- Business Insider selected 25 young professionals 35 and under for its rising stars of Wall Street list.
- We asked these up-and-comers what TV show, book, or movie best represents the finance industry.
- They shared some parallels and even pointed to works about non-financial subjects.
There’s no shortage of colorful characters depicting Wall Street. There’s the serial killer investment banker, the corporate raider who declares that “greed is good,” and the crooked, if charismatic, stockbroker, to name a few.
Two of those are fictional movie characters, and one was based on real person, but they have all shaped the public’s perception of what working on Wall Street could be like.
If you ask successful people at some of the biggest banks, asset managers, trading firms, or hedge funds whether they see their reality accurately perceived on the screen or in books, they’ll tell you that working on Wall Street is a little less colorful than it’s often painted to be.
“I don’t know that there’s a great movie or book depicting life on Wall Street,” Mark Zhu, 34, a managing director at Blackstone, told Business Insider. “The day-to-day is a lot more boring than you think. It’s a lot of calls and a lot of emails. There’s not as much flamboyance or out-there behavior. It’s almost not movie-worthy. Why would you pay money to watch somebody just sit in front of a computer doing Zooms?”
So maybe they think all that partying on HBO’s show about twenty-something investment bankers “Industry” is a little overdone, but there are still some elements the entertainment industry gets right occasionally.
We asked up-and-comers on Wall Street about the shows, movies, or books that best represent their daily lives. While no one representation was perfect, they talked about some of the parallels they saw. Some even shared some non-finance references that give a window into their world.
Here are the shows, movies, or books that give a flavor of what it’s like to work on Wall Street.
