He’s the Wolf of WallStreetBets.
Infamous stock broker Jordan Belfort threw his support behind the Reddit-fueled revolution in America’s financial markets, saying it would bring about “radical change.”
“I believe this is a paradigm shift right now,” Belfort — the inspiration for the hit film “The Wolf of Wall Street” — told Fox News late Monday.
“The big guys were colluding, doing this stuff, right?” he added. “So now the little guy finally has the ability to play that same game at least somewhat, and there is going to be a radical change.”
Belfort said he was initially thought the Reddit users touting GameStop shares were engaging in a “pump and dump” — the kind of scheme to artificially inflate a stock price that Belfort pleaded guilty to running at his Stratton Oakmont brokerage.
But he later realized that the rookie traders on the WallStreetBets message board had exposed a “real inefficiency in the market” by putting pressure on hedge funds that bet against the video-game retailer, he said.
The former penny-stock broker, portrayed in the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street” by Martin Scorsese, knows a thing about pumping stocks. He pleaded guilty in 1999 to manipulating investors into buying worthless stocks, was sentenced to 42 months in prison and ordered to pay $110 million back to his victims.
In 2018, he had only repaid $12.8 million, or a fraction of what he owed his investors, and was ordered by a Brooklyn federal judge to hand over his equity interest in a private company as a result.
“It’s not really about making money,” Belfort told Fox host Tucker Carlson. “I mean, they want to make some money here, but they are angry as hell and they’re sick and tired of getting stomped out by Wall Street which they have been forever, and they finally now have at least some ammunition to get back.”
“The danger is it’s going to end badly for these stocks, and I hope people don’t lose money in the process,” he added.
Belfort also rallied the Reddit troops with a YouTube video of himself giving a motivational speech cut together with clips from Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated movie about him.
The video was a recreation of Leonardo DiCaprio’s defiant, foul-mouthed monologue in the film — with some altered lines to fit the moment.
“This s— that Robinhood is pulling on us now, stopping us from trading, barring us from their platform — our home, the home that we built — what the f— is that, you know?” