JasonF

Puny mortals! You will never defeat me! All your base are belong to me!

The secret is to take a deep breath, steel your nerves, and pour your money into the openers. Sure, it's a risk, but those mega-adjusts are sweet.

Jackskeleton

So the day that jason gets it wrong he'll be knocked back down to earth..

Once you have more cash to play with it's a whole lot easier to pick up those expensive opener stocks and take those risk. All part of the game. That and you have to know when to buy into a stock.

kninestile

I was also the bottom feeder from the first week of the game. I haven't come back like gcribbs but I'm about to reach the 3 million mark. I had dropped down to just over 1 million.

Groucho

Indeed. A new account with H$2 Million couldn't even buy 10,000 shares of HPOT3 today.

JasonF

After I wrote this, I went back and reread it and decided it came across as a little bit of "Ha ha, I'm winning and you guys don't know what you're doing!" I don't mean it that way, but I decided to post it anyway because I think (I hope) there's some useful advice in there. I hope everyone takes it in the spirit in which it is intended -- which is "here's what I'm doing and why I'm doing it; I hope it helps you and your playing style."

10,000 shares of HPOT3 -- assuming you're holding them the right way -- are probably going to do a lot better for you this weekend than 50,000 shares of some movie that's not coming out for a year or three months or even a week.

Playing openers is the best and easiest (but riskiest) way to get ahead in this game. Playing bonds can be good, too, if you know which bonds to play and understand how bonds work. For anything else, I'd think long and hard before sinking a lot of money in. I think SPID2 is underpriced right now, but I don't think its price is going to change much between now and its release week. I could buy in now, but I'd probably only make 5-10% on that investment over the next month. I'd rather use that money to play the openers so that, in a month's time, I've got more money to invest in SPID2.

Can it backfire? Sure. But calling an adjust wrong isn't the end of the world. I got TROY wrong and bounced right back. If you had taken a $2 million port and shorted SHRK2, then yes -- you'd be down to $1.4 million. But I'd rather be wrong on a big call than play it safe and see my port stagnate.

Jackskeleton

One piece of advice is to really max out those calls/puts short the one you feel isn't going to make it. These are a cheaper form of playing the movie stock without having the big bucks to play the actual movie stock and the pay out may work out well for you to pick up more cash for bigger buys down the line.

devilshalo

I adjusted my strategies of holding on to stocks for movies that will be out in a year or two ( I sold most of the ones that have made a profit, only keeping those that are in the red) and I'm trying a little bit more aggressive approach to some aspects of day trading.

After dropping to 15th, I jumped back up to 7th with almost $4.5 M.

JasonF

Buying options is great, but I'd be careful shorting options -- they are priced low enough that there's not much upside and a lot of downisde. I mean, the Harry Potter $80 put is priced at 0.44, which means that a short is a bet that the movie will make $79.56 or more (not counting the commission). At most, you're making 0.44 * $10,000 = $4,400. Even if the put somehow rises to $10 a share, and you short it, you're still only looking at $100,000 profit. On the other hand, let's say there's a freak power outage that takes out the entire northeast United States for the weekend (it's happened before, you know, and the movie only makes $60 million. The put cashes out at $20 and you lose $100,000 if you shorted it at $10 and close to $200,000 if you shorted it at the mroe realistic $0.44.

Of course, these risks still exist with the call and the underlying stock -- a max long in the call will currently cost you $135,700, and you'll lose all that money if HPOT3 only does $60 million on opening weekend. It will cost you $2,629,600 to buy 10,000 shares of HPOT3 and their value will drop by almost a million dollars if that blackout happens. The difference is, you have the upside to compensate for your risk -- if HPOT3 hits $110 million for the weekend (unlikely, but not impossible), you make a ton of money on the call and the stock, but your shorted put earns you the same $4,400 you earn if HPOT makes $80 million.

