Hacker Cinema
Boiler Room
2000 · Film · 119 min
Directed by Ben Younger
A college dropout gets a job as a broker for a suburban investment firm and is on the fast track to success—but the job might not be as legitimate as it sounds.
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52 comments on Hacker News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Founder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_Room_(film)
A classic. "Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross" and "Boiler Room" are a great sales themed movie night.
Movies I think I truly great I usually only watch once, sometimes twice. If a movie ends and I just sit there thinking to myself… “wow”… I will probably never watch it again.
Movies I watch over and over again are movies that I relate to in some way or find comforting. These are ones I’ve watched at least 5 times, and some I’d bet more than 30 times.
- Back to the Future
- Home Alone
- What About Bob?
- It Could Happen to You
- Matilda
- As Good as It Gets
- Office Space
- Cruel Intentions
- Boiler Room
- Finding Forrester
- Training Day
- Super Troopers
- 8 Mile
- The Transporter
- Elf
- Bad Santa
- Mean Girls
- Saved!
- Garden State
- V for Vendetta
- Thank You for Smoking
- Stick It
- Little Miss Sunshine
- Idiocracy
- Hot Rod
- Run Fatboy Run
- The Other Guys
- Wreck-It Ralph
To name a few.
You might like the movie Boiler Room, which was inspired by Stratton Oakmont and the other penny stock shops that operated in the suburbs of NYC. Great ensemble cast and a much more grounded story.
Yes to both. Unlike the assumptions made by another commenter, the brokerage doesn’t care how much trading goes on because they take a flat percentage each quarter. (And they don’t charge commissions on trades anyway, whether it is me trading or them.) And the advisor we work with does, indeed, have a fiduciary duty. It’s not like I don’t know what I’m doing, I managed our portfolios for decades, and did pretty well and we will retire quite comfortably. But I’m tired of doing it, I’m willing to let someone else do it now.
So if anyone was picturing the movie Boiler Room, umm, that was a movie.
"Boiler Room" is really an excellent film, and not widely seen. A great lesson on how some (but certainly not all) stock brokerages work.
Crypto tokens are effectively the modern version of penny stocks, the thing you'd see garish ads on MotleyFool.com years ago. It's selling the dream of above average returns to retail investors who don't know any better, a game as old as time.
If films like Boiler Room and Wolf of Wall Street were to be made today, they wouldn't show brokers cold calling retirees, but rather people furiously typing away in Discord rooms, inflating the mirage until the insiders are able to cash out.
My grandmother used to keep a whistle by the phone to blow so loud it'd nearly injure them through the headset, but these milquetoast neoliberals and literal nazis and that make up the PA Democratic party and PA GOP respectively have since dropped all pretense, and would never give an elderly woman a branded distress call...
We're in a dark timeline OP. To file these plans just lets your enemy route around it -- you gotta harass whoever bothers you. If you don't have a whistle or rap horn, then just keep them on the line as long as possible then tell them to jump off the call center.
I had someone use their literal phone once -- said they were in "New York" and picked up when I called back. I think they were tricked by my VPN into thinking I was literally in NYC, and freaked out when I was like "I'm at CMU, I'm going to get one of these guys to give me a robot to drone your ass if you keep disturbing my lunch".
We got into a bit of a back and forth with him telling me I can't make threats and he's gonna call the police.
Like uh, ok phone scammer? Tell the police I said I'm gonna take a Megabus to Queens to literally murder you. I'd hope they'd be more interested in your literal boiler room[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_Room_(film)
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/blackberry-movie-review-2023
> “BlackBerry” is a MoneyBro movie par excellence, right up there with “Wall Street,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Boiler Room,” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” It shares their key, defining trait: even though its main characters are either charismatic sociopaths or sheep, and the capitalist system they operate in is deeply corrupt and rewards men without morals or conscience, the story is so excitingly told, the performances so watchable, and the dialogue so quotable that it becomes the verbal equivalent of an action flick—kinetic, suspenseful, and sometimes unexpectedly beautiful and weirdly moving.
This comment reminds me of the movie Boiler room and now that I think of it reminds me of this whole crypto industry imo.
Could it be that “women are too smart for that shit?”
That is, men are notorious for falling for get rich quick scams. In the movie Boiler Room they told trainees “Don’t Pitch the Bitch” and to not let a guy they were talking to discuss it with their girlfriend or wife because surely they’d get talked out of it.
