Abstract: This invention is a computer-aided method that allows individuals to finance and speculate via advance purchases on the success of films, and various other media projects. To fund their projects, producers transmit or upload a project offering, consisting of future copies of the project with embedded rights to potentially participate in future revenue streams, to a programmed server and the programmed server accepts bids from consumers in the form of reservations to purchase these future copies. The price of the future copies does not change, only the potential revenue split, as applied to all future copies, resulting in a yield auction. The yield auction stays open until consumers and producers arrive at a mutually acceptable revenue split and all available future copies have been reserved. At that time, a group debit occurs, debiting consumers for their future copies and the funds are made available to the producer to make their project.

Abstract: The present invention discloses a method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for a computer-implemented financial management system that permits the trading of securities via a network. A server computer receives buy and sell orders for derivative financial instruments from a plurality of client computers. The server computer matches the buy orders to the sell orders and then generates a market price through the use of a virtual specialist program executed by the server computer. The virtual specialist program responds to an imbalance in the matching of the buy and sell orders.