist Intelligence Unit estimates China’s AI-related spending will grow by up to 25% annually this year and next, adding up to 0.13% of 2024’s nominal gross domestic product in economic output. Tariff tensions between the U.S. and China However, Goldman Sachs and Citi in the last week cut their forecasts for China’s economic growth this year given heightened tensions between the U.S. and Beijing. China on Friday hit back at yet another round of U.S. tariff increases with duties of its own . Both nations escalated their duties on one another’s goods to triple-digit rates . China said it planned to “ignore” subsequent U.S. tariff increases, but remained committed to retaliating if necessary on other U.S. actions. “The full-swing tariff war may hurt the macro economy and the ripple-effect may spread over to most of the economic sectors,” Nomura’s China technology research analyst Bing Duan and a team said in an April 7 note. “Meanwhile, we think domestic AI demand would remain buoyant, following DeepSeek’s innovation and China’s ambition for AI leadership.” “We like [internet data center]/Cloud companies the most as the demand is largely unaffected by the ‘reciprocal’ tariff,” Nomura said. Their buy-rated plays in the category include state-owned China Mobile and two U.S.-listed stocks: GDS and Vnet . Shanghai-based GDS, which develops and operates data centers in China, forecast revenue this year would rise by at least 9.4% to 11.29 billion yuan. Beijing-based Vnet said its net revenues from internet data center increased by 28.3% last year to 1.63 billion yuan. “The overall utilization rate of wholesale data center in Greater Beijing Area is projected to reach 85% as early as 2025, marking the first potential supply shortage in the market,” the company said in an earnings call, according to a FactSet transcript. Less than 5% of each of the companies’ revenue comes from the U.S., while the remainder primarily comes from China, the analysts said. “We think the key growth drivers for China’s cloud computing and IDC companies are the pent-up demand for computing power / infrastructure after DeepSeek was launched, which is not directly affected by the tariff hike,” the Nomura analysts said. “To mitigate the tariff impact on China’s export growth, the government may continue to encourage the investments to boost domestic growth, especially in digital infrastructure, including cloud computing & IDC infrastructure. Nomura’s second-most favored category is AI software and applications, where the analysts’ buy-rated plays are Hong Kong-listed Kingdee and Kingsoft Corp , parent of Kingsoft Office. — CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.