Fair Game
“Gordon Gekko is a fictional character from the 1987 film ‘Wall Street’. Gekko was portrayed by actor-producer Michael Douglas in a performance that won him an Oscar, his character based, at least in part, on Ivan Boesky, an American businessman who’s notable for his prominent role in a Wall Street insider trading scandal that occurred in the United States in the mid-1980s.
Boesky had become an arbitrageur (in economics and finance, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price differential between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalise upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. In simple terms, a risk-free profit) who had amassed a fortune of over $USD200 million by betting on corporate takeovers.
In other part, ‘Wall Street’ Producer, Edward R. Pressman, said in relation to the upcoming sequel that, “originally there was no one individual that the character of Gordon Gekko was based on, but that Gekko “was partly Michael Milken” the American financier and philanthropist noted for his role in the development of the market for high-yield bonds aka called junk bonds during the 1970s and 1980s.
The defense of greed is reportedly a paraphrase of a 1985 Commencement Address at UC Berkeley, delivered by Boesky (later convicted of insider-trading charges) in which he said, “Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”
The inspiration for the “Greed is Good” speech seems to have come from two sources. The first part, where Gekko complains that the company’s management owns less than three percent of its stock and that it has too many Vice Presidents, is taken from similar speeches and comments made by Carl Icahn, an American billionaire financier, corporate raider, and private equity investor about companies he was trying to take over in the early 1980s.” So!
I’ve been playing Wall Street Survivor, a stock market simulation game for a few months now. The game enables me to test drive my trading strategies without losing the blouse off my back! I liked the virtual $100k portfolio hand-up for starters and strangely one immediately feels a boldly false sense of power in receiving something for nothing. I wonder if that’s how it starts for bods like Boesky et al. That still-small tingle culminating in a Milken-like ingeniously executed junk bond foodfest.
The game is a hot-pot of learning while you play which is also how I learn best. The current value of my portfolio is $127,299.04 while my Buying Power (BP) is $122,975.58 and I’ve got a Cash Balance of 48, 910.29. I’m currently sitting smack bang just left of centre in the 107355-strong number of players. To me, that’s not bad for a girl from the sticks. For me, the key is slow and steady stirs the pot, boringly simplistic but keeps me in the game. And as for losing the blouse off my back? Not today BUT every other day I’m fair game!
