Rocket Bomber - article - business - commentary - About the new RB Geek Stock Index

The Rocket Bomber Geek Stock Index, also known as the RB Geek Stock Index or further abbreviated RBGSX, is a way to use all that evil-financial-market-associated crap-and-data for a little bit of fun — and it’s a formalization of information I’ve been tracking for at least a year, so I might as well pretty it up and get a few blog posts out of it.

On Saturday, 17 April 2010, I set up a portfolio of stocks to track the overall performance of the comic book market. Since, for all intents and purposes that’s only two stocks [TWX and DIS] and two stocks are hardly a ‘portfolio’, I’ve added some [other] big media conglomerates, major retailers of books, publishers, a couple of multi-nationals that also happen to own some publishing, major players in the DVD/Blu-Ray market, and just to round things out: Apple, Nintendo, Sony, and the other three cos. that constitute the majority of the video game market (EA, Activision, and Game Stop)

It breaks down like this:

Media Conglomerates

• CBS Corporation (NYSE:CBS)
• The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS)
• News Corporation (NASDAQ:NWSA)
• Sony Corporation (NYSE:SNE)
• Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX)
• Viacom, Inc. (NYSE:VIA)

Publishers

• Wiley John & Sons Inc. (NYSE:JW.A)
• The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (NYSE:MHP)
• Lagardere SCA (EPA:MMB)
• Pearson PLC (NYSE:PSO)
• Scholastic Corporation (NASDAQ:SCHL)

Retailers of Books

• Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)
• Books-A-Million, Inc. (NASDAQ:BAMM)
• Borders Group, Inc. (NYSE:BGP)
• Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS)
• Hastings Entertainment, Inc (NASDAQ:HAST)
• Indigo Books & Music Inc. (TSE:IDG)

DVDs

• Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY)
• Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX)
• Navarre Corporation (NASDAQ:NAVR)
• Amazon, B&N, Hastings, Sony, Disney, Time Warner, et al. op. cit.

Video Games

• Activision Blizzard, Inc. (NASDAQ:ATVI)
• Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS)
• GameStop Corp. (NYSE:GME)
• Nintendo Co., Ltd (OTC:NTDOY)
• Sony op. cit.

Manufactures & Retailers of Hardware

• Amazon op. cit.
• Best Buy op. cit.
• Nintendo op. cit.
• Sony op. cit.

Also just a hardware manufacturer, but also Just Because

• Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)

These 25 companies make up the Rocket Bomber Geek Stock Index. (I figure if that guy Jones can do one, so can I) (and these are the 25 companies that interest me; if you disagree go do your own math) ( * and finally, a number of firms that would be of keen interest for inclusion in this type of exercise are in fact wholly privately owned and do not trade on any market, as such do not have a stock price, and seldom bother to report any other financial info elsewise: I know and feel the lack, but it’s not my fault that they can not be included)

I contemplated for a couple of minutes on how to weight each stock, and then figured I’d let the market take care of that for me: The RB Geek Stock Index consists of 100 shares each, priced as found on Saturday, 17 April 2010 (after the Friday markets closed) and taken together represent an overall portfolio value at the outset of $101,294.73.

[note: It’s all imaginary money, as if I had $100K I’d likely not be heard from at all for at least three years, past con appearances and drunken blog posts.] [And I could do the math just as easily with 1 share each but then we get into some gnarley decimals: 100per works out quite well]

The total dollar value of the RB Geek Stock Index is multiplied by our reporting constant (at time of launch: .0098722) to set both the initial value and baseline at an even 1000. [and since we’re either still in a recession or just on the very cusp of a recovery, in the long term it can only go up from here]

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Disclaimer: The RB Geek Stock Index is not meant to constitute, or even masquerade as, legitimate investment advice (see “drunken blog posts”, above). The RBGSX is calculated and tracked for entertainment and edification purposes only, and if that doesn’t cover my ass I invite you to claim whatever you like and I’ll be happy to show up in court drunk as a sailor on leave, for as many days in a row as it takes, to make a mockery of you, and your case, and the proceedings in general such that no judge or jury could even imagine that I’d be a credible source for my own name and birthday, let alone investment ‘guidance’. If pressed, I might even be able to produce receipts and character witnesses to prove I’ve been drunk more-or-less continuously since 1996. You do not want to call me on this — or take the RBGSX as anything but what it is: straight, sober reporting of the financial markets in this one niche market, with no returns on investment implied, imagined, impuned, impounded, implanted, implicated, impressed, impregned, imbibed, immanentized, immortalized or imbroglio-ed.

Any additions or subtractions to the companies tracked by RBGSX will be fully disclosed, and will likely also result in a recalculation of the reporting constant such that the numbers, for at least one week, would remain the same. [just like the Dow Jones, in fact]

[Short of a bankruptcy or merger, I think we’re good for a year or two]

So. Let’s have some fun with this.