Things I Thunked #2

Hey welcome back to ‘Things I Thunked’.

Last week I had some great conversations with people that read the newsletter which was amazing. I did also have some beatings from relatives because of my swearing (which I’ve been forced to rectify)

Because of those conversations I have now committed to a second issue.

Last newsletter I mentioned I had a cool idea around investing that I wanted to share so here it is:

Search volume-based investing – This is something I’ve not seen talked about a lot or mentioned much online but to me it just seemed like it could work so I had to try it out.

I am using certain SEO tools and ‘Google Trends’ to notice trends in search volume for low market cap stocks. I do this because I noticed a trend between 5-year peaks in search volume and a stock price increase less than a month later. Which makes sense because I’m guessing when a lot of people are searching for a stock price often it’s because they are invested or are going to invest.

So, at high points on a few stocks that seemed to be trending upwards I bought in and waited for 1-3 weeks to see what happens. To my surprise this worked 5 out of 5 times I tried it.

I’m not exactly putting in massive amounts to test this theory out but as you can see, those are some pretty decent % returns in such a short period of time.

TRNX (Taronis Tech.) was actually up over 150% at one point during this test.

I know this isn’t enough testing to say for sure that it’ll work all the time and is far more likely to be a complete fluke but I’ll continue doing it and writing about it so we can find out together how often it works.

As I mentioned in the last newsletter, I bought a few hundred shares of Rolls-Royce and this upward search volume trend informed part of that decision.

If I had bought at the point the search volume started to rise (around September 27th last year), I would be up around 200% at the moment. I was a very late, but I still believe the search volume will continue to rise along with the stock price.

Since taking that screenshot the price has gone up over 8%.

In random news since the start of January, I’ve been giving eBay flipping a go. So far, it’s going pretty well with an average ROI of 45%.

One of my best purchases was a few of these Lego Ninjago 71714 sets which I bought at ASDA for £4.50 each and sold on eBay the same week for £18.50!

I am also now moving on to selling on Amazon. In fact, as I write this I’ve got 10 sets of Monopoly so that I can start the ‘un-gating’ process to be able to sell toys (Find out what ‘gating’ is on Amazon here).

Before I get onto a boring summary of a business idea, I would like to remind you that you can scroll up to the top of the page (I think I’m still not used to this newsletter malarky) and subscribe to this newsletter. That way you’ll get it emailed to you every time there is a new issue. Thanks in advance!

Other random thoughts. Recently I have been thinking a lot about how underutilised product placement in-game marketing is.

Examples of in-game product placement

There are plenty of examples of massive companies doing this kind of thing probably most well-known recently is McDonald’s appearing in Nintendo Switch game Splatoon.

Another example of what I’m talking about and how I think a platform for this kind of advertising could be massively useful is from 2008 during Barrack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Obamas campaign used in game billboards and posters to drive gamers to vote.

“The 18-to-34-year-old male is the mainstream demographic for the hard-core video gamer,” said Van Baker, an analyst for Gartner Inc., a technology market research firm in California. “They’re hard to get to because they don’t watch much TV and they don’t read a lot, so it’s a good venue to get that segment.”

The ads drew an average audience of 11.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Image from Autoblog.com

Statistica 2021

The number of new games added to Steam increases rapidly each year but the mainstream ways of marketing to this growing audience has always been crappy popups.

I think a platform that allows advertisers to bid on placements with game developers of all sizes would be an amazing way to reach an ever-growing audience and to help the thousands of small game developers monetise their hard work. Potentially a plugin for game engines that would allow developers to draw in ad placement spots would be pretty cool.

Thanks for reading!