Branding will help but it will ultimately be the engine and user acquisition team to make it big. All the companies and mobile games that use a brand name simply used an old game engine and relabeled it. Star Wars Angry Birds <- Angry Birds Where's My Mickey <- Where's My Water The Hobbit: Kingdoms <- Kingdoms of Camelot Temple Run: Brave/Oz <- Temple Run These were all existing top hits with proven game engines. There are plenty of mobile games that have been reskinned with a brand name but failed to perform. So will we see something like Robocop: Hunter/ Stardom: Kardashins and will they succeed? Probably and I don't know if they will do well. Teen girl games haven't proven to monetize well; spenders are in blue games (male 20+) and creative/vanity (female 30+). Most importantly, Glu hasn't had that history of making a big grossing game. Deer Hunter was really the first one in a while. Keep in mind, a large reason for Deer Hunter's success is that it's an old franchise with a big following (Big Game Hunter). If I was interested in investing in them, I would play their new games and see how they monetize users (looking for mechanics that scale well, retention methods) and what marketing efforts they have (events linked to twitter? cross promotions? in-game virals?, etc) and see if they have changed. Edit follow up: As for "new profit models" or "rockstar marketers," that's hogwash to me. Turnover is so high in this industry, that everyone and their mother can say they worked at Tapjoy or some other place that had mediocre success. I've worked with Zynga, FB, Google, Kabam, etc. - so what? It's the norm and not unique. Every company is working on fine-tuning their game profit engines and copies each other. Fine details matter, and seeing fruits of those fine details matter. Signing Kardashin was very smart because of the social reach. I'd be interested if their efforts in Asia have any weight, as it's growing much faster there than over here.
one of the big things they mentioned upon signing kim kardashian this month was 1.she has 18 million twitter followers 2.she has 15 million instagram followers 3.she has 12 million facebook followers obviously lots of those are the same person, but regardless, she has major major pull and a few pics and tweets of her and her game can go a long way. Trust me mother kardashian is a marketing whiz. She got her son his own damn sock line, she knows what she is doing, she dulled her daughter's brand and got them a sears clothing line for gods sake. If there is money to be made, the kardashians will sniff it out. Im excited for GLUU, not as much as HIMX which I drool over nightly considering ever 1M units of glass will add .03 of EPS, but still very excited for GLUU to hit $5 or 6 in the near future
I mean 2008 had a devastating financial crisis I don't see one of those on the horizon. The fed cannot taper, inflows from retail investors are massive and growing.....stocks will continue to go up until bond rates rise and CD rates rise. In the meantime, people have nowhere to park money so they're buying stocks, especially stocks with bond like dividends I personally am playing it with high beta stocks
MMM getting whacked since the downgrade yesterday. I might be selling some 120 front month puts in it. And by might I mean I just did lol. Also for all you psychopaths it might be a decent time to start shorting DDD for a pullback. And lastly I saw this study from a guy I follow on twitter. http://paststat.com/blog/when-spy-posts-more-than-30-yoy-gains-what-next/ Basically, since 1995 when the S&P has posted a 30% year over year gain then the market has gone up 100% (25 out of 25) of the time for the next 12 months. Might not be easy to trade, but it would seem to indicate that the momentum isn't over.
Brightside...any opinions on gold other than it looking like trash? It's kind of like Chinese water torture right now for the longs. GDX looks even worse. I'd like to buy some sort of panic spike down about $100 lower, but I'm sure everyone would like to do that as well. Also, I saw a Yahoo finance article saying to short gold to $1000/oz so that just made me start thinking about the sentiment becoming a little too bearish. That said I just don't see any positive catalysts.
