Ask HN: Good documentaries about finance? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good documentaries about finance?

21 pointszepearl9 comments

I have always more or less hated accounting, but recently I had to admit that it can be as well very interesting => therefore yesterday I watched:

- "Enron - The smartest guys in the room" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016268/?ref_=nv_sr_1): kind of funny&scary at the same time. It shows the capitalism pushed to its limits; e.g. very interesting and/or crazy the fact that (if I understood correctly) they put their "future estimated revenues" into their current balances (even if I can understand their way of thinking being that "the current employees should benefit now for a great idea which might generate returns only in the future" the foundations for the estimation can be only purely speculative).

- "Inside Job" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/?ref_=nv_sr_1): the explanation about the "Credit Default Swaps" (never heard of CDS until now) was very nice, and the interviews are probably a master example about how things look like when "ethics" don't exist. Maybe a bit too heavy on the mix of short sequences of interviews.

- "The queen of Versailles" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125666/?ref_=nv_sr_1): this was just crazy, a master example of how money can worsen your life.

Any recommendations about other finance docs?

E.g. "high frequency trading" sounds interesting => it might be interesting to know what are the technical quirks, what the people behind it are, etc... . Or maybe something that analyzes again more in depth what happend in 2008? Or maybe anything that explains well some important concepts of accounting and/or finance, based on theory and/or historical events?

For example I did find by googling "Too big to fail", "Margin Call" and "The big short" but as they all involve big names (e.g. Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Kevin Spacey), I don't understand if they're fiction or not. I'm not interested in fiction.

Thank you :)

A few favorites that come to mind.

- Betting on Zero. A documentary on the billion dollar short on Herbalife and whether or not Herbalife is a pyramid scheme. It is definitely biased towards making Bill Ackman look good (the guy who made it is friends with Ackman) but nonetheless is very interesting and if you are anti-MLM it will fit your view.

- Dirty Money. I wouldn't say it is straight finance but shows a variety of business stories that are very interesting. I thought the one on the payday loan guy was the most interesting. It is produced by Alex Gibney (who did the Enron doc) so if you liked that one then this will be up your alley too.

- The China Hustle. Highlights some difficult in investing in Chinese companies and how they differ in terms of standards and reporting.

Thanks!!

- Betting on Zero (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3762912/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1):

Ha, I can't believe that Herbalife not only still exists but that if I look at its share price it even flourished, got into sponsoring, etc... - I know about the company because looong time back it did a push as well here in Switzerland, but as at that time I tagged it as "scam" I supposed that it would soon or later disappear... . Very interesting to be reminded about how "multi-level marketing"/"pyramid selling" works and very nice that by showing what that Ackman guy did I now understand as well e.g. all these recent discussions related to "short sellers" vs Tesla (I wasn't fully aware that "short selling" could be done in such an active way - I thought that some regulator would start targeting you...).

- The China Hustle (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7215388/?ref_=nv_sr_1)

Very interesting. I never heard about "reverse merges". Additionally I tended to think that e.g. the SEC and/or other regulators not only establish rules and react when they're not followed but actively check the truthfulness of the statements/informations beforehand, but it does not seem to be working that way (I can understand the reasons, but on the other hand this kind of defeats the reason of having such rules...). Btw a few weeks ago I stumbled upon some videos of this guy (e.g. "Why I refuse to buy property in China" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lAoTBVTTO8 ), which explain a bit how chinese people think and some of them are related to what is mentioned briefly in the documentary about the chinese housing bubble.

- Dirty Money (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7889220/?ref_=nv_sr_1): pending... .

The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX3M8Ka9vUA

Jeffrey Rifkin's oracular vision of an alternate trajectory to the status quo that obviates an inevitable extinction for humanity. Radical change engendered by three key innovations: satellite internet, autonomy, and decentralized clean energy.

It is worth noting that Elon Musk is working on all three of these ;)

Thank you! :)

It's not directly about current "finance" (as the title says it's about "economy", but of course which will affect finance), and it's a bit "heavy" (almost 2hrs of speech) and I basically skipped the first 10 minutes but the rest is for sure very interesting as e.g. it forces to rethink about all what happened in the remote past and during recent years and shows that a possible "nice" future is possible.

I'm not as optimistic specifically about the availability of IOT-data (in my opinion going to be mostly compartmentalized/proprietary), but in an ideal world it has for sure a huge potential.

Very funny the statement about IBM & the 7 computers, and towards the end the question in Trump-style :)

Summarized, for sure a good input/thoughts/inspiration about the big ongoing changes and all what they might affect.

Cheers

Neil Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money" (book and mini-series) is a good primer.

I loved this video by Ray Dalio. Really gives a great macro economic view and explains how he timed 2008.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0

For books there is Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years.

And for a blog there is a series from someone in Belgium documenting how HFT companies were putting microwave transmitters on towers in order to shave miliseconds from trade order times between London and continental European exchanges. It’s called HFT In My Backyard.

Watch the Big Short.

And given the times, really make sure you watch all the Russian/Putin/Trump documentaries - specifically "Active Measures"

Thank you!

- "The big short" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1596363/?ref_=nv_sr_1):

Good actors, nice style, sometimes funny, interesting. Again some good explanations and examples about how short selling works, recap about the US housing bubble, rating agencies and the whole finance industry in general.

I can think that probably the point of this film is to make people get rid of their naive view of the financial market/industry? E.g. in my case I always tended to think that it involved cause&effect / action&reaction but this does not seem to be always true. It triggers indirectly a lot of thoughts about many other themes (e.g. is self-regulation effective, impact of governments getting rid of existing regulations, complexity and interconnections in the financial markets, risk analysis, etc...).

- "Active measures" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8135494/?ref_=nv_sr_1): pending... (cannot hear about this stuff anymore, but the documentary has a high rating, so I'll give it a try)

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