In my opinion these are the twelve top trading movies ever made based on popularity and entertainment value.
- The Big Short: This is my all-time favorite trading movie. It told the stories of three traders that bet against the housing market bubble and won big.
- Wall Street: A tale of all that is wrong with Wall Street insider trading.
- Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps: This is much better than the original, and tells the story of the comeback of Gordon Gekko.
- Trading Places: The classic comedy where commodity traders try to turn a street hustler into a trader.
- Margin Call: I really enjoyed this drama about traders inside an investment bank at the beginning of the 2008 financial meltdown. I wish this movie was longer.
- Floored: This movie did a good job of showing how the trading life can turn your life upside down, or for some people, it can make you fabulously wealthy.
- Boiler Room: This movie is about how a boiler room operation works by hawking non-existent stocks and bonds for non-existent companies to enrich the ‘brokers’ peddling these worthless stocks.
- The Wolf of Wall Street: This is at times a raunchy story of greed based on the writings of Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker in penny stocks convicted of market manipulation. This movie may contain more drugs, sex, nudity, and cursing than you see in the other movies, but it’s ultimately a comedy and works as pure entertainment.
- Rogue Trader: The story of Nick Leeson, an ambitious investment broker who single handedly bankrupted Barings one of the oldest and most important banks in Britain.
- Too Big to Fail: This movie chronicles the financial meltdown of 2008 and centers on Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
- Barbarians at the Gates: This movie centered on the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. Audiences will be shocked at the incompetence and greed of Nabisco’s CEO F. Ross Johnson and the behind-the-scenes negotiations around this famous LBO.
- The Wizard of Lies: A movie about the fall of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme that robbed $65 billion from its investors. The story of the largest fraud in the history of the U.S.
