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2019: Culmination of Avengers, Thrones, Starwars and Markets?

It's Avengers Mania across the board with movie breaking all records in multiple countries (even in non-English speaking countries like India and China) and already collected over $1.2 Billion in 3 days! That's a juggernaut which would rule the box-office for next few weeks and would easily cross $2 Billion in matter of days. Looking at similar "culmination" events, 2019 turning out to be year of culminations. Let's look at these:

  • Starwars: Started in 1983 and after 8 movies, final episode is coming Dec 2019. So this saga is wrapping up after 36 years of fan-mania. It would be interesting to see if it will break "End Game" records.
  • Avengers: It started with first Ironman Movie in May 2008. After 21 movies over 11 years "Avengers: End Game" brings all stories together. While this may be called as "End Game", I am sure Disney/Marvel will keep on churning new superhero movies. Now it's just matter of time, if there is Marvel and DC superheroes come together to save the galaxies at some time in future. Given expanding world of Disney, I won't be surprised if it happens over next few years
  • Game of Thrones: This expansive and most popular cable series started in 2011 and after budget of nearly $10 million per episode (means more than $500 million cumulatively), it will wrap up with movie style (1 hour and 20 min) runtime in May. Even in today's world of streaming and countless choices, GOT has created buzz similar to last season/episodes of MASH, Seinfeld etc. What's next? AT&T (which owns HBO) must be planning multiple spin-offs of GOT
  • Markets: Markets are on its 2nd longest bull-run and in Q2 it will become longest bull-run on record. While one can never predict when this bull-run will be over, it's reasonable to assume that as election cycle gathers momentum, we would see markets taking a pause in summer and potentially make one last run towards all-time highs towards end of 2019 before having a shallow bear phase in early 2020. Till then enjoy the ride since markets will reach all time highs with S&P potentially breaking 3000 in next few days.
There is something about the timing since coincidentally all of these started in Spring (Starwars: May 1983, Avengers: May 2008, GOT: Apr 2011 and Markets: Mar/Apr 2009). No wonder there is a term called "Spring Fever"

It's time to go and enjoy Avengers Movie!
/Shyam

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