Hollywood Stock Exchange

I had some great tacos.

As for our part, we did the Hollywood Stock Exchange.

Who or what will we buy low, sell high, or maybe even hold? Some great picks this year and questions from the audience.

So let's get right to it.

The 2026 Hollywood Stock Exchange, live from Screen Time.

From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Belloni, and this is The Town.

Thank you, everyone.

It was set up about 30 years ago by a guy called Bruce, a British guy who's lived in San Francisco the whole time.

And he was doing it, I think, for the Hollywood Stock Exchange, you know, a fun game and they wanted to collect data for it.

Yeah, and it was just to help that.

But then it grew and grew and grew.

That, again, is the economist Robin Hanson, who has been watching prediction markets for a long time.

In the aughts, there was a place called the Hollywood Stock Exchange that had made markets on movies, and they were actually really quite accurate and informative.

They were play money markets, and they decided to go through all the legal hoops to get real money markets on movies.

A few months before they were gonna go live, movie executives got wind of this and lobbied Congress to make it illegal, [chuckles] and that was only the second kind of futures markets made illegal.