BTW, the guy with the beard who tells the Duke brothers that they need to pay up or else, and then seizes all of their assets, seems to delight in doing so. I think we’re to understand that the Dukes were not popular with others on the exchange.
And there are so many nice little bits in the movie. Like when the bell rings to signal the start of trading, and the mens’ room stall doors all open at the same time, like at the start of a horse race. The score has bits and pieces from the Mozart opera The Marriage of Figaro, in which (I learned from Wikipedia) a servant foils the scheming of his employer. When Winthorpe sees his friends at the tennis club, one of the women is ending a story with, “And she stepped on the ball.” There’s a bit in the 1958 movie Auntie Mame in which Patrick Dennis’ snooty girlfriend Gloria also ends a story with that line.
And in Ophelia’s apartment, there is a film poster on the wall for “See You Next Wednesday”, which is a sort of trademark of John Landis films.
RioRico, your couplet still applies. A shorter does sell what isn’t his’n. But then he buys it back, so he doesn’t go to prison.
He hopes that, when he buys it back, it’ll be cheaper than it was when he sold it, so he can make a profit. But sometimes, it’s more expensive when he buys it back, and so he loses money. But he still accepts that loss, because he doesn’t want to go to prison.
My hunch was that the Dukes are the rule, not the exception. They’ve been around a long time, evidenced by the fact that a Duke “founded” the exchange or whatever that quote was when their assets were seized. They’re known, rich.
My question was more about Louis/Billy Ray: they’re known because they represented the Dukes. But they’re off on their own here. This is their money, so their credit (not the Dukes’) is at issue. Of course they could have saved up but they’re pretty small potatoes…?
Lots of money launderers would like to show up at the stock market with stacks of cash, I imagine.
The big, powerful Duke Brothers have one guy in that pit. These guys (without a company?) are both in the pit. Dramatic license again?
I did think it was interesting that they knew how many millions the Dukes owed. 7 jillion transactions being screamed across the floor…someone higher up is tallying as we go? With today’s technology, yes…but back then?
If I understood it right, they sold at 1.42, then bought at less. The final price listed was .29 and that represents the lowest price paid, right? So as the price fell they bought at some amount between the two, like .55 or .67? If they bought at .29, they’d get almost 5x their investment but if they spent more, it would have been a less dramatic amount. Compared to what the Duke Brothers lost, though ?
Disclosure: I haven’t actually seen the movie since it originally came out. I’m running on vague memory and what’s said here.
As you say, they’re rich and known. The Duke boys - I just have to say it that way - will be given every possible opportunity to pay up and not lose their status.
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My question was more about Louis/Billy Ray: they’re known because they represented the Dukes. But they’re off on their own here. This is their money, so their credit (not the Dukes’) is at issue. Of course they could have saved up but they’re pretty small potatoes…?
They clearly are. And their plays are likely small potatoes overall. First, they’d need to have a relationship with a B/D to even BE on the floor making trades. Second, those guys on the floor are worker bees. If they wanted to really be in play they’d be somewhere else calling people on the floor to make those deals. But movie’s gotta movie.
Anyway, looks like at most they had what, $150,000 to spend? If they sold those futures at $1.42 and bought them at 29 cents later then the most they could have made is…about $580,000. If they DID get someone to float them - for whatever reason - the sky’s the limit. But I don’t think we saw anyone agree to do so.
Especially since - an unmentioned part - what they did is so illegal everyone involved should be in jail. The Duke boys technically didn’t break the law at that point. However, criminal conspiracy to defraud an entire exchange? That’s worth some time in the hoosegow right there. Valentine and Ophelia might not have known it but I guarantee you Winthorpe knew it.
Yes, they do. I get people wandering in every year just wanting to ‘ask’ about how to invest all this cash they ‘found’ or ‘inherited’ and how they don’t trust banks for whatever reason.
Absolutely. Neither of them should be there. Winthorpe is an executive trader. He’s not licensed for that and shouldn’t know how to do it unless he started there. As stated up there, he should be calling one of those guys who’s employed by whatever B/D brought them on board to make those moves.
