Making The Hollywood Stock Exchange Go Legit

from the business-models dept

Remember the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX)? It was a fun little site that let you "invest" in various movies, actors, or studios for fun (without any real money). When it first launched, I thought it was just a hobby site. Then, they started raising money and talking all sorts of nonsense about selling "research reports" to Hollywood studios that could be used to predict how well a certain movie was likely to do. Hollywood didn't bite. So what happened? The company nearly went out of business, but was recently bought by real financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald. They're trying to turn the exchange into a real exchange involving real money. The plan (hope) is to create a futures market on movies, so that studios can hedge their bets on making a movie. Of course, this will require some changes to current US law, but Cantor Fitzgerald doesn't seem to think that will be much of a problem. Of course, they also think that the studios will eventually come around to that whole "research" idea that had previously failed, but they're willing to wait on that.

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