Stock Market Movies: 55 Trading and Finance Films to Watch

A good stock market movie shows you in two hours what textbooks need whole chapters for. You see how greed and fear move markets, how financial crises start and why traders fail. Some films in this list are closer to real trading than you might like. Others are mainly good cinema.

This list covers 55 films, series and documentaries in three groups. You get a top 10 sorted by current rating data, the most important new releases since 2021 with where to stream them in the US, and short notes on every other title. All ratings were checked on 12 November 2026. There are no affiliate links on this page.

Stock market movies in 30 seconds

• 55 titles on markets, finance and business, from 1940 to 2023.
• Three groups: trading films, finance films and business films, plus documentaries for traders.
• Top 10: ten essential titles sorted by a combined IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes score.
• New since 2021: Dumb Money, the Wirecard documentary and three more recent productions.
• Where to watch: for every new title we say where it streams in the US.

One trading documentary is almost impossible to see. “Trader” (1987) is a PBS film about the young Paul Tudor Jones, shot in 1987 before the October crash. It was broadcast on PBS in 1987. Jones later had it taken out of circulation, and we could not verify a current authorized streaming or home video edition.

Top 10 stock market movies: our essential picks, sorted by rating

Film	IMDb	RT critics	RT audience	Score
1. Inside Job (2010)	8.2	98%	91%	90.3
2. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)	7.5	97%	87%	86.3
3. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)	7.6	95%	88%	86.3
4. The Corporation (2003)	8.0	89%	90%	86.3
5. The Big Short (2015)	7.8	89%	88%	85.0
6. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)	8.2	79%	83%	81.3
7. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)	8.0	67%	87%	78.0
8. Margin Call (2011)	7.1	87%	74%	77.3
9. Wall Street (1987)	7.3	77%	81%	77.0
10. Too Big to Fail (2011)	7.2	77%	76%	75.0

The score is the average of three numbers. We multiply the IMDb rating by ten and take the mean with the Rotten Tomatoes (RT) critics score (Tomatometer) and the audience score (Popcornmeter). Three films tie at 86.3; the critics score decides their order. All values were read on the IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes title pages on 12 November 2026 and will change over time.

The ten titles are our editorial picks, not a ranking of the whole list. Some classics further down score higher on paper, for example Citizen Kane or Trading Places. We chose the ten films that explain markets, banks and financial crises best and then sorted them by score.

By combined score, the top three are Inside Job (2010), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). Inside Job leads clearly with 90.3 points. The next three films are level at 86.3.

1. Inside Job (2010)

IMDb: 8.2/10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 98% (critics), 91% (audience)

This Oscar-winning documentary takes apart the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. It moves from bad mortgages to the rating agencies and to the conflicts of interest between Wall Street, politics and universities. No other film explains the failure of the system as clearly. If you watch only one documentary on the financial crisis, watch this one.

2. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)

IMDb: 7.5/10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 97% (critics), 87% (audience)

This documentary tells one of the biggest accounting scandals in US history. The energy company Enron reported profits for years through creative accounting until it collapsed in 2001. The film shows how analysts and auditors looked away. It is a lesson in why you should never trust a balance sheet blindly.

3. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

IMDb: 7.6/10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 95% (critics), 88% (audience)

Four real estate salesmen, a brutal sales contest and a single night. The drama with Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon shows sales pressure in its purest form. Strictly speaking, it is not a stock market film, but it is the best study of what commission pressure does to people. If you have ever had an aggressive call from a broker, you will understand the other side afterwards.

4. The Corporation (2003)

IMDb: 8.0/10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 89% (critics), 90% (audience)

This Canadian documentary asks an uncomfortable question. If a company is a legal person, what kind of personality would it have? The film’s answer is not flattering. It is essential for anyone who wants to understand the logic behind corporate decisions, but it offers little that you can use for trading itself.

5. The Big Short (2015)

IMDb: 7.8/10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 89% (critics), 88% (audience)

Based on the book by Michael Lewis, a handful of outsiders spot the US housing bubble before everyone else. They bet against it, in effect a form of short selling. The film explains subprime mortgages and CDOs more clearly than any other, with humour and celebrity cameos. The key lesson for traders: being right and staying in the trade are two different things, because the characters held losing positions for many months before the bet paid off.

6. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

IMDb: 8.2/10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 79% (critics), 83% (audience)

Martin Scorsese’s epic of excess follows the broker Jordan Belfort, who made a fortune selling worthless penny stocks and then fell hard. Leonardo DiCaprio plays the pull of fast money so well that some viewers miss the warning in the film: Belfort’s system was plain fraud against his customers. Entertainment value: huge. Role model: none. The film still shows how penny stock schemes work.

7. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

IMDb: 8.0/10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 67% (critics), 87% (audience)

The true story of Chris Gardner, a homeless single father who completes an unpaid internship at a brokerage firm. He goes on to found his own Wall Street firm. Will Smith was nominated for an Oscar for the role. It is not a film about trading technique but about persistence, the quality that in the end decides everything in trading.

8. Margin Call (2011)

IMDb: 7.1/10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 87% (critics), 74% (audience)

An investment bank finds out overnight that its risk models have failed. By the next morning it must decide whether to sell toxic securities to its own clients. The drama plays out almost in real time and does without any Hollywood exaggeration.

Many professional traders call Margin Call (2011) the most realistic stock market film. It shows the decision pressure and the risk management of an investment bank without Hollywood glamour. Read our guide to risk management for the trader’s side of the same problem.

9. Wall Street (1987)

IMDb: 7.3/10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 77% (critics), 81% (audience)

Oliver Stone’s classic created the image of the industry that still sticks today. Gordon Gekko and his line “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good” became famous. A young broker is drawn into insider trading and power games. The film is a document of the 1980s, and its central question still holds: how much are you willing to give up for success in the markets?

10. Too Big to Fail (2011)

IMDb: 7.2/10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 77% (critics), 76% (audience)

The HBO drama reconstructs the weeks around the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008. It tells the story from the point of view of US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. You see how government and the Federal Reserve improvise in crisis mode while the banking system stands at the edge. It is drier than The Big Short but closer to how the bank rescues really happened.

New since 2021: GameStop, Wirecard and Madoff on screen

The biggest market stories of recent years have reached the screen. These five productions close the gap between the 2008 crisis and today. Four of them are Netflix originals.

Title	Type	US streaming	IMDb
Dumb Money (2023)	Feature film	Hulu; rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV	6.8
The Billion Dollar Code (2021)	Miniseries	Netflix	7.9
Skandal! Bringing Down Wirecard (2022)	Documentary	Netflix	7.2
Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga (2022)	Docuseries	Netflix	6.4
Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street (2023)	Docuseries	Netflix	7.3

Streaming offers change often, so check before you plan a movie night. We took the Dumb Money offers from JustWatch for the US on 12 November 2026. The four Netflix titles are the service’s own productions.

Dumb Money (2023)

Dumb Money (2023) tells the story of the GameStop short squeeze of January 2021. Retail traders on the Reddit forum WallStreetBets put several hedge funds under pressure.

Paul Dano plays Keith Gill, known as “Roaring Kitty”, whose YouTube videos started a revolt of small investors against Wall Street. The film shows both sides: Reddit traders with student loans and hedge funds that lose billions. It explains only on the surface how a short squeeze works. It captures the market dynamics and the frenzy of those weeks all the better.

The Billion Dollar Code (2021)

This German Netflix miniseries tells how two Berliners built Terravision, an early forerunner of Google Earth, in the 1990s. Decades later they took Google to court. It is not a stock market story in the narrow sense, but a strong drama about intellectual property and the market power of tech companies. With an IMDb rating of 7.9, it is the highest-rated new release on this list.

Skandal! Bringing Down Wirecard (2022)

The Netflix documentary traces how the payment company Wirecard rose into Germany’s DAX index. At the same time, journalists at the Financial Times worked for years against heavy resistance to expose billions in fake revenue. The case shows that even a member of a major index can end up worthless and that accounting scandals are not only an American problem.

Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga (2022)

This three-part docuseries tells the GameStop story from the side of the Reddit users, streamers and small investors involved. It is lighter than Dumb Money but also less deep, and works as a quick introduction to meme stocks. If you have seen the feature film, here you hear the original voices.

Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street (2023)

The four-part Netflix series by Joe Berlinger documents the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Bernie Madoff cheated investors out of about $65 billion, a figure that includes invented returns. The lesson for every investor: unusually smooth returns through changing market conditions are a warning sign and deserve independent verification.

Trading films: stock markets, trading floors and traders

Trading films are feature films and documentaries that put trading, the life of traders and the mechanics of the stock market at the center.

