Paramount
The Wolf of Wall Street is a 2013 American biographical crime film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the titular stockbroker. It recounts Belfort’s life as an ambitious young stockbroker on Wall Street in the late 1980s, and how his firm traded fraudulently with Saudi Arabia’s national petroleum company. Belfort was convicted of fraud in 1998, and ordered to pay back victims $110 million; he subsequently paid $10 million. The film is based on Belfort’s memoir of the same name, and covers his career as a stockbroker in New York City and later in Long Island, along with his consequent involvement in securities fraud.
In 1985, Jordan Ross Belfort enrolls at Boston University where he sells (mostly penny stocks) at the school cafeteria. He makes junior year speaking assignments, but hasn’t done any real work, takes his study partner for granted, is manipulated by a woman, and is kicked out of school. At his father’s urging, Belfort enrolls at the New York University School of Business, where he excels, obtaining a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. He works as an assistant to a stockbroker and gains experience at Merrill Lynch as an underwriting salesman for Enron. Belfort lands his first job with the firm Hillstarter in mid-1986, where he sells penny stocks and executes telephone orders of IPO shares. and fails most of the tests. He is kicked out of the university but the stockbroker industry attracts him and he goes to work for a boiler room brokerage.
Jordan soon learns that sales for this job involve cold calling clients throughout the United States and selling stocks, regardless of the commission or knowledge about the company. When he meets Mark Hanna, it’s love at first sight.
About exchange trading i.e. investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), leading to arrests and convictions on Wall Street. Belfort’s motivational speaking skills lead to the formation of his own company, Stratton Oakmont, a NASDAQ-listed brokerage firm, which he opens with Mark Hanna and Donny Azoff, his second in command. The firm is a boiler room where the salesman makes cold calls to potential clients and pushes stocks on them. Clients include doctors, dentists, psychologists, lawyers, accountants, and stockbrokers themselves. Jordan buys a mansion in the Hamptons and moves his family to New York. He hires Danny Porush as his head trader.
Stratton trades penny stocks with little money on hand but soon starts trading blue-chip stocks with little success.
In conclusion, Belfort and his company start doing business in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East from London to São Paulo. His push into the Middle East is not well received. When clients ask about his returns, he claims that the market is on a bull run and makes a speech to them in which he claims that for every dollar the market drops 50 cents comes back up.
Belfort’s success attracts other boiler room operators, who call themselves ‘sell-side research shops”. Their purpose is to promise unrealistic returns and take advantage of naive brokers with limited knowledge of stocks or little regulation by NASDAQ. These firms provide false information on behalf of their employers and create unrealistic trading records.
