I'm looking forward to your updates, keep us posted and help us make good picks and understand the stock market better.

About TTWO, good job on your gains. I really think it's going to bounce up in time for GTA V.

Do you mind if I say I would predict they surge up radically? I see another 2005 (San Andreas) / 2008 (GTAIV) peak for GTA V's release, only shorter this time.

Opinion, do we know what caused the plunge for the Western devs from 2008 to 2009? Was it the overall recession or was it videogame related?

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=4423925

The only ones who seems to recuperate from it pretty well were ATVI and TTWO.

It was mostly recession related.

People flew the stock market in droves and every stock tanked ( except AAPL but Apple is a different story..).

Then in 2009 when things got better people picked first the best growth stock to get back into the market and no matter what you say video gaming stocks are not growth stock as their business is very cyclical and they have to reinvent themselves every few years.

ATVI recovered well because with WoW it has a business less cyclical and it was able to keep being profitable during that time. And ATVI is more like a utility company than a video gaming company. They have regular profits, they pay a dividend and they do huge stocks buy back which help keep maintain the stock price...

TTWO did well because it demonstrated that it was not as much a one man pony show as it was in the past ( Read Dead Redemption, L.A Noire and NBA2K have been doing very very well these last few years). And TTWO is still a good acquisitions target which is keeping the price high, I'm not sure who would be interested in buying but if I had the money and I was to buy a gaming company, TTWO would be the one...

As for the TTWO spike, my original target was 17$ but with the recent market rally I can now see the stock going as high as 20$. If the stock spikes the day they announce GTA5 release date I will sell that day, if it doesn't I might wait until the week the game actually releases..( I've seen the stock spike as much as 8% up on those kinds of occasions, keep in mind that some of the GTA5 expectations are already priced into the current stock price so the spike could be lower).

No matter what I doubt I will keep my TTWO stocks much past the actual GTA5 release date.

I think there is one important thing people have to keep in mind when talking of video gaming stocks though, especially on this site.
You can not buy stocks with your heart, you have to buy them with your mind.
It's not because you like the Wii that Nintendo stock is necessary a good buy.

Like I said earlier, I hate Apple, I don't own any of their product and I think they are becoming way too arrogant ( remember that 1984 commercial in the 80s ? I think it could very well apply to them now).
On the other hand I positively love Amazon, I have a kindle, a kindle fire, I buy a tonns of e-boonks, I am a prime member, I have an Amazon rewards credit card.
Yet I own a lot of Apple stock and no Amazon stock.. And financially this is the right thing right now...

Okay, so important points are the cyclical patterns in the VG market (usually spikes at the start of the gens), economical resessions, other more stable businesses (MMOs), stock handling (ATVI's example), game announcements, and other factors we still will discuss as we go.

We'll keep an eye on the TTWO stocks and take a snapshot after the release at end of 2012, mid 2013, and see how the pattern goes. The 2005 spike is more gradual, while the 2008 spike is really a surge, so selling after a pattern like that would be perfect. Odds are the 2008 pattern will repeat instead of the 2005 one, but we'll keep an eye on it.

@buying from the mind rather than the heart. I 100% support that post. It's about business, not about preference. But, we still need to develop a good gut and then learn to trust it. Even then, gut =/= heart.

Saw in the news Nintendo was up around 2% the other day. Looks like people finally realized that their minds are fickle.

So basically the last 3 years have been disastrous for many publishers (except for Zynga and Actiblizzard for the most part). Should be no surprise there. High development costs and languishing Wii/DS software sales are likely the cause. Hopefully development costs for the eighth gen aren't even higher or we're going to be seeing a lot more gaming companies declaring bankruptcy. The model isn't sustainable for mid-level publishers and we're seeing the results in declining stock values and multiple closings.

Lots of the trends are affected by video game industry factors, and some are affected by factors from other realms. It would seem like the dip since 2008 may be economy related. The recession of 2008 didn't help things on a global scale, and of course it didn't happen too close to gen start, so gen start couldn't offset it I'm thinking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-2000s_recession

Hey Seth, do you have a source, I'm trying to maintain a list.

"Some laggard stocks rose. Nintendo, which shed
more than half of it value last year, jumped 2.9 percent. "

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/16/markets-japan-stocks-idUSL2E8DG0AN20120216

You can see the bump in their stock on Yahoo

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=NTDOY.PK+Interactive#symbol=ntdoy.pk;range=1d;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined;

However, while looking for the link I found this link from another source only stating 1.3 percent increase.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/global-markets/nikkei-eases-from-6-month-high-sentiment-stays-upbeat/articleshow/11910381.cms

I believe Reuters is probably more right than indiatimes site.  Not sure if one site counted after hours trading or what.

Thanks!

The last 3 years have been disatrous for most of the stock market, video games aren't really the exception there but more like the rule.

Look at GE, the benchmark for the US industry.