I guess the 80’s have more appeal than I thought, based on WDDNG’s very surprising take.  I was one of the bigger optimists on the stock, and thought that while an upward adjustment was very possible, it wasn’t likely to be adjusted upward by much. Luckily I had more guts in my Mega-account, where I held 50k of the stock. 

On another note, we have officially entered Cinemeconomist hell. As regular readers may have noticed, my basic buying strategies are: 

1) find stocks which mathematically offer high rates of return, such as arbitrage stocks and undervalued blockbusters, and max out on them in descending order of their rates of return. 

2) find stocks that are due for release in 1-3 weeks, and max out on them in anticipation of a buying spree. 

There are several other popular strategies, such as waveriding on cheap stocks, beating the herd to a trendy stock, logging on at 3 am to read what Max thinks are the hot stocks, or buying IPOs, but I don’t have the patience for the time-intensive strategies, and I absolutely suck at predicting the mass psychology of the HSX traders. 

On my favorite two strategies, circumstances conspire against me. There are no arbitrage stocks of note, and the Oscar Bond market, Max’s gloomy hints at a possible interest rate hike by Dr. Zeros, and a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil have all lead to stock market which is bucking logic and historical trends. Welcome to Cinemeconomist hell – here is Supply Side zealot and Gold Bug Jack Kemp to talk you through a retrospective on melodramtic, weepy chick flicks through the ages, starting with all three versions of Love Affair back to back. The horror.  The horror. 
 
There will once again come a time when rationality rears its cold, steely, and profitable head, and logic becomes an easy way to earn a quick Hollywood Buck, but until then I shall stubbornly stick to the tried an true methods which brought me into the top 5 ytd last year.  I am holding SNSLS, DARKC, EATER, MNIRN, and the bonds that are most likely to win the Oscars – PFOND, HHUNT, GSTUA,  KBASI, BREYN, and RWILL. 

I’ll also be having a few more columns on the Macro-economics of HSX since I read the entrails of a pigeon this morning, and see that such understanding will become very important in predicting widespread market trends. 

Mini-Review: The Wedding Singer – I took my wife to see it for Valentine’s Day, as a precursor to a candlelight dinner at home of Seafood Alfredo. The music is a riot, and their are several wondefully inspired scenes, which inevitably involve Sandler singing (His miserably depressed version of Madonna’s “Holiday” had me in stitches). Roger Ebert is correct in his assessment that the romantic comedy plot of boy-and-girl-in-true-love-that-is-obvious-to-everyone-else-but-is- 
confounded-through-misunderstanding,-communication-failure,-scuzzy-fiancees 
-and-contrived-scriptwriting was older than God when Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers used it Swing Time, but the problem isn’t that the plot is hackneyed, its that it isn’t used to good comic or romantic effect. Whenever Sandler isn’t singing, or a retro-80’s tune isn’t blaring on the soundtrack (the absence of which occurs far too infrequently), the film is a yawner. Catch it on video, or rent Gross Pointe Blank, a film with an 80’s soundtrack that is damned good, or better yet, rent Astaire in Swing Time, a very funny ’30s romantic comedy musical with my all-time favorite musical dance sequence – Astaire dancing with his four shadows in the “Mr. Bojangles” number. 

Picking himself up, dusting himself off, and starting all over again, 

Tom Miller