June 2 , 2012- A Movie to Watch Out For – The Wolf of Wall Street

On the couch with Jordan Belfort

“Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered.”

Coming soon this year, Leonardo Dicaprio will star as Jordan Belfort. He’s the real inspiration of Boiler Room.  The filming is set to start on August 2012.

Read his wikipedia below 😀 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Belfort

http://www.jordanbelfort.com/

Jordan Belfort —> Known for	His history as a stock market manipulator and boiler roomoperator.

1.) “I was a very smart kid, I was a great salesman and I was driven to make money,” he says now. “Those were God-given assets. But I had some God-given detriments, mainly that I was emotionally immature, insecure and I had a predisposition to instant gratification.

2.) “My role models were Michael Douglas’s character, Gordon Gekko, in the movie Wall Street and Richard Gere from Pretty Woman. The best of everything – the presidential hotel suite, the Ferrari, the house on the beach, the gorgeous blonde, the expensive wine, the art auctions, the yacht – the ultimate Wall Street rich guy.”

3.)”It was about becoming numb to what’s right and wrong,” he says.

“The first time I took a cash kickback, I was kind of nervous and it was just five or 10 thousand dollars. Before long I was getting millions of dollars and it seemed like it was OK. ‘Everyone on Wall Street does that’ was how I rationalised it.”

4.) Belfort was earning $50 million a year, once reportedly making $12 million in three minutes. In the ultimate compliment, the Mafia were sending people to Stratton on “work placements” to learn how it was done.

5.) Except that in finance, the additional problem is the way the money is made, says Belfort. “You make all this money but there’s nothing attached to it. You make your money buying and selling the ingenuity of other people.”

There’s an “emptiness” to that sort of money, he says. So the bankers and brokers try to fill the void with material possessions – and when that’s not enough, with drugs. Belfort claims heavy drug-taking is “pervasive” on Wall Street.

6.)  For research, he has been talking to a top contact at Goldman Sachs on how traders “securitised these loans, how they essentially dressed up subprime packages to make them look good enough to buy as credit-worthy”. It sounds rather like what went on at Stratton.

7.) Jordan Belfort: You know it’s a question that I’ve asked myself a thousand times because that’s the true insanity of it all. And at the heart of it is this – there is a very fine line between ambition and greed. To be ambitious to go out and want to stake your claim in the world and make a lot of money, that’s wonderful, that’s the heart of capitalism, that’s the heart of success. 

But when that ambition crosses over to greed which really means at it’s heart is just making as much as you can, as fast as you can and not caring about who gets hurt and the consequences and it’s all about you know me, me, me, now, now, now, now – in the end that will destroy you and that’s what happened.
I suffered from a disease called ‘more’. No matter how much I had, I wanted more. You don’t lose your ethics all at once. It happens very slowly and almost imperceptibly, you know you’re doing things right and one day you step over the line.

Read more here ( Confessions of the Wolf of Wall Street)

For serious readers, you can check both of his memoirs

1.) The Wolf of Wall Street

2.) Catching the Wolf of Wall Street

– See ya –

If these stuffs are your cup of tea, there are some very good films such as Overheard (Both 1 and 2).  You’ll learn a lot and love both films.

Read more about Overheard here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overheard_(film)

– Faceless Trader

P.S.

Let me know if there are some really good films (market related) in the comments section.  Thanks!