I believe it was very simple.
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silentman01 — 12 years ago(April 12, 2013 02:32 PM)
To be honest I don't think your point has much weight because if you remember that in a scene with Irons and Spacey they refer to each other as salesmen. I have worked in a financial firm before as a consultant and in our training, I remember our division head posed us with a question which strikes me to this day. He asked what was the most important thing about being a consultant/salesmen, I replied in the class that the most important thing is the ability to be able to ANALYZE the market. He told me (the division chief) that it was the LEAST important thing to know, the most important thing is building relationships.Consultants/Brokers build the relationships and the analysts are left with the job of analyzing packages suited to the client's specific needs. Very few brokers have a CFA, I would estimate probably 10% (if that) have it. The people you mentioned specifically (Tuld, Will and Sam) are people who follow into the first Category while it is the job of Sara Robertson and people like Eric whose job is to decipher the patterns and draw projections on these packages they sell. I practiced in Canada where if you passed the CSC (Canadian Securities Course) and held a job at a financial firm (such as Investor's Group), you were authorized to sell these packages if you received the proper registration from the MFDA and other organizations (depending on how many types of products you wanted to sell), for futures and options you would have to pass the DFC(Derivatives Fundamentals Course) to sell them. None of these courses are even 5% as hard as the CFA which is more popular among analysts. Thus, the movie actually seemed very realistic to me having worked in the business for a year. You also pointed out that the Head Engineer obviously knows and fully understands engineering, but engineers don't usually become the CEO of a construction company. I loved the movie but I also understand your concerns regarding the flaws that may make it implausible.
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di1an — 12 years ago(May 23, 2013 09:38 AM)
It wasn't just exposition - remember, Tuld (Irons) says "I didn't get here by being the smartest". My dad was a risk manager (EMBA, Cranfield) at Citigroup, London from 1984 right up until the crash in 2008, I watched this film with him and he said it was unbelievably accurate. I have a cousin (LSE, MFE) at RBS who said the same. Essentially the very senior people got their by means other than technical skills.
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Kiers77 — 12 years ago(August 17, 2013 02:11 PM)
I disagree somewhat with your point:
"The HEADS of a trading floor are going to understand the business"
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The problem was discovered by Risk Management. And their numbers and methodologies (eg, VaR) (RAROC) (Basel III Risk wtd capital) keep changing for different these kinds of reporting requirements: (US, Internal Performance, and BIS).
Plus, banking's a daily numbers game. I wouldn't expect the higher ups to know the intricate details of every spreadsheet that goes through every department. Yes, upper management get daily back office reports from each area, but I don't think the "keep it simple" remark is off base at all.
Not at all like say engineering or physics or the "hard sciences" where the theory is written in stone and empirical. Finance is all about variable human behavior.
Would you expect managers to know about the algorithms in HFT today? -
stant6 — 12 years ago(August 30, 2013 02:30 PM)
I don't know if others have said this, (but I agree that the heads would understand the data and its implications), but it was how the writers let the audience not get lost in the complicated jargon, so they used the "dumb" heads as their proxy.
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Bluefishtank2012 — 12 years ago(November 30, 2013 12:16 PM)
Well said
He was trying to get everyone on the lowest common denominator so he could take charge and tell him to sell.
It's easier to screw people over if ur dumb and don't have the brains to show heart -
gtbarker — 12 years ago(January 27, 2014 08:21 PM)
You have to remember this is a movie and they have devices to help introduce new or complex information to the layperson audience. What you have described is what they did here. Yes it was very clumsy, but that is why they do it and you see it in all sorts of films where doctors might be discussing treatment and one might say we need to get them on something to thin their blood right away and the other one will say something really dumb like why? And the reply will come back because if we don't they could have another stroke and this time it could be fatal. This is just a dumb example I made up, but I have heard pretty similar in the past and it makes me want to start eating my own face. But there you have it - that's why the bosses had to act dumb in this film too.
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federal_rider — 12 years ago(February 10, 2014 06:03 AM)
I think you may have missed one of the points of the film. They want to hear things "in plain English" because they don't care about the particulars. Good or bad is all they want to know. Will and Sam would have come up in a different time, probably through family connections or people they knew. They could conceivably run a floor without knowing all about complex derivatives, CDS's, the quality of sub primes. These guys only care about money, not the nitty gritty of what they are doing. This reflects the real guys at the top of these firms, I bet the head of Lehman brothers didn't have much of a clue what was going on around him. He just went round by million dollar+ pieces of art. Not to say these guys aren't fully aware of the consequences of their recklessness though
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irivas9 — 11 years ago(November 07, 2014 08:55 PM)
Like so many others have said here, this seemed to me more like a plot device to let the audience in on what was happening and why there was such a big crisis going on even if they didn't have a finance background so they could understand the movie.
