Remember Tommy Belesis? Founder and CEO of preeminent boiler room John Thomas Financial? Breakout star of Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps? Mentor to Shia Labeouf? Guy who enforces rules at his shop about not letting junior employees sit down, who has cultivated an atmosphere in which senior brokers rub the balls of a bull every morning for good luck and walk around saying things like “motion creates emotion” without any irony, and who generally gives the impression he proudly displays towels in his guest bath that have been hand-stitched with the phrase “Don’t pitch the bitch,” which he make sure to point out during house tours? This may come as a surprise, as it seems so out of character, but he’s been charged with fraud and intimidation that in one instance involved suggesting an employee ought to look both ways before crossing the street. Read more »
Money Never Sleeps
If Threatening To Hit An Employee With His Car Is Wrong, Tommy Belesis Doesn’t Want to Be Right
By Bess LevinBoiler Room Operator Who Doesn’t Let Junior Sit Down, Thinks Cameos In Shia LaBeouf Movies Are Good For Business Shockingly Charged With Fraud
By Bess Levin
Who could have seen this coming, besides everyone? Read more »
“Brokers who show up with stubble are sent to the bathroom, where a bow-tied attendant dispenses razors, cologne and candy.”
By Bess Levin
Back in February, FINRA informed John Thomas Financial founder Anastasios “Tommy” Belesis, he of rallies for Wall Street and Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps fame, that he “may face disciplinary action on a claim that he artificially inflated the price of a stock,” while the Post reported that the firm was being probed by the FBI and the SEC. According to the firm’s lawyer, Robert Bursky, “There is not a shred of evidence that suggests there is an ongoing inquiry by the FBI,” and if you asked David Pitts, a spokesman for John Thomas, if the brokerage is a boiler room, which Bloomberg did, he’d say it is not (and that, on the contrary, “it helps real companies raise money and provides honest advice to investors”). Regardless of whether or not any of the allegations are true, a few business practices one might want to avoid if questions like “is this place legit” or “is this business entirely modeled after 2000′s Boiler Room” are being raised include: Read more »
“I don’t think LaBeouf’s character [who attempted to raise capital for an alternative-energy company] was unrealistic from a personality standpoint. More Wall Street people than you’d think have that kind of beneath-the-surface idealism.“– Anonymous Goldman analyst, in a conversation with Dealbook discussing how “real” things are in Money Never Sleeps. The same financial services employee noted that “there were too many ties” and said he thought “the percentage of scenes that Jake wasn’t in the office was way off.” [Dealbook via DI]
The culture of the employees, the trading floor [as depicted in Money Never Sleeps]…I thought all that was pretty good, though some of the machines looked funky. And those equity guys were portrayed very accurately, like the lugheads that that know their stories on a couple of [stocks]. At Lehman the difference between equity floor and the fixed income floor was like night and day. It’s like the Harvard, MIT crowd in fixed income and then it’s like UMass on the equity floor. So many equity guys totally got blind-sided. They didn’t understand credit derivatives, and they just were so wrapped up in their own little stories.– Lawrence McDonald, managing director at Pangea Capital, previously VP of distressed debt and convertible securities trading at Lehman Brothers, and guy for whom the Wall Street sequel was “hard to watch” because it “brought back a lot of bad memories.” [TDB]
It’s one thing to produce a film that induces feelings of suicide in the audience, what with its 17 different plots lines and Gucci loafers, all the while exposing your childlike comprehension of the machinations of Wall Street but when you insult the looks of Lloyd Blankfein, you go too far. Read more »
Financial Services Employees Offer Words Of Wisdom, Tepid Enthusiasm For Money Never Sleeps, Night Of Love And Desktop Wallpaper
By Bess LevinIggy Ioppe. Colin Butler. Greg Hold. Three “finance powerhouses” who “play hard” for “the thrill of the game itself.” Somehow they managed to find time in their schedules to help promote Money Never Sleeps. This involves telling us their favorite Wall Street quotes, of course, but also their relationship statuses (all singles, ladies!), and market musings. (For instance, Greg, founder of Hold Brothers, appreciates that “The markets are fair. They don’t care who your daddy is.” Colin, VP of institutional trading at Caris & Co has learned that “You’ve got to come to work each morning ready to bite the ass off a bear.” Iggy, a prop trader at Credit Suisse loves the confluence of “society, economy, politics.”) There’s also this: Read more »
Daily Intel Jessica and I saw a screening of Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps last week. We haven’t shared our thoughts on it until now because we haven’t wanted to/been ready to talk about it. I’m not going to say it’s so bad you shouldn’t see it, but that’s just because it’s so bad it needs to be seen to be believed and we want more people to be able to share in our collective trauma. Like being stripped naked, covered in honey and sewn ass to mouth to your fellow members of the incoming Goldman Sachs analyst class, you can’t truly understand unless you’ve gone through something like that yourself. Read more »
Guests at a Sunday night screening of Money Never Sleeps included hedge funder Jeffrey Epstein, who was greeted warmly by guests after he completed a prison sentence in June. “It was the first time he has been out in two years, but nobody blinked he was there,” a witness reports. “He was chatting to Jonathan Farkas, Wilbur Ross and Leon Black. He was sitting right near Rudy Giuliani.” Also there were moguls Stephen Schwarzman, Pete Peterson, Teddy Forstmann, Peter Brant and Martha Stewart, as well as TV journalists who cover them, including ABC’s Chris Cuomo, Bloomberg TV’s Gigi Stone and CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo. [NYP]
Despite the fact that his co-star Shia Labeouf has the accumulated wisdom of several lunches with top brass at the Encino branch of Charles Schwab, sitting in on rounds 17-23 of the Goldman Sachs interview process, and months of studying for the CFA’s Level I exam only to come down with a stomach virus the day of the test, it was retired investor Mike D who will be talking shop at CLSA’s investor conference in Hong Kong this September. For those who question whether or not Douglas knows anything about investing in real life, and why he and not another I don’t know– THE GUY WHO HAS BLOOMBERG ON SPEED-DIAL– was invited, rest assured, MD knows what he’s talking about here. Read more »
“Don’t go expecting a movie that will give you some great intellectual or emotional insights into the Wall Street crisis. Sure, there are the obligatory “life on the trading floor” scenes and quasi-faithful recreations of arguments between Treasury and Wall Street at the oak-paneled New York Fed. And there are lots of cameos of CNBC anchors and Nouriel Roubini (as “Dr. Hashimi”) to give the movie “authenticity.” But the authenticity is as phony as Bernie Madoff’s investment returns. How many Fordham-educated prop traders with the last name “Moore” speak fluent Mandarin?” [WSJ via BI]
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