Customer Reviews

Floored

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I thought a lot about how to characterize this movie before writing the review. I think it captures a lot but also misses a lot. The movie has short interviews with some long-term successful traders and some not so, and it seems to be able to get closer to the latter. The one thing I didn't like was that it gave too much attention to one guy who had sour grapes rather than any legitimate or significant claim to trading going electronic and away from the floor. (Perhaps this guys was just not a likable person, not sure, or the director was trying to show how this person is dealing with his livelihood slipping away.) Also, I would have thought the film could have made a more poignant social commentary and picked the low hanging fruit by getting into high frequency trading and how the big money players and a handful of prop firms can basically buy speed to get orders to the exchanges before other less well-capitalized players.

Some of the stories recalled by the traders are almost unbelievable like the no-holds barred aggression on the trading floor. Also, one of the guys who got wiped out being on the wrong side of a Yen trade, recalls while smoking a cigar and hitting a golf ball on a snowed over course how his wife subsequently left him when he got wiped out. This was well done and this person/character was well humanized. The movie, I think, did a good job of showing how the trading life can turn your life upside down, or, for some people, it can make you fabulously wealthy, as the director shows. But what I still can't figure out is who is the intended audience here? For most people close to trading, there is not really anything new and for people who really don't know much about trading, the view is really too narrow--it really mostly only gets close to locals trading their own accounts and some electronic prop guys toward the end who look like they're mostly trading news releases or the open and close.

Given that, especially recently, the prices we pay as consumers for everyday goods is partially determined by men and women at trading firms of all sizes, and that more and more equity trading volume is being churned about by computer algorithms, as examples, I think there is room in the marketplace for a documentary that has a larger scope and a larger yet specific target audience.