As one of many people on HN with the day-to-day responsibility of monitoring and troubleshooting a complicated Internet thingy that springs leaks and throws rods at inconvenient times, I am here to inform you that "works for me" is often a pretty valuable piece of information.
Now that our good intentions are worked out, it's probably silly for us to keep going with this thread. Somebody on another thread just said "Boiler Room is an incredible movie" and I need all my energy for that thread now.
The Big Short and Boiler room are incredible movies. The only real competition is Wolf of Wall Street, which goes too deep into the debauched party lifestyle at the expense of the more interesting financial story, and Margin Call which has the opposite problem since it’s completely inaccessible to most people.
Boiler Room is a movie, you can make an interesting movie about anything
> Wow, this looks like a pretty serious manipulation game they were playing:
It's a basic pump and dump. Nothing new nor interesting. It's been done for decades. There have been many movies on it - boiler room being one.
"When I ask why there are so few women in the crypto space..." reminds me of the movie Boiler Room where they train scam telemarketers to never pitch investments to women or let a guy they are pitching talk to their wife about it.
Men are more vulnerable to making certain narcissism-related mistakes, such as getting into bad investements because of FOMO or self-publishing books about new fundamental theories in physics that center around the mass ratio of the proton to the electron being exactly the square root of 3371456.
Reminds me of the slogan ‘don’t pitch the bitch’ from the movie Boiler Room, namely men are much more inclined to get into stupid investments over FOMO, challenge Vlad Putin to a fight, etc.
Men are notorious for being fooled into bad investments with FOMO.
In the movie Boiler Room they tell trainees to hang up if they get a woman in the phone and have the rule ‘Don’t Pitch the Bitch.’
I’d suggest that communication is just as important as technology skills. Most end users and people paying for the technology don’t naturally understand the problems and challenges. These things need to be be explained clearly, in a way they can understand.
One of my favorite quotes that illustrate that is from the movie Boiler Room.
“There is no such thing as a no sale call. A sale is made on every call you make. Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you a reason he can't. Either way a sale is made.”
Communication is often thought as a speaking skill I would add that listening is a skill as well —- equally as important, if not more, than speaking. I’ve see so many bad designs because the developer failed to listen to, and fully understand, what the users really wanted.
Generally don't comment on sub-posts, but Boiler Room is a great movie! And very apropo to the current market stock/crypto craze going on right now.
My first thought when hearing of the company was the J. T. Marlin "brokerage" from the movie Boiler Room. And for those viewers that didn't get the joke, the movie helpfully provides a scene where other brokers in a bar make fun of the uncanny resemblance to "J. P. Morgan".
Bonus point for the ethical similarities between J. T. Marlin and Nikola.
> Unfortunately, there's a catch. People can say things they don't believe, especially if there is a large amount of money to be made. If I'm holding a large amount of X, and can convince enough other people to buy X that the price rises (hopefully by a lot), I can sell my shares of X for a (large) profit. Pump and dump schemes have been common forever, popularized in the the 2000 movie Boiler Room as well as Wolf of Wall St.
Or most recently Gamestop investors.
> At the end of the day, the point is they're trying to sell their book, which is not the same as trying to sell investment X (although they may be very closely related).
My point it is almost never going to be possible to distinguish between good investment advice and self-serving investment advice. Sure, there is some fungibility there for people with different investment needs, like pension funds vs young income earners. But! we should think about what we would think if the reverse was true. If investors were advocating for investments that they weren't personally invested in, then I would be far more skeptical than if they did.
Unfortunately, there's a catch. People can say things they don't believe, especially if there is a large amount of money to be made. If I'm holding a large amount of X, and can convince enough other people to buy X that the price rises (hopefully by a lot), I can sell my shares of X for a (large) profit. Pump and dump schemes have been common forever, popularized in the the 2000 movie Boiler Room as well as Wolf of Wall St.
Far stranger schemes exist, the most recently to hit popular culture is gamma squeeze. Just because a scheme is strange has little bearing on whether or not it'll end up working out with them having your money.
At the end of the day, the point is they're trying to sell their book, which is not the same as trying to sell investment X (although they may be very closely related).
It makes no difference at all to the average person complaining about the accredited investor rules preventing them from investing in sure-fire wins.
If it is a "sure-fire win", then individuals don't get to participate in those investments, institutions and people with a lot more money than you have get to participate. As an individual of only moderately high worth, you get the shit portrayed in the movie Boiler Room.
