Want to feel the rush of working at the heart of the financial world? Start with a good movie. The best stock trading movies can transport us right onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. These must-watch finance movies put you in a place where you can’t help but want to be part of that high-adrenaline community of stockbrokers, investment bankers, and hedge fund managers.
But be careful what you wish for – it’s a cut-throat world on the Street. Between 5 to 6 billion shares are traded on the American stock market on a daily basis. Those trades make great fortunes, misfortunes, and financial meltdowns in some serious cases.
We list 9 of the best stock trading movies that tell the craziest stories from the financial industry. Most of them based on real-life events, others so convincing they might as well be. Most importantly, all of these movies have a takeaway on how to start trading stocks that aspiring investors can draw a lesson from.
Read on to find out more about the best stock trading movies.
Disclaimer: We tried to leave out big spoilers – but, for ultimate viewing pleasure, you might want to watch the movies before continuing this read.
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Here’s an iconic stock market movie that defined the genre and the stereotype stockbroker. While this 1987 depiction of Wall Street featuring Michael Douglas and a young Charlie Sheen sought to denounce the excesses of the stock market and its amoral traders, it ironically inspired generations of investors to become the next Gordon Gekko in their world of finance.
Director Oliver Stone’s Wall Street follows Bud Fox, an ambitious young stockbroker who becomes entangled with Gordon Gekko, a rich and unapologetic corporate robber. Bud is seduced by Gekko’s world of power and wealth and engages in insider trading and other unethical practices. As Bud climbs the ladder of success, he faces moral dilemmas that force him to question his values and loyalties.
“I look at a hundred deals a day. I pick one.” – Gordon Gekko
Gordon Gekko’s famous “greed is good” speech teaches you a lesson, albeit not the one Gekko intended. His words capture the movie’s central theme – Wall Street examines how greed motivates people but also leads to their downfall. The movie clearly shows that greed is, in fact, bad.
For all of Gekko’s obvious shortcomings, his business prowess is noteworthy. Some of the advice the battle-hardened stock trader shares can help investors find success, like his take on speculation being akin to gambling and not a smart thing to do when trading. Instead, Gordon emphasises the value of information as “the most precious commodity”.
P.S. The sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a great watch, too.
Want to learn how to take advantage of a stock market crash? Then this is a good movie for you. One of the best stock trading movies ever made, Adam McKay’s The Big Short features a convincing Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt as they bring history’s biggest bet against the financial system to the big screen. The movie is based on author and financial journalist Michael Lewis’ same-titled book.
“The Big Short” (2015) follows a group of financial outsiders who predict the 2008 housing market crash. The film weaves together the stories of Michael Burry, Jared Vennett, Mark Baum, and young investors Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley as the rogue traders each discover the instability of real estate mortgage-backed securities and bet against the market through credit default swaps. As they dig deeper, they uncover widespread fraud and corruption in the financial system.
“It’s two simple questions: Is there a bubble? And if there is, how exposed are the banks?” – Hedge fund manager Steve Baum
(Quick definition of a ‘stock market bubble’: A stock market bubble is when market participants drive stock prices higher to levels that don’t reflect actual value, then the market ‘bubble bursts’, dropping prices down to reality.)
Apart from being a fun explainer on the 2008 financial crisis, CDOs (thanks Anthony Bourdain’s seafood stew), and credit default swaps, there’s a sinister takeaway at the movie’s ending – financial institutions and the economy are set up to fail big, again. But that’s not the only takeaway.
The Big Short greatly exemplifies a few key lessons:
This one is another of the best stock trading movies covering the 2008 housing bubble. First-time director J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call follows the inside workings of a large investment bank during the financial meltdown. It’s not just Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, and Demi Moore that make Margin Call a great watch – its realistic portrayal of high-stakes Wall Street operations is especially gripping.
Margin Call revolves around a 24-hour period at a major investment bank during the start of the 2008 financial crisis. After a risk analyst discovers that something big is about to happen (i.e. financial meltdown) and the firm is in imminent danger of collapsing due to overleveraged assets, a series of meetings ensues where both stakes and emotions run high.
“Sometimes in an acute situation such as this, often, what is right can take on multiple interpretations.” – Jared Cohen
Margin Call’s biggest takeaway is not so much technical but is the importance of ethical decision-making in high-pressure financial situations. There’s nothing like a financial crisis to force individuals and institutions to choose between self-preservation and moral responsibility.
Margin Call makes for a cautionary tale for investors. In highlighting the systemic issues in the financial industry that often incentivise risky behavior and short-term thinking, the movie stresses the importance of risk management.
James Dearden’s Rogue Trader is a biographical story that you can count among the best stock market movies. Not because of the movie’s quality (because it has its flaws) or Ewan McGregor’s stellar performance – but for the real events the movie is based on.
Rogue Trader tells the true story of Nick Leeson, an ambitious young trader at Barings Bank who is flown to Singapore to manage futures trading. Leeson is at first successful, but soon begins making illicit trades to recoup mounting losses. Spoiler: Nick Leeson’s risky bets spiral out of control and eventually lead to the collapse of Barings Bank, one of Britain’s oldest financial institutions.
