Playing & Trading Strategy

...And here's the update for last week, wherein we had a -3.8% increase (or 3.8% loss) thanks to the terrible performance of The Young Messiah.  I was anticipating its performance to duplicate that of Risen a few weeks before, and even though early numbers were higher, Messiah ended the weekened with a take 3.5x less.  Ouch.  We have a bunch of solid performers coming up, but still a few question marks: My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 among them.  It's also looking more and more like Warcraft will not be our breakout blockbuster of the season, and likely big performers such as The Secret Life of Pets and Bourne 5 are already trading at a high price probably close to how they'll actually perform.

As I said last post, this is resulting in me changing up the trading style a bit.  I'm going to start liquidating some of our long-term holds of upcoming releases and putting funds in some of our top movers that are farther out and won't see release this season.  My plans to start that today were thwarted since most of those holdings are actually on the uptick, and I'm not going to turn away profits.  But I did sell off Kubo, which appears to have hit a plateau for now, and reinvested those funds in Girl on a Train.  I will likely be doing more of this as our long-term holdings hit flat stretches, depending on how much transaction fees limit profits.  Considering the hit the fund has taken this week, it's actually a great time to jump on UNIVX and pick it up at an undervalued price before it rebounds.

Here's a quick look at 3 more Universal properties in development.

Frenemy of the State

Rashida Jones has been proactively writing the past few years; Celeste & Jesse Forever was produced starring herself and Andy Samberg, and now she's working on Toy Story 4.  And that probably means that her adaptation of her own graphic novel Frenemy is backburnered perhaps forever.  Currently trading for pennies, with no news since 2012.

God of War

The video game series was a huge hit, but the zeitgeist for this was 5-10 years ago and there hasn't been much since the new console generation launched 2+ years ago.  God of War 4 is still at least a year out, and considering a movie isn't already in production to play off of that release date, it seems there won't be any real movement on this until after that at the very earliest.  Another penny stock that's not worth touching right now, this one is probably due a re-look around 2017-2018.

G

A sci-fi vehicle for director Louis Leterrier than never progressed out of the concept stage.  Considering it's set in a future where earth is slowly losing its gravitational force, this seems like the kind of movie that would require fx all over the place and would not be cheap to make.  It IPO'd back in 2011 when Leterrier was climbing the ranks and had successive hits in Transporter 2, Incredible Hulk, and Clash of the Titans.  But considering Leterrier just suffered the catastrophic bomb of The Brothers Grimsby, I wouldn't expect studios to be throwing money at him any time soon.  He's going to have to go back to the drawing board and work on something smaller instead, likely the exact opposite of this sort of project.  Short of Leterrier somehow retooling this as a low-budget actioner, it's unlikely we'll ever see anything happen with a property that never even officially hit development and never received any news after its IPO.

That brings us current again with weekly reporting.  Universal's next release remains My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 on March 25th.