Movies that deal with high finance.

There are very few movies that deal with the intricacies of high finance, and even novels often don't deal with that. I did a quick perusal of what books dealt with drama in finance, and many of them involved murder on Wall Street. By contrast, the books by the late Paul Erdman dealt with the nature of trading and banking, which is where the suspense is - he called the genre, "fi-fi" or "finance fiction".

I can think of only three movies that do the same - Trading Places, Dan Akroyd and Eddie Murphy, and Wall Street 1 and 2, with Michael Douglas.

Any thoughts?
 
Sounds like we need a screenwriter with a banking history to chime in :)


Also you didnt mention wolf of wallstreet..
this isn't quite as much 'drama in finance' but there are a ton of movies that use wallstreet as a plot device. such as Casino Royale the villain bets against the market and loses everyone elses money. so he has to join a poker tournament and play against james bond
 
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Good point about Wolf of Wall Street, but Casino Royale didn't focus on the selling forward as the main focus. The tension in the Bond movie, like all Bond movies, was the action and playboy romance. I guess, by the same token, Trading Places was also not focusing mainly on the selling forward, because it focused more on how people act when their roles in society are reversed, but it still did focus on the markets. Casino Royale only mentioned it briefly, then focused on gambling, which is not quite the same as financial suspense.
 
I've been working on one of those off and on for years, but never get it quite where I want it....

I'd also mention:

Arbitrage
Margin Call
The Big Short
Boiler Room (a personal favorite)
Rogue Trader (based on a true story that I remember VERY well)
The Smartest Guys in the Room (documentary, not quite as good as the book of the same name but still riveting)
 
I've been working on one of those off and on for years, but never get it quite where I want it....

I don't know about the other movies, but have you read Paul Erdman's novels? They were very popular in the 1970's and 1980's, and they would be a good source of fictional material on fi-fi.
 
No.
Having spent decades in that field, I'm not looking for fictional material beyond what I create from my own experiences.

I'm like that too. I'm in law now, and, when I complete my journey in this profession, I wish to move on and never come back. That's been the constant theme of my life, never to return to my previous place, and, the few times I did so, I regretted it. I think many of us are like that.
 
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