Which is why whining about accredited investor rules annoys me: they can change the rules, but that isn't going to make companies want to deal with your small potatoes. They're not knocking on your door now, why would a rule change make any difference? Even if you cross the magic threshold, opportunities will not immediately knock on your door out of the blue. But if you want dents in your door from all the knocking, up your net worth from single-digit millions to double-digit.
I didn't like WOWS for the reason you describe. They went completely over the top with the party/drug/girls scenes, and you can tell the film is trying to overtly glorify that kind of lifestyle, as opposed to showing the trappings of that life. I got the same feeling I get when I see some random flexing on Instagram. It felt fake.
Boiler Room on the other hand might have been a worse movie, but it had a low-budget feel about it that at least grounded the characters and story within some sense of reality. I think they were going for the Glengarry Glenross aesthetic.
That's a good point about missing the satire and why movies like "Boiler Room", "Wolf of Wall Street", etc can rub me the wrong way. Sure, there's a fall and consequences after all the money and partying but that money and partying looks pretty good (especially if you don't get caught).
I agree, The Big Short was insightful and you come out of it with a better understanding of the financial industry. The Wolf of Wall Street glossed over the financial information to focus on the debauchery, which to me is far less interesting.
Boiler Room and The Smartest Guys in the Room are my other go-to business movies.
> tech bro... CEOs
Even in this headline, there's some pretty interesting equivocation happening between techies and CEOs overall. The article makes a decent case for why there's collective anxiety about tech companies, but neglects the question of "why only tech?"
The ~1990s had a whole string of movies with bankers and investors as villains: American Psycho, Rogue Trader, Glengarry Glen Ross, Wall Street, Boiler Room, and so on. Lately, we had had Wolf of Wallstreet and The Big Short, but in a post-2008 world where banking already has trashed the economy we're surprisingly short on bankers-as-villains films.
We got a couple of global warming films in the 2000s, and a couple more in the 2010s, but I can't think of one which makes a serious attempt to cast oil CEOs as villains - certainly not in the sense that e.g. tobacco companies have been. Avatar is probably the closest thing to "CEOs trashing the environment" that's been a hit.
Pharma companies lend themselves to human-interest tragedies, and we did get Dallas Buyer's Club. But there's no whole genre here like there used to be with "the bank takes the farm".
So there's the missing question: why tech companies specifically? The most obvious answer is just "more impressive visuals". I'm not sure we're talking about a particular anxiety of the moment, or if it's just that banks and oil companies work better on the page than on the screen.
This cannot be stressed enough, IBM is basically the opening scene of the movie "boiler room"
Or pink sheet stock trading. Watch the film Boiler Room.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pinksheets.asp
I was a technical sales manager at a fast growing ISP focused on selling T1, DS3 and "business grade" DSL. The money was good. It felt like we were on top of the world. Embarrassingly, looking back, the movie that best describes our culture/ environment back then was Boiler Room. It's one of Vin Diesel's last movies before becoming a star w/ the Fast & Furious series and it's streaming on Youtube if you're ever interested. Different industry but same vibe. Most of us were recent grads from no name schools. There were also a few dropouts and a few who never attempted college. Depending on where you live, this would be the equivalent of coming out of school in your 20's w/ very few skills to make a doctor's salary almost 20 years ago.
Towards the end, every week for a few months, we'd talk/ read about mass firings or competitors shutting down completely. The writing was on the wall when the CEO brought in the PE guy (who still maintained his role at the PE shop he came from) in as a VP to "tighten things up".I was too young and naive to recognize what that meant but his role was to come in and get the company ready to be acquired or parted out like an old car at the junkyard. Yup, we were being prepared for the slaughter.
That last day was tough. We knew it was coming but didn't know when. Working under that type of environment is a tough feeling to describe. Big cardboard boxes on everyones desk one morning, along w/ an offer to take or leave was devastating & relieving at the same time. I took the offer and used the cash to start a company.
Some never recovered. Some had picked up bad habits (cars, alcohol, coke, fast life) while the money was flowing, making it harder when the cash dried up. I always lived a low key existence. I never appreciated it more than when our world stopped spinning.
Reminds me of the scene in Boiler Room when the guys from J. P. Morgan stroll into the bar and later point out that the firm in the movie, J. T. Marlin, is named such so as to try and sound like a stock firm people have heard of.
Don't forget about David Choe, the artist who graffiti'd Facebook for almost $500M in stock compensation. To quote the (not great) movie "Boiler Room", "you see stuff like that and it just plants seeds."