Typical themes are speculation, crashes and the thin line between wealth and ruin. Films from the top 10 such as The Wolf of Wall Street or Margin Call belong here too. The titles below add less well-known productions and one big comedy.

Rogue Trader (1999)

The true story of Nick Leeson, whose unauthorized futures and options trades in Singapore destroyed Barings, Britain’s oldest merchant bank. Ewan McGregor shows how small hidden losses in the secret account 88888 grew into a loss of about £827 million because nobody controlled the risk. Essential viewing on position sizing and control.

Trading Places (1983)

Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd star in the cult comedy about a cynical bet between two commodity broker brothers. Does success come from the environment or from talent? The finale contains the most famous frozen orange juice futures scene in film history. Trading futures on stolen government crop reports, as in the film, was later banned explicitly by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, in a provision often called the “Eddie Murphy rule”.

August (2008)

Josh Hartnett plays the co-founder of a New York internet start-up in the weeks before September 11, 2001. The film captures the end of the dot-com era, when overvalued internet companies fell one after the other. Not a masterpiece, but a decent portrait of the New Economy bubble.

Floored (2009)

This documentary follows floor traders at the Chicago futures exchanges whose job is disappearing because of electronic trading. It is an honest look at the winners and losers of the shift from the trading pit to the screen. It is interesting for traders because many of the people in it never made the jump to screen trading.

Money Monster (2016)

George Clooney plays a TV stock picker who is taken hostage live on air by a ruined small investor. The thriller uses an alleged algorithm glitch as its hook and asks the right question: who is responsible for public stock tips? It works as a thriller; do not take the financial details too seriously.

Boiler Room (2000)

A college dropout joins a dubious brokerage that sells worthless stocks to customers over the phone. The film shows a pump and dump scheme in detail. The young brokers know the lines of Wall Street by heart, which says a lot about their role models.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)

The sequel brings Gordon Gekko back after prison, right into the 2008 financial crisis. Oliver Stone weaves a family drama into the subprime collapse but no longer reaches the edge of the original. Worth watching for the period scenes from the days of the bank bailouts.

Equity (2016)

A senior investment banker handles a stock market listing and comes across inconsistencies and corruption. The film tells Wall Street from the perspective of women in investment banking. A solid thriller about IPO mechanics, career pressure and the question of whom you can really trust in investment banking.

Wall Street Warriors (2006)

This docuseries follows brokers, fund managers and traders in Manhattan through their days of gains and losses. It ran for three seasons from 2006 to 2009. Few productions from that time get you closer to the real working day on Wall Street.

Arbitrage (2012)

Richard Gere plays a hedge fund billionaire who hides the loss from a failed investment with cosmetic accounting while he tries to sell his firm. An elegant thriller about how long book losses can be hidden. Every trader knows the answer: never long enough to save the position.

Dealers (1989)

A British drama about rival dealers on a London trading floor in the 1980s. Classic cinema of that decade about ambition, big positions and pressure in the dealing room.

Documentaries for traders

These documentaries are less known but worth the search. They give rare views of currency trading, high-frequency trading and the machine side of modern markets.

Billion Dollar Day (1985)

The BBC documentary follows three currency traders in New York, London and Hong Kong through a single trading day. It is a fascinating document from the time before the internet, when the telephone and instinct ruled the forex market.

Million Dollar Traders (2009)

In this BBC series, hedge fund manager Lex van Dam gave a group of amateurs real money to trade. The idea came from the Turtle trading experiment of the 1980s. The series shows without mercy how quickly emotions destroy a strategy. For new traders it is more instructive than many a course.

Money and Speed: Inside the Black Box (2011)

This Dutch documentary reconstructs the Flash Crash of May 6, 2010. The Dow plunged roughly 600 points in five minutes, bringing its total decline for the day to almost 1,000 points before it rebounded. With data visuals down to the millisecond, the film shows how algorithms set off chain reactions. Essential if you want to understand who you are trading against today.

Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street (2010)

A portrait of the quants, the mathematicians and programmers whose models built the financial products behind the 2008 crisis. The film asks what happens when formulas are supposed to measure human behavior. You know the answer from 2008.

Chasing Madoff (2010)

The documentary about whistleblower Harry Markopolos, who worked out the Madoff fraud a decade before it collapsed. He took his numbers to the SEC and was not heard. A good companion to the newer Netflix series, with its focus on the failure of the regulators.

Finance films: banks, the financial system and fraud

Finance films deal with the financial system as a whole: banks, monetary policy, financial crises and fraud are at the center, not trading itself.