KMI a houston based company looks ripe right here for you blue chippers. At $34.98 its near a 52 week low and has a 4.6% dividend that grows every quarter
Since the second half of this thread is titled investing and I dont want to start another thread for this I have a question for you guys. I want to purchase an existing restaurant that is currently for sale. What type of bank should I pursue first to get the loan. They are selling the restaurant for around 49k, which I have found that they have that invested into the business with just the equipment that I would be acquiring. Can I use the equipment as collateral with the bank? The restaurant profits right now and I am sure I will need to get proof for the bank to see? I am experienced and have been in the restaurant management process for years but the only knowledge I do not really have full grasp of is the loan area. Any advice would help me so much. Thanks!!
also look at TNXP just heard some great stuff about it from a family friend, he says it has some big big stuff coming in the medical world and he read some incredible stuff on it. I had my mom look at it and she said it definitely has big potential its a $29M market cap I looked it up on seeking alpha and apparently another writer feels it could be a $100 stock on seeking alpha pro.....the paid subscription portion its $6 today
A bank will not lend against goodwill assets. They might do a loan with the equipment as collateral, but I wouldn't expect much. Small business transactions are usually owner financed. 49k isn't a huge amount so if the business is worth a damn I would expect him to agree to some owner financing.
Also, how much is left on the lease that the business is in? Can they kick you out if the business is transferred to another owner?
Do you have the financials of the restaurant? It sounds like you might not just yet if you don't have the proof for the bank to see. Your first step should be to get those. Drill down into them in detail to make sure the profits are real and not manipulated. I think you should try to figure out, if the restaurant has $49k of equipment and is profitable, why they would be willing to sell it to you for $49k? As for a loan, the process varies by business and bank. If you have an existing relationship with a bank, talk to their small business loan officer. If you don't, try going to a few banks and seeing what they would need from you. Smaller / local banks might be a bit easier to deal with than large banks.
Like you said 1150 is the technical bounce for a short term long trade. I initially became bearish at the false test of 1750 in Nov. 2012 and started taking smaller short spec positions and clearing all longs. I've been fully bearish since about May at the first instance of taper talk. I knew at that point the run for gold was over. I started building my position short in my book starting in mid May, but had about a quick 50 point drawdown, but luckily the position size was small. Even though we didn't get the taper as expected, the sheer concept of it has wrecked this market and all gold longs. Now add ECB and BOE stimulus shrinking mentions and it isn't a good recipe for the metals. I actually got called into our NYC offices shortly after the Bernanke taper mention despite me living and trading off site overseas. At that time we determined the bigger investment banks will make one last push in the POG to clear their ledgers. Like clockwork we saw a push in September to the technical resistance and then it has been all down hill since then. Right now even the perma bulls have basically thrown in the towel in gold. The sentiment is too bearish. I've been a bull in gold since 2008 if you look back at my previous posts in this thread about gold. But the day of reckoning has already arrived for those resistant to change. At this point all watch is on the $USD. If you think there will be a currency crisis and it will collapse then the POG will stabilize. I don't believe $USD will collapse all out though as many of the last gold bulls are hoping for. Also I've been carefully watching $WTIC. If oil can rally, it may lead a commodity rally like it did before a few years ago. I don't trade oil myself, but I watch it for cross currents in the commodity complex. The bounce in oil might be showing $USD hand in terms of a near term fall. When the equity markets sell off, I think you will see further evaporation in POG as gold positions will be the first thing cleared from investment bank ledgers to make room for equity drawdown. Currently, I don't have any more short position in POG as my book reached our target return goal and so we basically closed the book for the year. So I've basically been on vacation for the past few months. I think gold will chop around so if you want to extract some profits you might want to sell some COMEX calls or GLD calls to earn some monthly profit. I would be inclined to write some calls around 1300. As an aside, I would rather have my money in Bitcoin at this point. About a year ago a colleague of mine tried to convince me about the future of BC. I told him it was bogus and so forth. But he persisted since he was a big user of the Silk Road. I ended up putting 2000 USD as a joke into BC. It has turned out to be the best investment I've ever made. He put in about 20,000 USD so he's sitting pretty right now.
