Quite often we forget that it can still kick you in the teeth even if the market is in the center of a bull run. So the next time you look at your P&L and find out that you’ve had a poor day, switch off the laptop, hide your laptop, and relax while watching one of these four classics about the stock market movies, its shareholders, and those who are desperate to kill.
Boiler Room 2000 ‧ Drama/Crime-
This underrated film from 2000 follows Seth’s personality, performed by the very accomplished Giovanni Ribisi, as he learns about the ins and outs of selling speculative (and most probably fraudulent) penny stocks to what he calls “those suckers.” “Boiler Room” requires a deep dive into a fly-by-night brokerage company packed with hyper-aggressive young stock jocks peddling “sure to fail” shares into disproportionate shares. The “RECO” scene, superbly played by a pre-star Vin Diesel and a 28-year-old pre-megastar that you will recognize as Ben Affleck, is two of the highlights of the film.
Trading Places (1983)
Louis Winthorpe is an entrepreneur working for Duke and Duke’s commodity brokerage company owned by the Mortimer and Randolph Duke brothers. Now they’re bickering about the most trivial things and what they’re bickering about is whether it’s the environment or heredity of a person that determines how well they’re going to do in life. When Winthorpe bumps into a street hustler called Billy Ray Valentine and thinks he’s going to rob him, he’s detained him. Seeing how different the two men are, the brothers decide to make a wager as to what would happen if Winthorpe loses his job, his home, and is shunned by anyone he knows and if Valentine has been given the job of Winthorpe.
Trader (1987)
Related to finance and stock market filmed before the October 1987 crash on Wall Street, TRADER is a one-hour documentary by an intriguing person, Paul Tudor Jones II. It provides a scarcely seen perspective of futures trading and explains how this frenzied, extremely loaded marketplace works. Jones ‘ forecast that America is approaching the end of a 200-year bull market is also being examined. If he is correct— and he is almost always— this nation and the world will face unprecedented financial changes.
Wall Street 1987 ‧ Drama/Crime-
Bud, a junior stockbroker, likes to work with his idol, Gordon Gekko, and attempts to impress him by spying on well-known companies. But when Bud learns of the evil antics of Gordon, he is trying to ruin him.
A young and enthusiastic stockbroker is prepared to do anything to get to the top, including trading illegal inside details from a cruel and greedy corporate entrepreneur taking the youth under his wing.
Bud Fox is an ambitious stockbroker on the Wall Street of the 1980s, doing whatever he can to make his way up to the top. Admiring the authority of unsparing corporate raider Gordon Gekko, by offering insider trading, Fox entices Gekko to mentor him. As Fox gets embroiled in greed and underhanded schemes, his choices ultimately threaten his father’s livelihood. Fox questions his loyalties in the face of this dilemma.
