Top 10 movies that offer financial advice

Even if you don’t believe in Gordon Gekko’s Wall Street mantra ‘Greed is good’, tinsel town may still have a thing or two to teach you when it comes to what not to do in business and life.

There are numerous celluloid pearls of wisdom that translate to real life, and some that can help you make – or save, as the case may be rude cash.

With that and your best interest in mind – in mind, Emirates 24|7 has compiled the DDIY (Don’t Do It Yourself) toolkit of the top 10 films that offer sound financial advice in addition to entertainment.

Heed or ignore the advice at your own risk!

#10 The Secret of My Succe$s

This 1987 American comedy starring Michael J. Fox and Helen Slater was produced and directed by the late Herbert Ross (best known for Footloose). The film shows how a fresh finance grad turns misfortune into opportunity after being laid off from his job before he even starts working.

The character, played by Fox, assumes a false identity – works as two different executives in the same office – with one character falling in love with a colleague and the other having an affair with the owner’s wife.

A bizarre sequence of events later, he ends up taking over not only the company he works for, but also potential suitors, with the protagonist seemingly living happily ever after with both the women. One piece of humble advice, though: don’t try it at home – or office!

#9 The Firm

Crushing debt, a lemon of a car, a brother in jail, another dead in war, a tough childhood – all the makings of a criminal, you’d think.

But no, the movie is actually about this young lawyer who joins a prestigious law just as he is about to sit his Bar exam. Seduced by the money and gifts showered on him by ‘the firm’, he is totally oblivious to the more sinister side of his company. Then, two associates are murdered and the FBI contact him, asking him for information and suddenly he finds his life ruined.

He has Hobson’s choice – work with the FBI, or stay with the firm, which in fact is linked to the mafia. Only, the lawyer decides to follow his own plan, which makes him the target of both the FBI and the mafia. What would you do in such a situation? Tell you what, don’t answer that.

#8 Trading Places

A modern-day take on the Mark Twain classic Prince and the Pauper, this movie, staring Eddy Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, is about a snobbish commodities investor and a homeless street hustler who find their positions reversed as part of a bet by two callous millionaires – now that’s going to be entertaining (and perhaps educating), isn’t it?

The storyline involves brothers Mortimer and Randolph Duke who enjoy a little wager now and then. For the latest bet, they engineer establishing a common criminal as a successful businessman. The criminal is given the job and home of the businessman, who in turn is set up for crimes he didn't commit – brothers Duke do all this just to find out if he resorts to crime once he’s lost his rich environment and friends.

Predictably (in Hollywood, the good guys win – always), it eventually works out to the liking of both the prince and the pauper in the end, and the wagering brothers get a lesson in humility – a very expensive one on that. If only life was that fair – and God’s scriptwriter was based in tinsel town – thousands of Ponzi scheme victims might have had a different fate.

#7 Glengarry Glen Ross

This Jack Lemmon-, Al Pacino-, Kevin Spacey- and Ed Harris-starrer was adapted by David Mamet from his acclaimed 1984 Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning play of the same name.

The film depicts two days in the lives of four real estate salesmen and how they become desperate when the corporate office sends a representative to ‘motivate’ them by announcing that, in one week, all except the top two salesmen will be fired.

A series of events then lead the desperate salespeople scrambling to vainly reach that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, with some devastating consequences – A perfect lesson in what not to do in desperation.

#6 The Game

This Michael Douglas-starrer thriller is intriguing and unpredictable right till the very end. The film is about a wealthy financier who gets a strange birthday present from his wayward brother: a live-action game that consumes his life.

The movie, which has a happy ending (despite the protagonist jumping off a multi-storey building after shooting his brother) has some absolutely strange sequences and a volatile storyline – art mimics life, you might say – and the moral of the story, if there was one, is that life is too precious to be counted in coins.

#5 Boiler Room

A 2000 American drama, written and directed by Ben Younger, and starring Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel, Nia Long, Ben Affleck et al. The film focuses on the thin line that separates what happens in an illegal casino and in a go-go brokerage firm.

