In my opinion these are the best stock market movies ever made based on popularity and entertainment value. There are also many lessons that can be learned from these movies about greed, fear, bubbles, and investing.
- The Big Short: This is my all-time favorite trading movie that explains a lot about the 2008 stock market and housing crash. It told the stories of three traders that bet against the housing market bubble and won big.
- Wall Street: A tale of 1980s Wall Street insider trading and the darker side of capitalism and stock market manipulation.
- Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps: This is an updated and modern version of Wall Street, and tells the continuing story of the original and the comeback of Gordon Gekko.
- Trading Places: The classic comedy where commodity traders try to turn a street hustler into a trader and shows the old 1980s live trading pits.
- 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. This is a type of a behind the scenes look at what crashed the stock market.
- 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 a cautionary tale. This movie works as pure entertainment and is not to be taken seriously.
- 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 leveraged buyout offer.
- 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. The biggest lesson is that real stock market returns are not as steady as his were in reality.