Here you find the titles that look behind the doors of banks and the money system. They range from a Frankfurt investment bank to the Panama Papers and the US Federal Reserve.

Bad Banks (2018)

This German-Luxembourgish series follows a young investment banker through accounting tricks, insider deals and power struggles. Paula Beer plays the lead in the best German-language production about modern investment banking so far. Two seasons, both worth watching.

Other People’s Money (1991)

Danny DeVito plays “Larry the Liquidator”, a corporate raider who wants to take over an old-fashioned wire and cable company. The speeches at the shareholder meeting at the end sum up the conflict between shareholder value and jobs better than many a business seminar.

The Bank (2001)

In this Australian thriller, a mathematician develops software to predict stock market crashes, and his employer wants to exploit it without scruples. Alongside, the film tells of a couple who lose everything to the bank after taking a foreign currency loan. Fiction with a real core: such loans hurt many Australian borrowers in the 1980s.

The Laundromat (2019)

Steven Soderbergh’s film about the Panama Papers. Meryl Streep plays a widow who follows the trail of a worthless insurance policy to the shell companies of the law firm Mossack Fonseca. The film makes tax havens and money laundering structures easy to grasp but gets lost in its episodes.

Master of the Universe (2013)

Former Frankfurt investment banker Rainer Voss explains, in an empty bank tower, how the closed world of investment banking works from the inside. The German documentary has no effects and is all the more powerful for it. One of the best inside views of the finance industry there is.

The China Hustle (2017)

The documentary shows how hundreds of Chinese companies reached US stock exchanges through reverse mergers after 2008, many of them with doctored numbers. Short sellers such as Carson Block show how investment fraud worked on a large scale. Still relevant today if you invest in foreign stocks.

The Wizard of Lies (2017)

Robert De Niro plays Bernie Madoff in the HBO drama about the days before his arrest and the breakdown of his family. Where the Netflix documentary gives the facts, this film shows the human side of the fraud: cold, precise, disturbing.

The Associate (1996)

Whoopi Goldberg plays a financial analyst who, short of clients, invents a white male business partner and conquers the New York finance world with him. A comedy about prejudice in the industry, with more substance than its slapstick tone suggests.

Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve (2013)

The documentary looks behind the facade of the US central bank and asks how much of the 2008 chaos monetary policy itself caused. It has interviews with central bankers and their critics. If you want to understand interest rate policy and its side effects, start here.

The Ascent of Money (2008)

Historian Niall Ferguson, then a professor at Harvard, tells the history of finance in this TV series for Channel 4 and PBS. It runs from the first loans through bonds and stocks to the housing crisis. Ideal for seeing that every bubble in history follows the same pattern.

Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)

Michael Moore’s polemic against the US financial system after the 2008 crisis. It covers foreclosures, bank bailouts paid by taxpayers and lobbying. Moore argues one-sidedly, which is part of his style. As a picture of the mood after the crisis, it is still worth watching.

Let’s Make Money (2008)

The Austrian documentary follows money through the global financial system. Director Erwin Wagenhofer goes from pension savings to Spanish property bubbles and tax havens. He shows where your savings actually work, and who earns from them.

Business films: companies, work and society

Business films show how companies, work, politics and society interact, often through the rise, takeover or fall of a firm.

The stock market plays a minor role at most here. Instead, these titles look at capitalism, management and the world of work, from Thomas Edison to the tulip mania.

The Company Men (2010)

Ben Affleck plays a manager who is laid off after twelve years with his company and loses his Porsche, his mortgage and his self-image. The film about the layoffs after 2008 quietly asks what work says about a person’s worth.

Barbarians at the Gate (1993)

The HBO film about the real takeover battle for RJR Nabisco, one of the largest in Wall Street history. James Garner plays the CEO who wants to buy his own company and faces private equity firms with deeper pockets. It shows the leveraged buyout era of the 1980s in all its absurdity.

Citizen Kane (1941)

Orson Welles’ masterpiece about the rise and loneliness of the newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane. Not a stock market film, but the original study of media power, monopolies and the question of what remains of an empire in the end. Many critics still call it the best film ever made.

War Dogs (2016)

Two men in their early twenties from Miami win arms contracts worth millions through a public Pentagon bidding site. Based on a true story, the film shows how arbitrage thinking without scruples ends in the arms trade. Entertaining, with a bitter aftertaste.

