Watch The Wolf of Wall Street

In this dark comedy drama, a young stock broker strikes out on his own and makes a fortune as a financial manager in the 90s. The problem is, he does it illegally, and while he lives it up, the authorities are closing in. The film is based on the autobiography of financial scammer Jordan Belfort. It was directed by Martin Scorcese. In 1987, Jordan Belfort lands a job as a Wall Street stockbroker for L.F. Rothschild, employed under Mark Hanna. He is quickly enticed into the sex- and drug-fueled stockbroker culture and Hanna’s belief that a broker's only goal is to make money for himself. Jordan loses his job following Black Monday, the largest one-day stock market drop in history, and takes a job at a boiler room brokerage firm on Long Island that specializes in penny stocks. Thanks to his aggressive pitching style and the high commissions, Jordan makes a small fortune. Jordan befriends his neighbor Donnie Azoff, and the two found their own company. They recruit several of Jordan's friends, whom Jordan trains in the art of the "hard sell". Jordan's tactics and salesmanship largely contribute to the success of his pump and dump scheme, which involves inflating the price of a stock through issuing misleading, positive statements in order to sell it at an artificially augmented price. When the perpetrators of the scheme sell their overvalued securities, the price drops immensely and those who were conned into buying at the inflated price are left with stock that is suddenly worth much less than what they paid. To cloak this, Jordan gives the firm the respectable-sounding name Stratton Oakmont in 1989.