Yeah…no. No way it happens that quickly. Even today most stock trades settle in two days. Used to be three two years ago - I think, I forget the exact time of the change - and decades ago it was 10 or 14 days. Now for options it’s usually next day close-of-business but there are exceptions.
Now, in terms of getting all that tallied? Even today with modern technology things get out of balance and trades that were executed can’t be reconciled and some equities are put on hold until things can be sorted out. I wasn’t active way back when - I was 16 in 1983 - but I can’t imagine it was anything but orders of magnitude worse then.
As I said up there, the most they could have made was about half-a-million dollars in profit. But the Duke boys could have lost far more. If nothing else, because others would have taken then bet against the Duke boys - players much larger than Ackroyd/Murphy - and would have stood to make far more money.
Imagine: the MOST the Duke boys could have lost per contract was $1.42. So if they’re truly wealthy then they could have sold a million contracts and lost a maximum of $1.42MM. If they had 10 million contracts they could lose $14.2MM. That’s a big chunk of change - about $36MM in adjusted dollars - but I can’t imagine it would bankrupt the Duke boys.
I just looked it up. Ackroyd started buying OJ after the report - and where in hell does the Secretary of Agriculture make the routine OJ report, anyway? That’s some bullshit there, too - at 29 cents and they had plenty of buyers. So figure they made $1.14. IF - big if - they were confident enough to bet with money they didn’t have they could have sold unlimited contracts at $1.42 even beyond their own $150,000 they had. SO their profit potential as seen in the movie is essentially unlimited by real-world considerations.
Of course, that still discounts a LOT of real world considerations but, still, the good guys got rich and the bad guys got punished.
Well, there would be some fees from the exchange. And the B/D they’re (not) with (apparently) would want it’s cut of the take. So there’s that. Figure they lose about 20-30% of the take in fees. Could be much worse or better depending on what Winthorpe negotiated.
But, as you say, in movie-world where anyone can walk on the floor and start trading, sure, what the hell. It’s all free! Woot!
OK, so theoretically the Dukes boys lost $1.13 per contract max. If they owed $394MM then they’d purchased 346,672,566 contracts out there from our heroes or others who didn’t follow the pack.
But it’s a margin call. So if they owe that much - unless that represents there entire investable assets - they have significant other assets elsewhere. I can’t believe writing futures like that would bankrupt them.
Googling, in the real world, the standard contract amount is 15,000 pounds of orange juice solids. So for each contract at 1.13, does that mean you owe $16,950? That reduces the number of contracts needed.
Nice catch. I don’t know how they’re delineating contracts in this sense. Generally, I see ‘contract’ as a unit but it may have been different back then.
They started buying at 46. They had a lot of shorts to cover so the price should have risen at that point. Poetic license.
I wouldn’t say that “the good guys got rich”. They’re about as “good” as the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. There were a plethora of other traders that lost money based on their ill-gotten information.
I’ve always thought a good sequel would have been to take the money from “Coming To America” and then turn the tables on Winthorp and Valentine.
Thanks to Jonathan Chance for bringing actual trading expertise to this. I knew that the writers definitely bent the rules with details of how commodities trading works in service of the story, but it is interesting to hear just how far they went to make the movie work. Of course, if they had to wait days to tally up the trades and margin call on the Dukes, it would have undercut the tension of the moment (and frankly in reality the Dukes, like the Hunt brothers, probably would have managed to get themselves bailed out if they had as much influence as they seemed to) so one can argue the necessity in service of the movie, but it seems this is about as accurate a portrayal of commodities training as Armageddon is of asteroid deflection.
As for Louis and Billy Ray, they are definitely not good people; as Jonathan Chance pointed out, they actually broke the law, doing the very thing the Dukes were plotting to do. Aside from that, Louis is still a full-of-himself rich white asshole (even if he has lowered himself to dating a prostitute), and Billy Ray has just upped his hustle from street game to commodities trader. The film never portrays them of having any kind of redemption or resolving a moral quandry, so it doesn’t cheat the viewer in that sense, and of course they left Clarence Beaks to be molested by a gorilla, so they’re really pretty horrible people, but then, ‘Eighties comedies were really about horrible people doing terrible things to one another, e.g. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The War of the Roses, Raising Arizona, Ruthless People, and they were better for it.