“I, Nicholas Leeson, have lost 50 million quid… IN ONE DAY!” – Nick Leeson
Leeson’s attempts to cover up initial losses by creating a secret “error account” led to increasingly risky trades and, incredulously, the single-handed collapse of a centuries-old bank. Rogue Trader and the true story of Nick Leeson highlight the absolute need of transparency and accountability in trading and financial operations in general.
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is many investors’ favorite finance flick. Leonardo Dicaprio brilliantly portrays a greedy and adrenaline-fueled Jordan Belfort as he runs a boiler-room scam making huge fortunes from worthless penny stocks.
“The Wolf of Wall Street” follows Jordan Belfort, a young stockbroker who gets rich in the late 1980s and 1990s through illegal penny-stock trade with his brokerage firm, Stratton Oakmont. The film shows Belfort’s lavish lifestyle of drugs, sex, and excess when the FBI comes knocking and his decadent world starts to unravel.
“Without action, the best intentions in the world are nothing more than that: intentions.” – Jordan Belfort
For all the laughs this film evokes, its message is dead serious. Jordan Belfort’s life might seem fantastic at surface level, but The Wolf of Wall Street shows that success without ethics is ultimately hollow. Despite his wealth and power, Belfort’s life spirals out of control due to drug addiction and legal troubles.
But there’s a positive lesson here, too. Jordan Belfort is a self-made man with a ferocious determination to become successful. It’s why he’s still such a popular public figure today. Anyone wanting to make a buck in the stock market as badly as Belfort will have the odds in their favor.
This documentary from director Alex Gibney is a powerful portrayal of the corporate and individual greed that lay at the foundation of what was once America’s seventh-biggest corporation.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” tells the inside story of Enron Corporation. Follow the rise and fall of Enron and get to know its wildly unethical execs, like Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, as they use fraudulent accounting practices, market manipulation, and corporate corruption to inflate the company’s value. The film chronicles the spectacular collapse of Enron in 2001, which resulted in massive job losses, wiped out retirement savings, and criminal trials for its C-suite leaders.
It’s wild to think that Enron manipulated energy markets and created artificial shortages under the eye of regulatory institutions and with banks and financial institutions complicit to Enron’s fraudulent practices.
While not necessarily a stock trading movie, there’s an important lesson for investors. In showing how investors and analysts failed to scrutinize Enron’s finances, the documentary reminds us to DYOR (do your own research) and get down to the nitty-gritty of a company’s financials before investing.
There’s rarely been a bigger scam artist in the history of Ponzi schemes than Bernie Madoff. The 2010 documentary by Jeff Prosserman is a full account of his exploits through the eyes of the financial analyst who exposed him.
Chasing Madoff chronicles Harry Markopolos’ decade-long quest to expose Bernie Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme. As a financial analyst, Markopolos quickly recognised that Madoff’s impossibly consistent returns must be fraudulent. The documentary film follows Markopolos and his small team as they gather evidence and make repeated attempts to alert the SEC and other authorities to Madoff’s fraud.
Chasing Madoff is a great introduction to the murky world of Ponzi schemes and learning how to recognise one. Like in the Enron documentary, the obvious lesson stock traders can learn here is to do proper research and critically look into a company’s financials. Simply put: don’t fall for a Ponzi scheme!
Glenn Jordan’s 1993 Barbarians at the Gate is a tell-tale story of corporate greed and the classic account of the $31.1 billion leveraged buyout of food and tobacco corporation RJR Nabisco that took place in 1988.
Based on the true story of RJR Nabisco’s leveraged buyout, Barbarians at the Gate story follows F. Ross Johnson, the CEO of RJR Nabisco, as he attempts to take the company public through a leveraged buyout. Johnson’s plans are mixed up when other companies, led by Henry Kravis, start a bidding war for RJR Nabisco.
“If we try to outbid each other no matter who wins the company will be impossible to manage because the debt load would be crushing.” – F. Ross Johnson
Barbarians at the Gate depicts the corporate manoeuvres, inside jobs, and excesses that characterised Wall Street in the 1980s. It shows its viewers how a little insider manipulation can influence major financial transactions. The Nabisco buyout is a good case study of the critical role that thorough due diligence plays in major corporate transactions.
Boiler Room sees Vin Diesel as a nineteen-year-old college dropout turned broker in turn-of-the-century New York. The movie is the product of the first-time director (himself only 29 years old) who interviewed tons of brokers while writing the screenplay.
Seth Davis is a young college dropout running an illegal casino in his apartment. Davis joins a suburban brokerage firm called J.T. Marlin to impress his disapproving father. He quickly learns the firm’s aggressive and unethical sales tactics to push questionable stocks. As Seth racks up successes he also grows uncomfortable with the firm’s fraudulent practices.
“We don’t hire brokers here–we train new ones.” – Jim Young
Boiler Room is an instructional movie for aspiring investors. A successful Seth has to find a way through his newfound wealth, strained family relationships, and moral lows as he gets deeper into the world of high-pressure stock trading and the pump-and-dump strategies that manipulate stock prices.
The best stock trading movies aren’t just entertaining – they give a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the financial markets and the broker’s mind. If you’re done studying the nine movies mentioned above, we have a few more recommendations:
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