Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Box Office receipts can already be "wagered" on through many offshore sportsbooks and non-US exchanges such as Intrade. Intrade right now has multiple binary strike contracts on 4 upcoming movies.

If the "cast and crew" of these movies aren't already making a killing in these markets, perhaps information on these productions isn't so secretive after all? The internet is like a chat room on steroids. Nothing is kept under wraps regarding movie buzz - everyone has access to it.

The rumor mill started cranking yesterday about the disaster that the Green Hornet movie is becoming, and that isn't scheduled for release until December.

By the way, the Trend Exchange is targeting institutional traders only, and these contracts would not be available to your average Joe on the street unless they traded them through an intermediated broker who had a clearing relationship with an approved FCM.

It's the Cantor Exchange offering that would allow you to trade these movie futures through your credit card. These are two separate business models being proposed. The CFTC staff TWICE recommended Trend Exchange approval to their commissioners, but the "political animals" that head the CFTC were frightened by the media blitz created by the entertainment industry against it.

And know this - their objections are directly related to the attempts at transparency into box office receipt calculation that these markets would offer. The Trend Exchange would have access to the exact raw data from the theaters (point of sale) that the studios have. Yet a 2-year review of these numbers shows a standard deviation of 2% between the actual raw data and the studio-published box office number.

So much is tied to box office numbers (merchandise, contracts, compensation, royalties) that the studios like to "play with" or "massage" these numbers to help their bottom line.

These attempts to hold these CORPORATIONS to the same accurate accounting standards that every other business needs to adhere to should be applauded, not condemned!

Also, these products are being proposed as exchange-based, federally-regulated, centrally-cleared instruments. The mortgage-backed derivatives that caused the recent financial meltdown were over-the-counter (OTC), off-exchange, UNREGULATED instruments.