10 English Movies To Watch About Stock Markets And Trading

It’s said that the stock market may or may not be your place of work, but it is definitely a classroom where you can learn about life more than anywhere else.

The financial markets are where life is fast-paced, and the stakes are as high as the skyscrapers of Wall Street, and the quest for success in this dog-eat-dog environment sets the scene for adrenaline-rushed scenarios mingled with emotions. No wonder, then, that the stock market has often starred in many a Hollywood blockbuster.

Not only are they entertaining beyond measure, but movies based around the market also have a lot to teach both stock traders and non-traders about the market and the people that work there daily, their lives, pressures, and how they handle them. Here’s a list of 10 films about the stock market for your next binge:

1. The Big Short (2015)

Perhaps the best-recognized film with a plotline based in and around the stock market, The Big Short is entertaining, ingenious, and educational for both a market-oriented and non-market audience.

The plot revolves around the build-up of the 2007-08 financial meltdown, the epicenter of which was Wall Street. It was the subprime housing loan and credit bubble burst which took down one of the biggest banks, the Lehman Brothers bank, but the ripples were felt around the world. It also attempts to explain the complex financial terminology for the audience to follow the film.

2. The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013)

Genius, greed, lust, avarice, rush – and much more in this fascinating Martin Scorsese number starring one of his go-to guys, Leonardo DiCaprio. The Wolf of Wall Street is no less than a roller-coaster ride into the bright palaces and dark corners that the stock market can lead one to.

It’s based on the life of Jordan Belfort, a stock trader who struck fortune in the market, starting with penny stocks and then sliding into the deep recesses of excesses.

3. Too Big To Fail (2011)

If The Big Short showed the 2008 financial crisis from an investor’s perspective, Too Big To Fail, the 2011 adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book of the same name brought to light the travails of the Treasury Secretary. And what he had to go through to keep the Lehman Brothers bank, one of the biggest players in the stock market, from going bust and affecting millions, maybe billions, of other investors. This docudrama is a must watch to grasp in entirety the 2008 fall of the markets.

4. Floored (2009)

There was once a time when the NYSE trading floor was packed with clamoring trading sharks, cunning stock market players with an appetite for raking in a lot of money in a lot less time. Traders now might be unfamiliar with those times, but this documentary shows how trading was revolutionized and democratized with the advent of technology, like computers and stock trading API, and how these traders adapted to it.

It’s a potpourri of success stories about the traders who managed to stay afloat and the hard-luck anecdotes of those who found it difficult to keep abreast of times.

5. Wall Street (1987)

Bud Fox, a small-time stockbroker, keeps pestering money roller Gordon Gekko for parlance, to learn his ways which Gekko used to conquer the stock markets, but is denied. On his 40th attempt to reach Gekko, Fox is granted an audience, and there it begins, Fox’s chase for not the riches, but the game, the rush that earning in the stock market brings once he tastes it. What follows is a series of bad decisions made in the name of being the best in the market.

6. Boiler Room (2000)

How do you become a millionaire by seemingly assisting people in their own dreams of being millionaires? Boiler Room shows how: By selling them this dream, by making it play in front of their eyes like a movie. All it takes is a phone and just the right attitude to sell baloney on a call. This is Jim’s business, selling low-rated, junk stocks to people who do not want them in the promise of making them rich. This is how disasters and dreams are made in the market.

7. Margin Call (2011)

Margin Call explores the moral dilemma that stares at a company CEO when he, along with company officials, discovers that the market is teetering on a very tight rope, just moments away from collapsing into the abyss of the 2008 financial crisis.

What should the firm do? Dump the worthless bonds to save itself, or pledge allegiance to its customer base and perhaps take a dive for the worse with them?

8. Inside Job (2010)

While most films on the stock market crash of 2008 focus on storytelling, this one is more political and research-based. It can be deemed a critique on the United States administration and bankers in places high up on how they manufactured, hid, and ultimately profited off other smaller investors in the making of the crisis.

9. 25 Million Pounds (1996)

25 million pounds is a great story depicting one of the most shocking frauds that the financial world has seen. Barings Bank was a name synonymous with financial success in the stock markets back in 1980s and 90s, when London was the market hub. Enter Nick Leeson, a clerk that the bank sent to their Singapore office to trade on the Singapore SGX. What follows is a string of bad, unscrupulous trades, and a long trail for hiding them.

10. Becoming Warren Buffett (2017)

The title is pretty self-explanatory. This documentary is a must-watch for any person trying to make it big in the market. It delves into the making of the shrewd and meticulous investor that Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, has turned out to be.

Conclusion

Learning about the stock market does not always have to be via books and trading. You can assimilate a lot of information about it, and about the happenings in the market and investors, by watching good films made based on this industry. While feature films are preferred, documentaries showing the mechanism of the market, about new, ground-breaking tech like AI-driven APIs (like Alpaca API), are binge-worthy in their own right.