By Steve Sailer
03/16/2010
From my new column at Taki’s Magazine:I certainly don’t know much about investing, but I can give you one solid tip: don’t bet in the movie box office futures market.Read why betting real money on how well upcoming movies will perform is a bad idea there, and comment upon it here.Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald expects to get federal regulatory approval to begin trading movie pseudo-shares in April (and a start-up called Veriana Networks also hopes to get into the business). The rationalization is that movie-makers could unload some of the risk of a flop on investors, but the appeal is that it’s more fun than gambling on pork bellies.
What could be a more perfect embodiment of our post-modern economy? While the Asians manufacture everything, Americans will try to get rich by selling each other cinematic synthetic financial instruments.
Betting on box office numbers isn’t a new idea. For a decade, hobbyists with too much time on their hands have been competing on the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) for pretend money by predicting how well new movies will perform.
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