shrug I thought it was the most realistic part of the film.
The Wall Street firms hire young (very young) math whiz kids in order for them to "create" financial instruments that are so byzantine that only the creators can understand them. To a certain extent.
Most of these male math wizards do their best work before they are 30. Most of these creators aren't really over 40. So the top dogs are outclassed, but they are no longer in positions that require them to understand the ins and outs of what their kids are creating. Their jobs are to sell it, to make sure they are just on the side of legal and to manage the kids.
The fact that Stanley Tucci's character had a bit of a handle on what was going on actually reflected well on his business and math acumen. He was well past the age of BIG math.

Coming from experience and an industry completely unrelated, I think you're a little naive in your cut and dry assumption that those at the top know the details of their trade. Quite often the skills or scruples required to get to the top have little to do with the details, it has to do with the ability to get the right people on board to feed you the information so you can make the cut throat decisions that need to be made to make money. This is a skill in itself that requires a certain level of sociopathic tendencies which most people at the top possess.

I agree. It seemed humorous but unrealistic, and Im not even into finance.

As a professional couch potato with years of experience, I just have to say this might be my favorite thread at IMDB, ever. I'd like to buy all of you a drink.
For the sake of argument (from someone who's made all their money the old fashioned way-inheritance) imho Jeremy Iron's character did not strike me as someone who'd risen through the ranks hardscrabble, he seemed as though he was someone who'd inherited family assets and had gotten very good at making the pile bigger. I'm not saying he wasn't schooled and/or trained at the craft, btw. It just didn't seem as though he'd had to hold any of those other jobs.

I think some of the initial replies were trying to convey a message that I agree with.
Once you are out of school and join the real world, you will find that the people at the top are NOT the smartest or most knowledgeable. You may be disappointed to learn that people in management get there because of the their social skills, strength of their personality and even physical attractiveness.
Management often asks STEM people to explain what they mean "in plain English." It's not creative license, it's just reality.
Also, with the 2007-2008 financial collapse, it was indeed very arcane to many financial managers, which is exactly why they didn't see it coming.
On top of that, traders are ultimately sales people, NOT analysts. Their strength is in convincing people to make trades. Taking reports from analysts and taking out the bits that can be used to convince people to trade is what they do. They are not scientists or mathematicians, they are hustlers.

TOP is TOTALLY IGNORANT! Read "Too Big to Fail." LOTS of heads of big banks were ignorant about what was going on. And many top guys Jeremy Irons age came up as clerks on the trading floor with NO COLLEGE let alone CFA or MBA! And lots of guys in the C suite have no CFA or MBA but might have liberal arts degrees or humanities.
Defender of the weak, and enemy of the weak minded.

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.

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.

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Best comment. Your first 3 sentences made my evening!

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.

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.

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.

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..

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.

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

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.

I would take you serious, but the 2008 crash actually happened, if it wasn't incompetence, then it would of been deliberate?

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

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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.

I disagree somewhat with your point:
"The HEADS of a trading floor are going to understand the business"
.
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?

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