Was Choe's comp worth near $500M? Hell no. Is he laughing to the bank? Of course. Is life fair? Hell no. Were other early employees screwed by the Choe's comp? Probably but they made out more than OK. I don't hear Taner complaining. Roll the dice. Make your decisions. Live with them.
In 2004 I turned down a job offer from Google. On paper, I'd be worth lotsa millions. In reality, I would have gained zero. Why? Because the team I interviewed with was full of jerks, and I would have quit before my 1 year cliff had I accepted the offer. Instead, I stayed and worked at my then current job. I made a lot of good professional contacts and have never looked back.
Would my life have been different if I accepted the Google offer and hit the IPO payday lottery? Possibly. I'm not sure. I don't think about it at all. I moved on over a decade ago. I'm quite happy with my life. There's more to life than being a "early XYZ employee" or "pre-IPO employee". Notorious BIG had it wrong. You don't have to slang rock or have a good jump shot. You can live nicely and happily making assists.
Loved the movie. Doesn't mean I want to be like him. One of my favorite movies, The Talented Mr Ripley, leaves you feeling unsatisfied about the conclusion-- not a typical Hollywood ending.
Boiler Room is also a favorite, which of course is related to Wolf of Wall Street.
Do all men care about money? No. But are there are set of men who seemed to be consumed by money more than any set of women, oh yes.
Who works on Wall Street? Hell the movie Wall Street, Boiler Room, etc aimed at?
Although I wouldn't be surprised if somebody somewhere has a list of accredited investors over the age of 80 who are likely to have Alzheimer's, that is not going to happen in significantly larger numbers as a result of this change.
There is an entire industry dedicated to this based out of New York. It gets hungry guys in early 20s to wake at 8am and begin cold calling high net-worth individuals offering them "investment opportunities". This industry flourished before the Internet and is depicted in movies like Boiler Room. The internet ate up a lot of their business because people no longer needed to be on walstreet to get data from walstreet. However, I can see these guys jump on this opportunity and begin shilling startups to the relatively high net-worth but naive retirees wanting to invest in the next facebook.
When my business partner and I were starting our first business we would unwind at night by watching motivating movies like these. Some of the ones we watched included: Boiler Room, Wallstreet, and Glengarry Glen Ross. Two more recent movies that I would add to the list are Margin Call and the Social Network. My list of motivational books would be much longer.
I love the line - we have two kinds of sales people, rich and new.
There is a definite truth to the fundamentally different psychology of top sales people compared to engineering talent. Sales works best as a very objective judge by results environment - with great rewards at the top and a short walk off the plank for non-performers. I find, having done both, that a lot of engineers find it difficult or impossible to put themselves in the mind of a sales person and truly understand what motivates them, if they've not done it extensively themselves.
Glengarry Glen Ross gets it right with First Prize a new BMW, Second Prize a set of steal knives, Third Prize you're fired. If you're an engineer watch that movie or Boiler Room with horror and recognize that many sales people see those as very realistic expositions of certain kinds of aggressive sales environments.
What I'm reading in your sentiment is that you believe that such regulation prevents the "hard sales" approach of getting people to invest wonderfully demonstrated by the junk bonds and Boiler Room movie. And I agree with you - such crap tactics are what ruins it for the rest of us.
But I also don't believe that simply barring access is the right way to go. In an environment where barriers to entry are falling everywhere, the funding aspect still remains the most difficult. A talented small group of engineers can put together solutions that rivals the best of fortune 100 companies, but those same engineers are usually not capable of marshaling the resources they need to execute, often more efficiently than their big company counterparts.
Start-ups are super risky. If people understand that, and have means to diversify, than we have a good model. To me, Kickstarter is an awesome way to crowdfund for a product or a finite project. By promising something in return, you essentially get a head start on sales revenue, and use it to fund the development.
Strangely enough, I was talking to one of the sales guys at the $DAYJOB a couple of days ago, and we got on the subject of movies, and he brought up Boiler Room. I looked for the DVD at Barnes & Noble and they didn't have it... guess I'll go download it and see what the fuss is all about.
Glengarry Glen Ross is another fun movie about sales and life in the world of business. ABC!
Boiler Room - one of my favorite movies ever. It will change you.
It's strange. Most of the movies I use aren't here already. So here's my list.
Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096316/
Cinderella Man (2005) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0352248/
The Secret of My Succe$s (1987) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093936/
Strangely I also find, Scarface (1983) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086250/ and The Bucket List (2007) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0825232/ strangely inspiring.
Pirates of Silicon Valley and The Social Network would also be on my list but they have already been mentioned.
I also keep the fraud trilogy handy.
Wall Street (1987) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094291/
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/
Boiler Room (2000) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181984/
And Swordfish is a great movie about being a hacker... specifically the common recruiting process.
On a more serious note, I do agree with you. Some decent movies with a office environment/work theme: Boiler Room (2000), Duplicity (2009), Glengarry Glen Ross, Other People's Money (1991), Swimming with Sharks and Wall Street (1987).
I've also enjoyed the dramatized real-life stories in Rogue Trader and Barbarians at The Gate.
Everyone on Wall St (approximately) has read Liars Poker - and, while there's some artistic license being take, the observations are basically dead-on. And people are proud that they work in an industry that has such a compelling book. And they see the characters (or their company's versions) every day.
To pick other examples : 'Wall Street' is a must-see movie for everyone on the Street (though it's completely overblown). OTOH, Boiler Room (while being a decent movie) doesn't resonant much, since the vast majority of the money on Wall St is made by making tiny percentages on large amounts, rather than by ripping off small investors...
I guess that the majority of Wall St think that Liars Poker is a fairly balanced (and interesting) view of what goes on. Michael Lewis has an entertaining and insider-ish blog on Bloomberg (NI LEWIS, if you're in front of a terminal)
And here's an article he published yesterday (really targeted at the Wall St crowd) : http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-09-13/hedge-fund-man-finds-inner-lion-in-outer-space-michael-lewis.html
Boiler Room is one of my favs. Even though Glengarry Glen Ross was relatively boring, I like this line:
"It takes brass balls to sell real estate."
Then he turns around and he is holding brass balls. A-B-C is the best pitch ever in a movie, after greed is good of course.
If you want a great example of how to deal with rejection, come to Haight Ashbury and watch the homeless people ask for change. Sometimes if they have a good enough pitch, I'll give them a dollar. There was one guy giving "bad advice" and he told me to give him my credit card and to have unprotected sex with an intravenous drug user.
I gave him a dollar.
Isn't that a line in the movie Boiler Room? http://goo.gl/IM7r
I meant it as a tongue-in-cheek reference. The mentality of the character in the movie boiler room gets involved with stock trading because he equates it to the young white male version of "slangin' crack rocks". I found it interesting that stock traders/programmers are literally "slang-in'".
The mentality in the movie also leads one to question the value of what is being created in the world of stock trading. So, to me, the comment had multiple levels of irony and coincidence. But having to explain it makes it lose some of the luster.
I read this article a while back, that said that Microsoft employs more millionaire secretary's that any other company in the world. They took stock options over Christmas bonuses. It was a good move. I remember there was this picture, of one of the groundskeepers next to his Ferrari. Blew my mind. you see shit like that, and it just plants seeds, makes you think its possible, even easy. And then you turn on the TV, and there's just more of it. The $87 Million lottery winner, that kid actor that just made 20 million o his last movie, that internet stock that shot through the roof, you could have made millions if you had just gotten in early, and that's exactly what I wanted to do: get in. I didn't want to be an innovator any more, i just wanted to make the quick and easy buck, i just wanted in. The Notorious BIG said it best: "Either you're slangin' crack-rock, or you've got a wicked jump-shot." Nobody wants to work for it anymore. There's no honor in taking that after school job at Mickey Dee's, honor's in the dollar, kid. So I went the white boy way of slanging crack-rock: I became a stock broker.
- Seth Davis, Boiler Room
The idea is not bad, but the film itself should have been executed better. For me, in order to deem a movie inspirational it would first have to be a good movie (good cinematography, acting, and story). I feel that Boiler Room was missing on all those criteria.
Boiler Room (the movie) has many examples of that kind of manipulative sales technique.
I used to work in the finance & investing industry before doing a startup. The slimy, misleading marketing proliferating itself everywhere is absolutely ridiculous. They're even pretentious enough to call their fees and back loaded funds "products".
If you've ever seen the movie Boiler Room, my second finance job was similar. My third finance job had similarities to Barbarians at the Gate (on a much lower scale) and the classic tulip bulb story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Strange world is the finance.
This vaguely reminded me of the movie "Boiler Room".
If it sounds too good to be true...