Movies & Documentaries
Sometimes a good film explains a mortgage derivative better than a textbook chapter ever could. Here's a short watchlist of films and documentaries about markets, trading floors, and the crises that made derivatives famous for the wrong reasons.
The film version of the book above, and honestly a great companion to it. The famous 'explain it with a celebrity and a fish tank' scenes are some of the clearest plain-English explanations of mortgage derivatives put to film.
▶ Find it on YouTubeA quiet, tense drama set over 24 hours at a bank that's just realized its book of derivatives is about to blow up. Less flashy than The Big Short, more accurate about how a real risk meeting actually feels.
▶ Find it on YouTubeAn Oscar-winning, no-nonsense walk through the 2008 financial crisis — who did what, and how derivatives like CDOs and CDS went from obscure risk tools to front-page news.
▶ Find it on YouTubeA look at the old-school Chicago futures pits — the shouting, the hand signals, the culture — right as electronic trading was making that whole world disappear. A little rough around the edges, and worth it for the history alone.
▶ Find it on YouTubeA rarely-seen short documentary following futures trader Paul Tudor Jones before and during the 1987 crash. Famous in trading circles mostly because Jones later tried to keep it from circulating — which of course only made people want to find it more.
▶ Find it on YouTube