Great Film overall

Boring

Beautiful, moving film.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Rogue Trader I thought was done well from the perspective that it told the story, it highlighted the important events that occurred, and it explained financial terms to viewers who do not have a financial background. As a student of finance and economics, I thought the film to be informative, not overly flamboyant (like Wolf of Wall Street), and therefore entertaining. I would recommend this movie to anyone interested in trading or the financial markets, as a story of the ramifications of one's actions.

I really enjoyed this movie. I liked it as much as The wolf of Wall Street. My guess is it did not get the same publicity and hype that The wolf of wall street did. It kept my interest the whole way through. I'm not sure why it rates so low. Maybe it was because it was ahead of its time, people were just not ready for this because we did not have a financial crash in the USA until after this movie. After watching this it makes you wonder how this kind of thing happened. My guess is this inspired many people in the USA to do the same thing here and cause a major financial crisis here as well. But definitely Worth watching. I do not believe that Rouge Trader deserved such a low rating. I will watch again in the future.

The Barings crash is a legendary crime-story, whose ending everyone knows before the action starts.We enjoy it for the reassuring interplay of cliché human types - the posh dupes in the oak-panelled boardroom, the barrow-boy trader with the fancy footwork, the computer-brained Chinese dynamically driving the Eastern markets.The film is punctuated by certain key quotations, especially those that reveal that Leeson was NOT a brilliant banker. (His forecasts were ludicrously wrong.) He was just a brilliant liar, faking the records, piling bluff on bluff, and fending-off every worried caller with slimy excuses, sometimes literally pretending he'd lost signal. "Keep doubling-up, and you're bound to win eventually." But of course. "I never made any profit for myself." Er... give or take a few six-figure bonuses based on imaginary earnings. "I was going to go for broke." Not exactly what a branch manager gets paid for.And of course, that legendary sound-bite from the scion of the Baring dynasty: "It is not actually very difficult to make money in the derivatives market." The crimes of the counting-house do not offer a director much in the way of scenic backdrops, so James Dearden leans rather heavily on the aggressive mime-show of the young traders in their colourful uniform jackets. That and some regular cutting to the grand hotels and restaurants where lucky gamblers take their leisure. But he handles the rhythm well. We can feel the crescendo in the second half, the quickening drumbeats of doom.Ewan McGregor, as Leeson, looks the laddish sort who might be tempted into petty crime. But he does not look rotten to the core, as the part demands. Still he does express the dual personality of Leeson, caught between the extremes of pride and self-doubt.On the female side, his wife (Anna Friel) seems docile and submissive to the point of blankness. A couple of powerful women managers look as though they're about to make waves, but they don't quite get round to it. Leeson is robustly defended by his boss, played with conviction by Nigel Lindsay, a banker himself before he took up acting. And there are notably good performances by all manner of young unknowns crowding on to the trading-floors and into the humid bars and dance-halls.All based on Leeson's own memoirs of the same title, so believe what you like.

I spent twenty years working in the City of London and was actually working for Barings at time of the scandal. Naturally it shook the city, I will always remember the Monday morning, cutting through the press corps outside the building asking such idiot questions like 'Have you heard the news about Barings ?' But back to the film, it tells the story of Nick Leeson the man who broke Barings. He tells of all the problems he suffered with untrained staff, mistakes, and how he tried to cover for his staff. Nothing was ever his fault. This part of the film was pure fiction, mistakes always get made and the mistake Kim made at the start would not necessarily have resulted in her firing. Nick himself remains blameless in the film when what he should have been doing was telling his boss to hire some decent people. The fault with the Barings scandal of course lies with the management. They believed it because they wanted to. No dealer can make 20 million in a week unless he is gambling in excess of 2 billion or committing a fraud. A good film for those uninitiated in the way the financial world works but not totally accurate. I hear Nick Leeson is working for a football club in Ireland now. I harbour no grudges for the fact I didn't get my entire bonus that year or the fact ING made me redundant when they took Barings over !!!