SOROPIA, ERIKA MAE B.

20000232800

AMACC PASIG

BSBA3

“THE WOLF OF WALL STREET”

The movie The Wolf of Wall Street" (2013) is one of the successful movies that was co-produced by
Leonardo DiCaprio, who also stars as the main actor, Jordan Belfort. In the movie, B. Bedford is a broker
who makes a fortune on Wall Street by opening his own company after working at several places and
selling shares. However, besides making a lot of money, he and his friends become totally new people
who get addicted to sex and drugs. Soon after, the FBI shut down his company because it was involved in
fraud. Even though the movie contains a lot of inappropriate elements and content, it is still considered a
great source for studying and analyzing some sociological concepts. There are many sociological concepts
that I have found in the movie, which I will discuss in the following essay. Interactionism is one of the
concepts displayed in the movie. Who will use this movie as a piece of content for research? Interactionists
tend to study this movie more than other sociologists. "Symbolic interaction theory is a micro-level
perspective that examines people's everyday behavior through the communication of knowledge, ideas,
beliefs, and attitudes." The concept is clearly shown in the movie: how Belfort changes his lifestyle
because he becomes well off: buying lavish things, using the money he makes for drugs, sex, and thrills,
and the way he treats and leads his workers.

The stereotype is another concept shown in the movie. Stereotyping is when one judges a group of people
who are different from him or her based on one’s own and others opinions. Belfort is a smart guy when
he first chooses his friends as a priority, who have just finished or never finished high school. This belief
comes from many people who have low education, especially those who never have degrees for jobs and
are therefore easy to control and must follow frameworks that their employers propose. The dress is
another example of a stereotype. In the entire movie, workers are made to wear suits whenever they are
at work. The way they dress boosts their self-esteem, making them look professional and skilled even
though they are not learned. Culture is also a concept in the movie. Cultures are the learned and shared
behaviors, values, beliefs, and objects of a particular group of people or society. By watching the movie,
audiences will have a view of American culture, knowing how people dress at work and home, how they
interact with each other, and what things are around them. To be specific, Belfort and his workers always
wear suits at work and casual clothes at home. That displays American culture. The film helped me
partially learn not only American culture but also the values and norms associated with it.

Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street" is abashed and shameless, exciting and exhausting, disgusting
and illuminating; it's one of the most entertaining films ever made about loathsome men. Its star,
Leonardo DiCaprio, has compared it to the story of the Roman emperor Caligula, and he's not far off the
mark.

Adapted by Terence Winter from the memoir by stockbroker Jordan Belfort, who oozed his way into a
fortune in the 1980s and '90s, this is an excessive film about excess and a movie about appetites, whose
own appetite for compulsive pleasures seems bottomless. It runs for three hours and was reportedly cut
down from four by Scorsese's regular editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. It's a testament to Scorsese and
Winter and their collaborators that one could imagine watching these cackling swine for five or ten hours
and still find them fascinating and our own fascination with them disturbing. This is a reptilian brain movie.
Every frame has scales.

The middle-class, Queens-raised Belfort tried and failed to establish himself on Wall Street in a more
traditional way we see his tutelage in the late '80s at a blue-chip firm, under the wing of a grinning
sleazeball played by Matthew McConaughey but got laid off in the market crash of 1987. He reinvented
himself on Long Island by taking over a penny stock boiler room and giving it an old-money name, Stratton
Oakmont, to gain the confidence of middle- and working-class investors. At its peak, per Wikipedia, "the
firm employed over 1000 stock brokers and was involved in stock issues totaling more than $1 billion,
including an equity raising for footwear company Steve Madden Ltd." Belfort and his company specialized
in "PUMP AND DUMP" operations: artificially blowing up the value of a nearly worthless stock, then selling
it at a big profit, after which point the value drops and the investors lose their money. Belfort was indicted
in 1998 for money laundering and securities fraud, spent nearly two years in federal prison, and was
ordered to pay back $110 million to investors he'd deceived.

While working at L.F. Rothschild in the 1980s, Belfort is quickly taught that a stockbroker’s only goal is to
make money for himself. Brokers seemed to focus on selling stocks and generating sales commissions,
instead of advising clients on the financial risk of an investment or suitability for their portfolio. Belfort
and his team are depicted as sales professionals, not financial ones, who are trained to sell investments
at the expense of the client. Today, it’s still debatable whether financial professionals should be held to a
fiduciary standard, requiring them to act in the best interest of a client, rather than simply providing a
product.

Penny stocks are low-priced stocks that do not trade on major stock exchanges and are issued by
companies that typically do not publish financial statements. These trade anywhere from a fraction of a
cent to a few dollars, and because the market capitalization, stock price, and the daily volume of these
stocks are quite low, they are highly vulnerable to manipulation. For example, a sudden large volume of
purchase or sale could cause the price to drop by triple-digits in a single day.

To Good to be true: Be your own Investment

As the saying goes if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Especially for beginners to the stock
market, it’s important to remain clear-headed about your investment decisions and do your own
research. Many of Belfort’s victims trusted him and invested all their life savings in ‘guaranteed’ stocks.
Even with an advisor, it’s useful to understand financial markets and strategies, perhaps by at first
investing small and diversifying your portfolio.

Legal standards are the rules which govern the financial sector; but while something can be legal, it may
not always be ethical. Belfort’s company was within the law when selling penny stocks, but not fully
disclosing the speculative nature of the stocks was completely unethical. While he started by simply
blurring this line, Belfort soon crossed the line and was convicted for not following securities regulations.
Ethical business practices are the foundation of trust and goodwill; it’s important to take responsibility for
your actions.
While perhaps not the best role model, Belfort shows that long-term success is not a straight road. He
experienced both failures and successes before reaching the height of his career on Wall Street. Losing
his job lead to him starting as a stockbroker, and even after going bankrupt and serving time in prison,
Belfort finished his sentence and turned his strength in sales and communications into a career as a
motivational speaker. Financial mistakes can be rectified and instead become lessons for success. The
most important step a person can take, is the next one.

SimTrade allows you to make mistakes in a simulated setting, without suffering the financial
consequences of trading with your personal funds. This course teaches you how to analyses the impact of
events on stock prices and understand important concepts like market efficiency. As well as theory, you
practice building a position, liquidating a position, and how to make the market. SimTrade is the best way
for you to take risks, make mistakes, and learn how to make the best decisions for your portfolio.