Hollywood Stock Exchange Set To Launch In April 100
You can buy and sell actor or movie "stock" for virtual cash on the website Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX). Starting in April the company plans on letting you turn those movie performance predictions into real dollars. HSX filed with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission for approval as an active trading site in November 2008 and has just entered the final phase of regulatory review. Richard Jaycobs, president of HSX's parent company, said, "The number of people who visit movie theaters each year and form opinions about a film's success is in the tens of millions. We believe that's the reason the public response to this product has been very positive."
Rights to use Celebrity and Movie names? (Score:3, Interesting)
So can they do this without paying each Celebrity and Movie studio for the rights to use the names? That question will probably keep some lawyers busy for a while.
Re:Sports Stock Exchange (Score:5, Interesting)
So when is the sports stock exchange opening? I sure would love to bet... eh ehm I mean, "exchange and buy stock", for my favorite team.
That WAS tradesports, a sister website of intrade.
tradesports flamed out utterly spectacularly in 2008 for no apparent reason.
I was always mystified how two sister sites under the same company, presumably sharing code, management and backend equipment, could have one self immolate itself so thoroughly yet the other one seems just ducky even years later.
My guess is the mafia guys told them to butt out of the sports betting business, or else... That would explain a whole lot about that situation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TradeSports [wikipedia.org]
Re:What's the point (Score:4, Interesting)
On the "virtual" side of the Hollywood Stock Exchange, the "dividends" are paid based upon ticket sales after 4 weeks. Whatever the movie has made is then given to the "investors" which can then be re-invested into other issues.
As for the real-money aspect, the original founders of Hollywood Stock Exchange always intended to get into the real-world side of the market by trying to set up an investment market for film makers that would be based upon the same general principles, where a film project could be submitted as an IPO of sorts and have some real-world investment into the actual film via micro-transaction. In other words, mere mortals could "invest" into the actual film making costs as a sort of corporate entity.
In theory, some films might end up turning a tremendous profit, and some of the early fans of the concept could pool their money together to get the financing of some interesting project off the ground through some financing scheme like this. The stocks, when they closed under this model, would pay out based strictly on what revenue comes in.... keeping in mind Hollywood financing tricks and other garbage that would have to be reviewed incredibly closely on something like this too.
Something of this nature would be certainly interesting. Unfortunately, based on this very limited information in this article it doesn't sound like that is going to be the route this particular group will be going. It sounds more like something more akin to what Las Vegas casinos do with sports events and people betting on the success or failure of a given team winning a game. If that is the case, this would most certainly have to be classified as a gambling activity and not a legitimate security exchange.