Boiler Room Ethics

In business today, there are opportunists that will attempt to take advantage of a situation for personal and monetary gain. The movie”Boiler Room” is one such example of these opportunists taking advantage of others. The movie focuses around the main character, Seth Davis, a young man who has made thousands of dollars running an underground casino out of his house. His father, who is a federal judge, finds out about the casino and tells him to close down the casino and search for a real job. Seth wants to regain respect and approval from his father, and gets introduced to a stockbroker company J.T. Marlin as two brokers came to his casino and were able to convince him to join their firm JT Marlin. Seth not understanding what goes on behind the scenes of the stock market joins the firm, in the hope of making an easy buck. The newly hired trainees make calls to lists of prominent to middle class men and apply high-pressure tactics to sell the company’s exclusive initial public offerings (IPO’s). Seth becomes one of the firm’s best trainees and is exceptional at sales. He quickly rises through the firm and begins to notice practices that he begins to question, and eventually learns the truth behind the firm. His curiosity leads Seth to discover that the firm isn’t what he thought it was and is faced with several ethical dilemmas. He realizes J.T. Marlin is a boiler room that sells non-profitable stocks. He starts to realize that all these times he is forcing customers to buy something that they don’t want or cannot afford. Seth begins to struggle with his conscience as the storyline progress, beginning to feel remorse towards one man whom he convinced to invest his entire savings into a phony stock. At the time, Seth knew that he was getting the man to invest in a stock that did not exist, and that illustrated some of the most unethical attitudes and actions during this film. It is not until after he is arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that Seth