American Psycho (2000)

Christian Bale plays the investment banker Patrick Bateman, who turns into a murderer between business card envy and brand obsession. The satire exaggerates the shallowness of the 1980s Wall Street elite into the grotesque. You learn nothing about finance, but it is a cult film about the psyche of the industry.

Edison, the Man (1940)

Spencer Tracy plays Thomas Edison in the Hollywood classic about the race to light New York with electricity. It is interesting as an early example of the genre: even in 1940, Hollywood told the story of the struggle between inventors and investors.

Four Horsemen (2012)

Economists and thinkers, among them Noam Chomsky and Joseph Stiglitz, discuss the design flaws of the financial system and possible alternatives. The British documentary by Ross Ashcroft wants to offer reform ideas rather than conspiracy stories. Demanding, but rewarding for the big picture.

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990)

Tom Hanks plays a Wall Street bond trader whose life is taken apart by the press, the courts and politics after an accident in the Bronx. The adaptation of the Tom Wolfe novel was a flop when it came out. As a satire about media and class in 1980s New York, it has aged better than its reviews.

Pi (1998)

Darren Aronofsky’s black-and-white debut follows a paranoid math genius who searches for the pattern behind the stock market and finds a number that destroys him. Not a realistic trading film, but a fever dream about the temptation to calculate the market completely. Clever minds still fail at exactly that, which is why risk control matters more than any forecast.

Firewall (2006)

Harrison Ford plays the head of IT security at a bank whose family is kidnapped so that he moves $100 million to offshore accounts. A standard thriller in which the bank is mostly a backdrop. It rounds off the list at the point where banking meets cybercrime.

Collapse (2009)

A long, dark interview with Michael Ruppert, who predicted the financial crisis in public and thought the collapse of the whole system was unavoidable. Difficult and one-sided, but an interesting record of how crash prophets think. Watch it with healthy distance.

Tulip Fever (2017)

A costume drama set in 17th-century Amsterdam during the tulip mania, the first documented speculative bubble in history. At its peak, single tulip bulbs cost as much as a house. The love story dominates the film, but the trading scenes in the tavern are worth seeing.

Conclusion: stock market movies are entertainment and market lessons at once

I have been in the markets since 1980 and lived through much of this myself. I saw the crash of 1987, the dot-com bubble and the financial crisis of 2008. That is why I can tell you: the best of these films are closer to reality than outsiders think. The decision pressure in Margin Call and the hidden losses in Rogue Trader are not invented by screenwriters. Things like that happen in the markets again and again.

My personal picks for traders: Margin Call for understanding risk, The Big Short for the mechanics of a crisis and Rogue Trader as a warning about missing loss control. All three are good entertainment as well. If you want to go deeper after the films, our guide to the best trading books has reading on the same themes. For the history behind many of these stories, see our overview of every major stock market crash.

Frequently asked questions about stock market movies

What are the best stock market movies?

Among our ten essential picks, Inside Job (2010) leads by combined score. It reaches 90.3 points from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes ratings. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Glengarry Glen Ross follow at 86.3. Among the feature films about trading, The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street score highest.

What is the most realistic stock market movie?

Many traders name Margin Call (2011) as the most realistic picture of investment banking. It shows risk models, night shifts and decision pressure instead of Hollywood glamour. Rogue Trader (1999) also shows very clearly how hidden losses can ruin a bank.

Which stock market movies are on Netflix?

Four recent productions on this list are Netflix originals. They are Skandal! Bringing Down Wirecard (2022), Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street (2023), Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga (2022) and the miniseries The Billion Dollar Code (2021). Other titles come and go on Netflix every month.

Which finance movies are based on true stories?

Many of the most important titles are based on real events. The Big Short covers the 2008 housing crisis, The Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort, Dumb Money the GameStop squeeze of 2021 and Rogue Trader the collapse of Barings. The Pursuit of Happyness tells Chris Gardner’s life and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room the Enron scandal.

Is there a movie about the GameStop short squeeze?

Two productions covered here are Dumb Money and Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga. The feature film Dumb Money (2023) tells the events of January 2021 with Paul Dano as “Roaring Kitty”. The Netflix docuseries from 2022 lets the real Reddit traders speak.

What is the difference between trading films, finance films and business films?

Trading films are about markets and traders, finance films about banks, monetary policy and fraud, business films about companies, work and society. The lines are blurred: The Big Short is a trading film and a finance film at the same time, and Trading Places is a comedy about futures trading.