"To me, the most important thing is to get involved in fundamentally sound companies, earnings-based companies," he says. Sounding like a wet-eared version of New Jersey's great penny stock salesman Robert Brennan, Belfort says he's helping his clients invest in America's future. On average, Stratton Oakmont's brokers make around $ 85,000 a year. One 28-year-old broker is said to have gone from laying carpets to earning gross commissions of $ 100,000 his first month, $ 800,000 his first year. A former Stratton broker recalls Belfort's motto: "Whip their necks off, don't let 'em off the phone."īelfort's brat-pack brokers quickly came to idolize him. Only after an investor takes the blue-chip bait do Belfort's brokers pitch the higher-margin garbage. He taught them his trusted cold-calling technique, the "Kodak pitch." That is, the first tout is not some obscure over-the-counter issue but a blue chip, often Eastman Kodak. To push his stocks, Belfort hired the same kind of motivated young salesmen who had driven his meat trucks. As Belfort's righthand man, Greene owns a 20% stake in Stratton Oakmont. Within five months, Belfort and Greene had earned enough in commissions to buy out the entire Stratton operation for about $ 250,000. In early 1989 the lads opened an office in a friend's car dealership in Queens, then set up a franchise of Stratton Securities, a minor league broker-dealer. In 1989 Belfort teamed up with 23-year-old Kenneth Greene, an Investors Center graduate who had occasionally driven one of Belfort's meat trucks. His postgraduate work came at Investors Center, the 850-broker penny stock house, where he went to work in 1988, and which was shut down by the SEC a year later. After failing in the meat business, he learned the stock brokerage business at a succession of shops - L.F. The Queens-born son of two accountants, Belfort earned a biology degree from American University. Belfort confirms the investigation and says the firm is cooperating fully.
Subpoenas have been issued to a number of Stratton Oakmont's former brokers. A year ago, even before customers began lodging complaints, the Securities & Exchange Commission started investigating Stratton Oakmont's sales and trading practices. Belfort, who owns over 50% of Stratton's equity, may have personally made $ 3 million last year alone.īelfort's customers, on the other hand, haven't always shared in this prosperity. Stratton's total commission revenues should hit $ 30 million this year. And, while the product may be as perishable as meat and fish, the margins do appear quite handsome. Steaks, stocks - from a hustling salesman's standpoint, what's the difference? Today Belfort's two-year-old Stratton Oakmont brokerage, operating out of Lake Success, N.Y., specializes in pushing dicey stocks on gullible investors.
Looking for a product with more fat in it, Belfort founds stocks. "I was pretty talented," shrugs the smooth-talking Belfort, now 29. By the time he was 25, he filed for personal bankruptcy. But he expanded too quickly on too little capital. Within months, he was running a string of trucks, moving 5,000 pounds of beef and fish a week.
#The wolf of wall street full#
While staff writer Roula Khalaf ( now foreign editor at the Financial Times) didn't coin the phrase "The Wolf Of Wall Street," she did call Belfort a "twisted Robin Hood who takes from the rich and gives to himself and his merry band of brokers." Khalaf describes the business model as "pushing dicey stocks on gullible investors" and noted the already growing challenges from federal investigators. You can read the full text below.ĪT 23, Jordan Belfort was peddling meat and seafood door-to-door on New York's Long Island and dreaming of getting rich.
#The wolf of wall street movie#
But the movie does correctly feature one of the first public takedowns of Belfort and Stratton Oakmont in a 1991 issue of Forbes magazine. Scorsese and lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio seem less interested in the true facts of Belfort's life and actual details of his securities crimes than in showing off more and more lewd behavior. Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf Of Wall Street" is a raucous bacchanalia of sex, drugs, and money on Wall Street that focuses on the excesses of Jordan Belfort's career at over-the-counter brokerage house Stratton Oakmont.
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