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Rogue Trader

Rogue Trader

List Price: $14.99
Your Price: $11.99
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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great potrayal of the infamous rogue trader
Review: This movie captures well the story of the rogue trader.
Ewen MacGregor does a superb job, and manages to create some real tension. You can almost feel the tension in your living room when you watch this one!
When he first made the money back, you almost wish he would have stopped there, but somehow, like an addicted gambler, continues on, inventing ingenious ways to cover up, and get more money to trade.
All the cast does a good job, the locations are also excellent.
An underrated excellent movie, and well worth a look, if you have even the slightest interest in finance or banks.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: It gives some insight!
Review: This movie is based on the book of the same title and the actual events that occurred to collapse the Barings Bank. I was most impressed by the pace and direction that the director took with this movie.

It had some high energy points, especially when you Ewan McGregor begins to literally lose it as the option selling losses mount. You also see his duplicitous nature in his personal life and his professional life. There is nothing stop the train wreck coming.

A couple of things I didn't like was the misaccurate representation of this being like the stockmarket. The Singapore International Monetary Exchange is a futures and spot market for currency exchange. There were more intense elements that could have been brought in. This is an international scandal where are the Singapore regulators etc. every antagonist needs a solid protagonist and there wasn't one.

I have been involved with futures and options trading for the past 11 years. I know how intense it is to watch the screen as money ticks away from you. This just wasn't easy to convey in the film

Overall it is good insight into a world few will ever know. I think Nick Leeson did a terrible thing, but I my overall verdict is I'm not sure if it deserves a movie. Maybe that's why Singapore banned it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Very good
Review: This movie is good for one simple reason: You can feel the increasing stress as go along with the movie. It's like if you were the rogue trader and you start feeling more and more pressure from your upper management, from external auditors, from the specialized press and ultimately from your wife ! He was very close to get away with it. I hope you guys remember that he was lucky when the internal auditor had to leave, and when he could recover the initial loss. What he could not predict was the earthquake in Kobe of course ! The movie also shows Neil as a very employee emotional person. Barings never trained or tested Neil to manage people. That started everything when he wanted to recover from his employee mistake. A plus to the movie is the remarkable acting performed by Ewan, he was selected by God to play such role.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Interesting
Review: This movie, although heavily criticized my some, is really wonderful. It has a very interesting plot that keeps you worried about what will happen. Ewan McGregor, as they say on the cover, is fantastic! A great movie for anyone who appreciates intellectual things.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Greed, Arrogance, and Bad Jackets
Review: Unlike compelling stories of high finance and crime in films like the Thomas Crown Affair and Rollover, Rogue Trader purports to be the true story of Nick Leeson, a stock trader whose speculation brought down Barings, England's oldest bank. McGregor portrays Leeson as a charmer white collar criminal who ended up sentenced to six years in a Chinese prison for insider trading and fraud. Diagnosed with cancer, Leeson wrote his memoirs and low and behold it became a film. Ewan McGregor plays the self-absorbed, arrogant Leeson with his usual competence and energy. Anna Friel is his in the dark wife who yearns to be pregnant but can't interest her husband away from the trading floor. This is story of greed, larceny, and speculation on a grand scale. The film was never released in theaters but went straight to Showtime and has now been released for home sale. Skip it and rent it. Good acting, good story, but not a very compelling item for collectors of McGregor's work.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Enjoy a Realistic, Instructive and Well-Packaged Movie
Review: Very English, very British, really great fun, gives an occasion to learn quite a bit, I just loved it. For me there are only four good, instructive and realistic films done on the world of corporate life and the markets in general:

1) Wall Street. An Oliver Stone classic and an American legend. The best movie on the American stock exchange and on Wall Street's vulture culture, with great reminiscences of the worlds of Ivan Boeski, Mikael Milken, Henry Kravis, Jimmy Goldsmith and Kirk Kerkorian. The dialogues are excellent and the movie is packed with realistic information. Great lessons on human and social economic behaviour, including ethical considerations. American, full of straight-talk, gutty and witty.

2) Rogue Trader. The best movie about the world of a trader and its common fall-pits. A tale about gambling. Nick Leeson couldn't help his past success getting up to his head, as he thought himself somehow duty-bound or even entitled to the same historic track record quality (actually, the same happened to LTCM's high IQ managers, who also thought that their past record was sufficient to warrant further similar spectacular profits, which lead them to take on more and more leveraged speculative risks). Nick Leeson ends up in a desperate and illusory attempt to manipulate Nikei exchange futures in a lethal struggle against the trend right after Japan's earthquake. So it took the activity of just one trader with a complacent unsuspecting bank hierarchy to shake the City's financial establishment. English, British, First-Class.

3) Barbarians at the Gate. A fascinating real-life tale about American corporate greed and the gigantic play of egos thereby engendered. Also great lessons as how not to do certain things (cf. Ross F. Johnson), and that greed and a certain amount of gullibility often walk hand in hand (in the end, the RJR deal was far overpaid, turned out to be a loss for KKR, with the then shareholders being the only real beneficiaries). Very American, but like a farce on human greed and corporate ego.

4) Roger & Me, by Michael More. No comment. Really good. Downsize This, by same author, is actually a bit funnier (less depressing), especially the corporate interviews.

For a concluding note concerning Rogue Trader, one ponders Lisa Leeson's line where she comforts her husband just before his final arrest in Frankfurt, as the whole world seems to crumble around them, "You still got your health, and you got me!" she says... Actually Nick was to lose both of them during his imprisonment time in Indonesia, where his wife divorced him and where he was diagnosed with a colon cancer. As far as diseases developed by people victim of social and judicial incriminations are concerned, it reminds one that Mikael Milken (the junk-bond dealer that made LBO's possible) was diagnosed with a prostate cancer after having been imprisoned on securities fraud inculpation...

Anyway, by and by, this is an excellent, entertaining and informative first-rate movie. The acting is excellent and the dialogues are quite revealing. It is also very English.

Get a chance to view it in a quiet atmosphere, and enjoy!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The world loves a rogue
Review: Who would have thought that a film about the futures market and a bunch of stuffy English bankers could be so much fun? This film has it all- exotic locales, drama, suspense, and humor. Although cinematically it has the claustrophobic look and feel of a made-for-TV movie, it's very well done, fast-paced and a great evening's entertainment. Ewan McGregor's protrayal of Nick Leeson is brilliant and he is very ably supported by Anna Friel as Lisa, Nick's wife, and a cast of well-defined minor characters. Admittedly, this is a very sympathetic and one-sided look at Leeson's wildly destructive career in the future's market, but you just can't help wishing this likeable rascal had gotten away with it!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Oh dear God...
Review: With the greatest of respect to the previous reviewere, they have got it completely wrong.

This is the worst movie I have EVER seen. It is really, really attrious. The plot is awful, Ewan McGregor could not act worse if he tried, in fact the only saving grace is Anna Friel who is sadly missed from British television.

If I could award this zero stars I would. PLEASE do not waste your money!


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