The Hollywood Stock Exchange

The Hollywood Stock Exchange
The primary data source is the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX, www.hsx.com), an online market
simulation focused on the movie industry. As of January 2005, it had over 500,000 registered users
(“traders”), a frequent trader group of about 80,000 accounts, and approximately 19,500 daily unique
logins. New users receive 2 million 'Hollywood dollars' (denoted as "H$2 million") and can increase
the value of their portfolio by, among other things, strategically trading “MovieStocks” and
“StarBonds”. The trading population is fairly heterogeneous, but the most active traders tend to be
heavy consumers and early adopters of entertainment products, especially films.
HSX is not a real stock market: it revolves around fake money, all traders start with the same
capital when they first join, the pricing of “stocks” is governed by a “market maker” based on
computer algorithms (as opposed to pure supply and demand dynamics), and “stocks” have a finite
horizon in that trading comes to an end when the movie has played in theaters for some time.