Stock Market Father's Day Gifts

Father's Day is on Sunday, June 21. Have you done your shopping yet? Looking for some Father's Day gifts? Here are a few ideas.
Bull and Bear -Double Pen Holder

Bull and Bear Sculpture Statue

Wall Street Bull and Bear Silver Cufflinks


Wall Street (Insider Trading Edition) DVD


Wolf Of Wall Street DVD


Subscription to The Wall Street Journal


Subscription to Forbes


Stock Market Trivia


Stock Market Trivia Volume 2: Who Says Wall Street is Boring?

Wishing all the fathers out there a Happy Father's Day.

Stock Market and Wall Street Related Videos for the Holidays

Are you looking for a few videos to watch during the holidays? Or maybe you are looking for a great video gift for a friend who is interested in investing and the stock market. Pick up a couple of these interesting videos, a few of which you my not be familiar with.

Limitless is about an author who takes a new drug which causes him to become extremely intelligent  and astute. He becomes a stock trader who turns $12,000 into $3 million in a week.

Wall Street, a classic Wall Street movie starring Michael Douglas.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is the sequel.

Wolf Of Wall Street is the extreme Martin Scorsese movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, about Jordan Belfort, the infamous pump-and-dumper.

The Wolves of Wall Street is about a Wall Street guy who turns into a werewolf. Not my kind of movie, but if you are into this kind of campy genre...

Startup.Com is an interesting documentary about the rise and fall of govWorks.com, during the dot com boom and bust.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is an expose on the Enron scam, and the people behind it.

Mugshots: Enron - Wall Street Scammers is another good documentary about the Enron crooks.

The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron is a movie, not a documentary about what else, Enron.

Too Big To Fail is a movie about the financial crisis of 2008, starring James Woods.

Unraveled is a documentary about a financial con man.

Inside Job is an Academy Award winning documentary about the financial crisis of 2008, Starring Matt Damon.

The Flaw is a documentary about the credit bubble and economic crash.

The Startup Kids is a doc about the young startup founders of Vimeo, Soundcloud and Dropbox.


Boiler Room is  a movie I really enjoyed, since it is based on a true story and gives insights into how a stock brokerage firm operating as a boiler room works.

Have I missed any? Any investment related movies that you would recommend? If so, enter it in the Comments section.

The Stock Market Book That Gave Me Nightmares for 8 Weeks

Several years ago, I read the non-fiction autobiography called The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort. At the time, I was doing a lot of reviews of a lot of books, but I held off on this one because the book gave me nightmares for eight weeks (especially one of the hospital scenes). I didn't want anyone else to get nightmares at the time. But now that the book is going to be made into a movie directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, I think it's OK to tell others about this book and let them have eight weeks of nightmares, if they choose to read it. Be forewarned! (BTW, I actually enjoyed the book in spite of my nightmares. More about that shortly.)

This is probably the most disturbing book I've ever read, not just of investment books but of all books. So what could be so disturbing about a guy who was involved with investments and the stock market? The book is about a guy who started up a pump-and-dump stock brokerage firm, whereby he would buy up a bunch of low priced and penny stocks and have the brokers foist the stocks on the unsuspecting public at much higher prices. He ended up making multi-millions of dollars and became very wealthy. Sound boring? Let me give you a Twitter style version of what it's really about (without doing too many spoilers):

huge amounts of cocaine

four prostitutes with one guy

excessive adultery, of course

taping large wads of cash to a girl's body so it can get through customs to be laundered

throwing little people through the office

walking through the halls of a hospital with a hypodermic hanging out of buttocks (this was not the hospital scene that gave me nightmares)

pushing a guy out a window from a very high building

extreme sex

the yacht that almost sank

expensive cars and private jets

enormous amounts of money

extremely powerful Quaaludes

helicopter crashes

So the above is a list of the reasons why you might want to read it.

I did like reading the book for a couple reasons. First, it gave an extremely close-up view of the inside world of the pump-and-dump brokerage industry and the people involved in it. Second, many parts of the book were very humorous.

The one drawback I found about the book was the in the first chapter, Belfort starts out being "lower than pond scum." In the next chapter, he is wealthy and successful with his own helicopter and pilot. I would like to have seen more on how he made it from the bottom to the top. Maybe he is saving that for another book.

Anyway, if you are offended by lots of dirty words, then don't read The Wolf of Wall Street. If you are offended by any of the items on the list above, don't read The Wolf of Wall Street. Otherwise, if you want an eye-opener on the seamy seedy side of Wall Street, then read The Wolf of Wall Street.