Keeping up with the ‘virtual’ Kardashians: Glu’s big mobile bet

Earnings season rolls on with consumer discretionary companies like video gamemakers coming out with earnings. With the Nintendos, Sonys (SNE), and GameStops (GME) of the world reporting, there’s one company that will likely have many talking outside the world of the financial markets.

Glu Mobile (GLUU), the publisher of the massive mobile game hit, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, will be reporting quarterly earnings tonight. Wall Street is expecting the mobile app and gamemaker to report a loss of $0.06/share for the past quarter. Interestingly enough results from the smash Kardashian game will only have a marginal effect on last quarter’s results, since the game only came out on June 25th. Perhaps the company’s forward guidance will give investors something to cheer about.

One man who’s a little cautious with the mobile games story is Jonathan Hoenig of the Capitalistpig Hedge Fund.

“I’d worry about buying the stock right now. To me the Kardashians aren’t just like a flash in the pan, they ARE a flash in the pan… Very popular, very in the news, but that’s one of the reasons why I’d avoid buying GLUU," he says in the attached video. "We always talk about wanting to be contrarian, wanting to be where the news is not, this is very much in the news.”

Hoenig advises investors to avoid the whole mobile games industry in general, staying from other publishers like Zynga (ZNGA) and King Digital (KING), and paying up for bigger players in the interactive space.

“The season for these video game stocks is really over, at least for the short term. The names in the internet space that are doing well right now are the biggies, the Facebooks (FB), the Twitters (TWTR)… I think that’s where you want to be focusing in the space, not on these essentially one-hit wonders.”

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