Movie Money

My portfolio went up about $15,000 yesterday, making it worth more than $20 million.

No, no. Don't bother writing to ask for a loan. It's not real money, but a make-believe trading game based on movies. It's at HSX.com (that stands for Hollywood Stock Exchange), and I have been playing this for at least nine years.

The game principally involves buying "shares" in movies. The price of the share is ultimately determined by the movie's US box office returns in its first four weeks, where one dollar in share price equals 1 million in box office. My biggest success by far happened this year when I read a rave review of Slumdog Millionaire and bought 50,000 shares at $2.75. I finally sold at $78, although if I had hung on another two weeks I would have made $11 more.

The game is fun for me, because I am an absolute junkie for reading movie reviews and articles about the film industry. I like to play a game with the Leonard Maltin movie guide, which is almost 1,600 pages long. I turn to any two pages and look to see if I have seen any of the movies on those pages. I have yet to find two pages where I haven't seen at least one and often quite a few more. I don't know what it says about me, but couch potato does come to my mind.

The irony of the HSX movie stock game (for me) is that because it is about future releases I am almost always relying on what other people are thinking about films rather than what I have seen. But I guess it really does mimic the actual stock market for most of us in that regard, except at HSX there is no mechanism to bail out the guys who gave bad advice.

One result of sites like this is that players actually get extremely good at predicting what is going to happen in real life. While it is hard to see how predicting a movie's opening box office would have much value, it's pretty easy to see how it could be applied, for example, to something like the IT industry, where spotting the next big thing could be very rewarding.

(And alternatively, spotting the next big flop might help avoid losses. Take it from a member of the founding editorial team of PCjr Magazine and still a proud possessor of a mini-CD recorder and player who has no mini-CDs to play on them.)

When I was running the company here, I begged, pleaded and ultimately demanded from the online team that we develop a site similar to HSX for our industry. Besides being able to get a handle on the future directions of our business, I argued that we would be able to build a strong community of people who exchanged their ideas and knowledge with one another - and us. Surely that would be good for a specialist publishing company.

I still think it was a great idea. However, it is a testament to my managerial skills and leadership clout that it never happened.

The funny thing is that our parent company ultimately did create just that sort of site in the US. It was a financial flop. But I am not sure it failed because it was a bad idea, but because there were already lots of other sites doing the same thing.

And it probably didn't help that they chose to re-use the name, The Industry Standard, our most famous and colossally failed business during the dot-com era. (Care to cruise on Titanic II? How about some aerial photography aboard the all-new Hindenburg?)

Based on the Hollywood Stock Exchange, there are certainly enough people to make such a site hop. After all these years I am now nearing the 93rd percentile among HSX players, meaning that only 7% of the people have a bigger portfolio than I do. But in real numbers, I rank only 55,400 which means I had better a few more Slumdogs this year because there are an awful lot of good players ahead of me.

Anyhow, every morning I check how I've done at HSX and once in awhile I will spend some time deciding what I want to buy next. Right now my hopes for the future rest on "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" and "Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief". Which is probably quite odd since I would never spend the money to actually go to the theatre to watch either one of them. But I'm banking that lots of other people will.