Go watch A Gilded Game starring Andy Lau

 

[[ The attached video is my latest video on my YouTube channel and not related to the content of this article ]]

One of the things I did this weekend was to watch movies with my mum, as the rest of my family is on holiday in Malaysia.

Review-wise, A Gilded Game starring Andy Lau did not deliver the goods, but as a movie of folks who love investing, it deserves 5 stars along with the greats like Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street. 

Here are some of the points of why I liked the movie:

• It's rare to even consider a senior equities analyst as the good guy in this tale. Probably won't fly in Hollywood.
• Some of the questions check out; there was one fairly accurate use of Weighted Average Cost of Capital, and the protagonist even interacted with it, telling the senior manager to adjust the tax term due to regulatory changes. When asked how he knew this was a tech firm, he replied that PE is high at 148, which is quite brilliant to me and showed that the script-writer knows something about investing. 
• There was a scene where a cleaner asked Andy Lau's character whether a stock was a good buy due to its recent performance. His reply was spot on; the cleaner would take on too much risk if he bought it. 
• There were many opportunities to discuss high finance. A great scene involved a dividend cheque and a co-located server rack used for High-Frequency Trading. Andy Lau even walked through a stock chart and showed a pump-and-dump operation.  

The movie must be engaging to maintain dramatic tension, so there might be a suspension of disbelief. It's hard to believe that a seasoned business would get into a bet to give up its shares if its price drops to a certain level. Everyone in the movie suffered too much because they did not diversify their holdings and made leveraged bets on their margin accounts.

Finally, there is something admirable in Andy Lau's fictional character, Todd Zhang, who makes a good point. If companies rush to list IPOs and bid prices to please their clients, where is the profit to be made for the shareholder?

I won't share my favourite scene on this blog because it involves dog food, so watch it yourself!