Yes. An orange juice futures contract represents 15k lbs of orange juice solids. It might have been slightly different back then, but it was probably in the same range. The market is quoted in cents per pound. A $0.01 move in the price represents +/- $150 for each contract. For simplicity, if the Dukes bought at $1.42 and sold at $0.29, they would have lost $16,950 on each contract. To lose $394mm, they’d have to held 23,244 contracts. Over the past year the open interest (number of contracts outstanding) in FCOJ has fluctuated between 10k-20k contracts. Unless the FCOJ was much more liquid in the 1980s, which it might have been, it’s unlikely the Duke’s could ever acquire that large of a position in one trading session. Also, the exchanges impose position size limits on traders.
Regarding if it would have been possible for Billy Ray to gain access to the futures trading floor - absolutely. In the 80s there were thousands of individuals and small firms that traded for their own accounts in the open outcry pits in Chicago and New York. Yes, there would’ve been some paperwork. But all they would need to do is lease a seat on the exchange from a member and establish an account with a clearing firm. Take a look at current CME seat prices here. See here for a description of how clearing works in the futures market. In a nutshell, individual traders post collateral at a clearing firm. The clearing firm is a large entity with a large capital base and solid credit quality that guarantees the trades of all of its traders. The clearing firm monitors the account balances of its traders and issues margin calls if necessary and/or stops the trader from trading. At the next level, the exchange itself guarantees each clearing firm. As in, if a clearing firm fails, the exchange itself is a backstop of last resort. In the history of US futures trading, there has never been a failure of trading due to counterparty failure.
Let me ask this of our wonderful stock experts that have gone above and beyond on this thread:
If you were Michael Douglas in “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”
Would you have done what he did in the last act? Cause I gotta tell you…I understand his motivations. Which is more important, nailing this one in a lifetime opportunity to not just “Come back”, but also to stick it to all your detractors and get the biggest “I told you so” in your life. OR having a relationship with your daughter and grandchild that you never really had anyway?
I know that seems like a slamdunk to do the right thing, but I certainly understand how it would eat away at Douglas for the rest of his life. …of course its Hollywood so they gave us a happy ending, but still.
It’s all about the bets, IMO. The old guys ruined Louis and replaced him with Billy Ray, so they returned the favor and ruined the old guys. Two wrongs do not make a right, but revenge is sweet and the audience says, “Way to go!”
But now that we’ve seen scams like Enron, Bernie Madoff, and the subprime crisis, maybe we’re more sensitive to the fact that what Louis and Billy Ray did must have also created an enormous amount of collateral damage. Some decent, average, hardworking people would have been hurt, losing money on their retirement, investments, etc. because of the manipulation.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t even bring myself to look at what’s happened to my retirement plan since Covid 19 hit. If I took another hit because my broker vastly overpaid for FCOJ and I had to retire tomorrow, I might be really hurting.
Meanwhile, Louis and Billy Ray are having a nice vacation but they didn’t make so much money as to be set for life or anything.
Literally, I talk to people about their retirement plans - IRA, 401k, pensions and so forth - every single day. It’s most of my work these days.
MOST of my clients have been OK. I’ve trained them well over the years. But those who I’m newly talking to are taking things very hard this time. This is worse than what happened in Q4/18 when the wheels fell off last time. People are downright worried and have little faith in anything positive being done to help them. It’s me and them against the world this time.
I was going to say play oil company stocks* but those have seemingly decoupled from oil or common sense or reality. Yes, I know about the May oil futures and what happened. I’m only 50 miles from Cushing if anyone wants to store their barrels in my backyard.
Oh look…Devon and Apache are green today, Makes total sense!
But seriously…if everything doesn’t completely fucking collapse…they should be ok eventually.
Slight correction, some retail brokers such as Schwab and Ameritrade do allow futures trading and certainly margin is common on non-retirement accounts. Can’t speak for that time period as far as how many retail investors traded OJ.