Also, it seems very realistic to me that a CEO would ask one of the rank and file people to explain in "plain English" to explain something like this, they wouldn't really care about the nitty gritty of how the analyst came up with that conclusion (as the previous scene showed, a couple of executives had already sat down and agreed with the numbers the analyst came up with). At that point the CEO would be more concerned about what the problem is and how to deal with it. -
makingmovies — 11 years ago(February 09, 2015 06:53 PM)
Well, first, you are still a student, so, with all due respect, what do you know about real life? Models?
Second, you are so right to say THEY know what they are doing: : we have seen - in real life - how good they were in 2008, giving birth to a WORLD FINANCIAL CRISIS everyone is still paying with undue inflation, hard times, ruin, misery if not starvation in some countries, and wars.
Wake up, little piggy !
Don't tell me you want to be part of it because of your lust for power (riches, booze, drugs,whores,whatever?) and you want to stay blind. You should listen more closely to some discreet items of this film like the metaphor of the bridge, 3O minutes before the end.
Wake up.. -
BlindMan-11 — 11 years ago(February 09, 2015 09:00 PM)
There is a very very simple reason for saying'give it to me in simple English et al.'
Remember that the movie is being shown to people who would not know what Risk Management or all of the other more technical terms would mean.
So they have to find a way of being able to keep the audience engaged and understand what is going on without 'breaking the 4th wall' and looking at the camera and explaining as they go along.
Don't be so nit-picky on such an easy reason for moving the story along and still not having all but other CFA's etc. understand what is going on.
This comment was typed before a live studio audience. -
kai-farwind — 11 years ago(March 24, 2015 12:40 PM)
The writers probably got the picture during the financial crisis, however, it doesn't sound right to me that they didn't go for short position when they figured what was going on in the market. Becausethose are the moments you can make a fortune when you know what will happen in the market.
Too bad the movie didn't offer us much about what kind of business are they runningsimilar scenarios won't happen in a asset-managing company because according to the IPS(investment policy statement) of asset management strategy, short-term volatilities will be ignored. For example, like those famous endowment funds such as the fund Harvard was runningthey did nothing at the moment, which paid them back when the market recovered after 4 years.
Though Tuld pointed out one thing fundamentally true which is the same percentage of rich peoplethey are always there, same 5% who control more than 80% of everything. -
Bozohead — 10 years ago(June 08, 2015 12:29 AM)
Theres two types of young guys. Those who think they know everything and those who think everyone else knows everything. Obviously the former are more obnoxious but the latter can be just as wrong. The intelligent kids come to realise that some people know some things and success is about matching the right position and situation to the right person.
Was Bill Gates the best programmer? Do you think Steve Ballmer when he was boss of Microsoft understood all the technical products Microsoft had? Not even close.
Of course there was Steve Jobs. A guy whose technical knowledge was only what it needed to be. Unlike Gates he wasn't even a programmer nor was he an engineer.
Why should the finance industry be any different to the tech industry where top bosses and managers quite often dont have technical knowledge?
If you had lots of Apple stock who would you rather having running Apple? Jobs or Wozniak? Jobs or course. Who had the much much much greater technical knowledge? Wozniak by a mile. -
DendelionBlu — 10 years ago(October 28, 2015 04:01 AM)
In reply to all the people who think that "explain it like you would to a golden retriever" is a trick to dumb it down for the audience: it ISN'T.
Sure it serves that purpose too and in that way it's clever.
But if you worked in any corporation for a minute you know the top floor has no idea what's going on on the floors.
They only intervene when necessary, as in the movie, and yes, they do need a simpler effective explanation to make a quick decision upon.
Also, the way Irons snarls when he says "I can assure it isn't brains that got me here" says a lot.
It's not a trick for the audience: it tells us what the characters know and don't know, understand and don't understand. -
JurijFedorov — 10 years ago(October 30, 2015 10:34 AM)
I think you misunderstood the point. There were a few characters they had to make stupid. Firstly, the terrible trading practices had to be explained to 2 bosses in full, and a few more but only in short terms. First the middle manager and then the CEO. For the viewers sake they had to simplify both of these explanations. Therefore at least these 2 bosses have to be stupid, which they were. It has nothing to do with politics. This is a very known trope. Get one stupid guy in there so that all the geniuses have to slow down a bit for the stupid viewer - us. As the explanation had to be told several times they could not just have 1 guy. Maybe they could but I don't know how.