 Years ago, some friends and I played against each other in the Hollywood Stock Exchange. After years of not playing, it turns out our accounts are still active, and my account, which started with a $2 million stake all those years ago, now is at crazy Sultan of Brunei levels, clocking in at H$571,176,653.44 when I logged in today. More than two hundred and fifty percent growth on investment ain’t bad.
How I did it is pretty simple. Forget emotion, forget your own preferences. Stock value is supposed to equal, in millions, what a movie will earn after four weeks of release. If the price is less than that, buy it. If it’s more than that, sell it. It’s that simple.
So, The Brothers Grimm isn’t tearing it up at the box office right now? I bought it at $6.68. Unless Terry Gilliam starts showing up in theaters and killing movie-goers with a shovel, it will earn more than $6.68 million dollars in its first month of release. (In fact, it made $15.1 million in its first weekend.) That’s all there is to it.
I used to use my friend Greg’s UpcomingMovies.com site to look two years ahead for summer blockbusters before anyone else heard of them, since they tend to have the largest four week grosses each year. His site is now part of Yahoo! Movies, but the principle is still the same.
Now, if only someone would give me a $2 million stake in real life and unleash me on the stock market …
You know, I thought I started with a smaller stake than $2 million. HSX says my lifetime percentage gain is a whopping +28,443.35%. Yowza.
And now, you can cash in your H$ for some of the least interesting prizes ever. I’m sitting on my nest egg, thanks.
 According to this site, it would take the caffeine 441 2/3 cans of Cherry Coke to kill me.
Now I know to stop with 440 cans at a sitting.
(Source.)
Strange but true: www.CherryCoke.com gives you a page about the clearly inferior Vanilla Coke. Yuck.
More than you ever wanted to know about cola flavoring.
Modern science is all about telling men it’s not their fault they’re idiots. First, it was the (alleged) genetic call to adultery, and now scientists explain why men just don’t seem to listen to women. Somehow, I doubt this will placate women one bit.
Google gets bitchy at CNet when the site shows how much personal information is available on Google, using Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt as an example. Schmidt should just wipe his nose with a few fistfuls of $100 bills and get over it. Of course they’d use him as a test case: He’s someone readers would accept as an example of someone who would be online but would also have information they’d want to keep private (like, say, his net worth and home address). Shunning CNET over this is silly.
Well, it’s been pointed out that the ability to leave comments has gone somewhat kablooey, and there’s a few problems behind the scenes as well. I will be trying to straighten them out tonight after the Hesperia City Council meeting. If you’ve tried to leave comments and have been unable to, remember what you wanted to say and try again later tonight.
Well, my fix attempts have done diddly to fix things. I’ll keep poking around, but I think I’m destined to have to try the WordPress help forums, which I’ve found to be somewhat unhelpful previously.
OK, comments are working again. Now to get my Dashboard (control panel) back to normal …
And if anyone has any ideas why the MyNetflix plug-in isn’t doing as it’s supposed to, and just showing the next 10 movies on my queue, let me know. That one in particular is making me nuts, since it’s theoretically such a simple piece of code.
I totally forgot I’d registered for this site an eon ago until I saw that Jonah had posted one of the maps of his travels.
Anyway, here are the places I’ve visited, as of August 2, 2005, not including ones where I just drove straight through (sorry, Massachusetts):
States lived in or visited: Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Washington, D.C., Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maine (Hi, Kelly and George!), Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey (Hi, Kris!), New Mexico, New York, North Carolina (Hi, Kathy!), Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia (Hi, Lee!) and Wisconsin.
Countries lived in or visited: the United States, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and United Kingdom.
¡Fascinación!
|
|
|
|
