Tag: Playboy

The Playboy Mansion has Dropped in Value Just Like the Playboy Stock

by Fred Fuld III

Is the centerfold industry now passé ?

At one time, Playboy Magazine was the leading men’s magazine.

The publisher, Playboy Enterprises, was publicly traded for many years and had one of the most popular stock certificates, featuring a vignette of a nude Playboy Bunny, Willy Rey.

It also had a picture of the bunny logo, and Hugh Hefner’s signature printed on it.

Source: Author’s Collection

Hugh Hefner later took the company private.

After Hugh Hefner passed away, the company again began publicly trading through a reverse merger with a SPAC. It now trades as PLBY Group (PLBY).

Unfortunately, the stock hasn’t performed so well, trading at 2.68 at the beginning of 2023 and ending up at a dollar a share by the end of the year, a drop of over 62%.

But what about real estate? The Playboy Mansion?

The former Playboy Mansion, located at 10236 Charing Cross Rd, in Los Angeles, near Beverly Hills, was purchased on August 16, 2016 for $100,000,000. It is now only worth $34,166,291 according to Redfin, a drop of 65%.

This 14,217 square foot home has six bedrooms and eight bathrooms, and is located on five acres of land.

Which do you think has a better chance of recovering, the stock or the mansion?

Disclosure: Author didn’t own any of the above at the time of publication.

The Playboy Playmate Stock Picking Contest

by Fred Fuld III

Did you know that Playboy Enterprises, back when it was publicly traded as the previous entity, held stock picking contests for its Playmates (often referred to as Bunnies).

Hugh Hefner took Playboy private in May of 2011. It is now public again with the name PLBY Group (PLBY).

Back in 2006, the contest was won by Deanna Brooks, who was Playboy’s Miss May 1998. She won the Playboy Playmate Stock Picking Contest with a return on her stock portfolio of 43.43% for the year. Her return was 10% higher than the second highest contestant.

Another trait that set Deanna Brooks apart from the other contestants was that she was the oldest of the contestants. Her investments were as follows:
YAMANA GOLD (AUY) 99.39%
HAUPPAUGE DIGITAL (HAUP) 43.98%
IBM (IBM) 18.19%
PETROLEO BRASILEIRO (PBR) 44.51%
PFIZER (PFE) 11.06%

The return of 43.43% in 2006 was pretty sexy, since the Dow Jones industrials rose only 16.29%, the S&P 500 added just 13.62%, and the Nasdaq was up only 9.52% during that same year.

(Blast from the Past)

 

Disclosure: Author didn’t own any of the above at the time that article was written.

Think Baseball Card Shares are Strange? How About NFT Investing!

by Fred Fuld III

A few weeks ago, I published an article about investing in shares of baseball cards. Amazingly, some of these sports cards have had outrageously successful returns recently.

For example, shares of a Tiger Woods 1996 Sports Illustrated for Kids PSA 10 card was offered on February 28, 2021 on a IPO at $10 per share. On April 7, there was a buyout offer of $13.67 per share, a 36.7% increase in less than two months.

An even better example is the Wilt Chamberlain 1961 Fleer Rookie Card PSA 9 card which received a buyout offer of a 66.5% premium over the $10 IPO price!!!

So what is the next great investment sector? Maybe it is the NFTs. If you are not sure what an NFT is, it stands for non-fungible token. An NFT is is a unit of ownership of a unique, generally digital, item that is recorded on a blockchain. The item is not interchangeable, however the NFT is tradeable.

Here are some examples of what an NFT can represent. It can represent digital art. The artist Beeple created a digital artwork called Everydays: The First 5000 Days. The NFT for the art was auctioned off at $69 million through Christie’s.

The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, sold an NFT of his first tweet for $2.9 million.

NFT’s can also represent music, items in games, and digital sport cards.

Probably the most unusual NFT is skin. The Croatian tennis star, Oleksandra Oliynykova, is offering an NFT for the lifetime rights to the upper part of her right arm.

Speaking of skin, even Playboy (PLBY) is getting into the NFT arena.

So far, there have been nine NFTs that have sold for over a million dollars. So what do you think? Worth investing in? Have anything you want to tokenize?

 

Disclosure: Author has a long option position in PLBY.