Jackskeleton

If you are in the boat that you are depending on the strike prices then you really can't afford 10,000 shares + fee for transaction. yes, it's a pay out, but it's money a lot of folks didn't have. I used this strategy to move from position 20 to on the top 5. Those warrents and options are easy money and allow you to build up. Pick them up when they go on sale on wednesday and you will be making green easily. Go by what you think will happen at the box office. smaller risk and smaller gains, but something is something to work up from.

Vonner

New player here... DVDTalk_Vonner

Groucho

Welcome! Glad to have you aboard...it was looking like this might be our first week with no new players.

Edit: are you sure about that username? I can't get it to work.

Vonner

Oops, I guess it's DVDTalk_vonner

Mano

Try DVDTalk_vonner. Worked for me.

To echo most everyone else's statements, the truly easy (yet risky) money is in jumping on the calls and puts as well as buying stock in the weekend openers. This brings me to my question; the calls and puts for PITC2, GARFI, and STEPF all come out tomorrow with a strike price of $20 million, I'm wondering which do you guys think are realistic? I would say that PITC2 will definitely make that much but I doubt the other two will, though I'm not so sure about STEPF.
Thoughts...?

kninestile

Where do you guys find out how many screens a movie is going to show on before it opens? I use BOM to see how many screens a feature is playing on for movie that are all ready released but I don't see it for upcoming movies.

Thanks

edit

Nevermind I found it.

Jackskeleton

I may offer this suggestion, go to the community and see what is the word around the camp fire. sometimes you will get a lot of raving maniacs, but often you will get very good info and tip offs on where to go next

JasonF

Personally, I'm thinking STEPF will do surprisngly well, as will GARFI (even though everyone over the age of 11 thinks it looks like doo doo).

B.A.

I've heard quite a few women over the last few weeks who have said they want to see this. I think it will do fairly decent, too.

Jackskeleton

Why can't the prices adjust already. I want to see how much I'm going to lose today. atleast shorting TOMOR helped create a nice cushion for the blow.

Vonner

Okay I just started this so please don;t flame me for asking most likely a stupid question. I'm still trying to figure out how it all works. My question is...how often do the prices on movies adjust? I noticed some of the movies that I bought earlier have now either gone up or down in price. Do they do that on a regular interval, or just random? I ask because I'd like to get into some 'day-trading'. Thanks.

Jackskeleton

Prices change through out the day in small amounts. new releases of the weekend are halted trading on fridays and they adjust on sunday night. For the most part it's just depending on the stocks movement.

JasonF

Prices on securities are constantly moving. When people buy a security or cover their short, the price goes up. When people sell a security or short it, the price goes down. Exactly how this works (i.e. what effect buying one share of a security has on its price) is a closely guarded HSX secret. But it's happening constantly -- every share you trade effects the price.

There are some exceptions to this, though. Sometimes, securities get halted. You cannot trade in a halted security -- can't buy it, can't sell it, can't short it, and can't cover it. The big halt times are:
1. Movie stocks get halted on opening night at around 9 p.m. and remain frozen until they are "adjusted" at the end of the weekend. After they are adjusted, you can trade in them, but the price won't start moving until reste (the begining of the HSX day, which happens some time around midnight Eastern time).
2. After 4 weeks in wide release or 12 weeks in limited release (650 screens or less), a stock gets delisted -- usually on Monday, but it happened on Tuesday this week due to the holiday. At the same time as the delist, all bonds for stars in delisted movies get frozen until the next day when they are adjusted.
3. The price of IPOs remains frozen for the first day they are available. For example, later this week (tomorrow?), HSX will issue IPOs for the options on STEPF, GARFI, and PITC2. Those options will remain at their IPO price for a day.

Hope this helps -- if you need more information on "adjusts," let us know!

movieking

Where did you find it? I used to know where it was, now I can't find it. Oh well.

kninestile

On the right side of the main page there is a section called COUNTS. Underneath that just click on MORE COUNTS.

B.A.

I see that I lost all of the money I had made from Bruce Almighty 2 last night - close to $100k. Ouch. I should have sold it yesterday when I thought about it.

gcribbs

I guess Jim had said he would never do a sequel of it at one time.

I thought about shorting it when it was flying high and like an idiot I talked myself out of it