Educational Media Reviews Online

“Wall Street is a War.”–Ted Gutierrez

Shot between December 2002 and September 2003, this film plunges the viewer into life on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Filled with computers, telephones, headsets, and multitudes of well-dressed men either shouting or determinedly gesturing in Wall Street’s peculiar sign language, the trading floor resembles a casino on a busy night, until the filmmaker interviews several established professionals who reveal its role as a hub of economic communication and its significant interdependence on world events. Richard Grasso, who resigned as CEO and Chairman of the NYSE shortly after the making of this documentary, marvels that Wall Street is the only place in the world where billions of dollars can change hands so quickly and easily, based on simple oral agreements. Joe Graino, CEO of UBS PaineWebber, describes the activity as the “closest thing to combat” he’s ever experienced. Walking past the stations where foreign currencies are exchanged, where precious metals are bought and sold, where debts and equities are selected or disposed of, UBS hedge fund specialist Bill Richards explains how keen observation of floor activity enables a trader to build a picture of what’s going on in the world at any given moment.

The director, Andreas Hoessli, does a pretty good job of crawling into a stock broker’s head. He wisely chose not to interject any background music throughout the program. Instead, he relied on the everyday cacophony served up by the Wall Street trading floor. Rare visions of calm - the Rockefeller Center skating rink, Manhattan streets at dusk - provide some relief; yet strikingly, while the camera pans over the seashore and its bird-strewn sky, the viewer cannot escape the jangling of the marketplace in the background. Obsession seems to be Hoessli’s focus. Anyone thinking about a career on Wall Street should watch this film to find out what a typical day on the floor is like, and what personality traits and habits of mind will serve them best in such a job.

If you are looking for an historical overview of Wall Street or a tutorial outlining the nuts and bolts of investing, this is not the program for you. Rather, Wall Street: a Wondering Trip offers a taste of daily action on the trading floor and a glimpse into the place of the stock market in a post 9/11 world. Thus, it is recommended for academic library collections serving business programs. Complementary titles include Modern Marvels: the Stock Exchange, 1997 (similar, but with a greater focus on history and technology); Wall Street Prophets, 2001 (examining analysts’ conflicts of interest and ethical crises); Nova’s Trillion Dollar Bet, 1999 (chronicling the quest to hone financial market analysis into a science); Frontline’s The Wall Street Fix, 2003 (concerned with restoring trust after WorldCom); and Frontline's Dot Con, 2002 (discussing some Wall Streets brokers' betrayal of the public trust and the resulting IPO investigations).