Turns out, the illegal casino might have been a better bet for the 19-year-old college dropout, who despite making a killing at the firm ends up in the clutches of the FBI, and manages to break free only after turning the firm’s dirty secrets over to the agency in return for federal immunity for himself and his father – a federal judge himself.

Finance without ethics will lead you on the wrong side of the law – this movie and the Madoff scam are proof enough.

#4 Rogue Trader

Remember Nick Leeson, the original rogue trader (before Bernard Madoff took that title off him)? Well, this reel-life version of real-life events recounts Leeson’s exploits while he was a trader in the early 1990s for Barings Bank, and whose risky bets brought down the 233-year-old institution that, among other assets, housed the finances of the British Royal Family, including HM the Queen.

If, at your own firm, you find yourself in charge of multiple trading accounts that are supposed to act as checks and balances on each other, do the smart thing and walk away, or you might end up as the protagonist of such a movie, perhaps author a similar tome to Leeson’s ‘Rogue Trader: How I Brought Down Barings Bank and Shook the Financial World’, and become, in Leeson’s own words, “one of the world's most in-demand conference and after dinner speakers.”

Tempting, eh? You’d probably do good to remember that the current rogue trader is serving a 150-year prison sentence, and his son committed suicide this month, on the second anniversary of Madoff Sr’s arrest.

#3 Other People’s Money

A perfect clue to what your and mine cash stacked in bank accounts can do to the wider corporate world is used unscrupulously. The movie, starring Danny DeVito, Penelope Ann Miller and Gregory Peck, is about corporate raider Lawrence Garfield (DeVito), a.k.a. ‘Larry the Liquidator’, always looking for the next big score.

Things heat up when Larry puts his sights on a publicly traded company and a major employer in a small Rhode Island town. Trying to stave off the hostile takeover, Jorgy, the owner of the target firm, hires his stepdaughter, a lawyer. Before long, Larry becomes involved in a complicated game of cat-and-mouse in which he and the daughter each struggle to maintain the upper hand.

As he closes in on his goal – taking over the firm which he then intends to strip and sell off in parts – Larry has to decide which he lusts after more: money or the lawyer. A must-see movie, if only to study the fine line separating shareholder optimisation from stakeholder optimisation – even if you aren’t responsible for M&A at your firm.

#2 Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

If the original ‘Wall Street’ was about warning what individual and collective greed could lead to, the sequel is about the good hidden in the evil, and came this year, at a time when the world economy is experiencing a horrific hangover of the most extravagant parties of yesteryears.

The movie’s plot revolves around a young Wall Street trader who partners with disgraced former Wall Street corporate raider Gordon Gekko as the global economy teeters on the brink of disaster. Their mission is two-tiered: To alert the financial community to the coming doom, and to find out who was responsible for the death of the young trader’s mentor.

Hindsight, they say, is 20/20. While it’s nice to know what got us ‘here’, it is always better to know what will get us outta here. Sadly, this movie – or any of he world’s economists – fails to prescribe a pill that works (as yet) for the global slowdown.

#1 Pay It Forward

The expression ‘pay it forward’ is used to describe the concept of asking that a good turn be repaid by having it done to others instead of returning the favour to the original doer. In contract law, typically there are two parties but there is the concept of third party beneficiaries. Pay it forward merely applies this contract law concept so that third party beneficiary be a stranger to the creditor (or obligee).

This Kevin Spacey, Haley Joel Osment and Helen Hunt-starrer is about a young boy who attempts to make the world a better place after his teacher gives him that chance. The assignment: think of something to change the world and put it into action.

The protagonist – a young boy played by Joel Osment, conjures the notion of paying a favour not back, but forward – repaying good deeds not with payback, but with new good deeds done to three new people. His efforts to make good on his idea bring a revolution not only in the lives of himself, his mother and his physically and emotionally scarred teacher, but in those of an ever-widening circle of people completely unknown to him.

This is one advice that, if followed by even a small minority of people in the world, has the potential to make the world – and not just the financial world – a much better place to live for future generations. Dare to be the one to start this movement today?

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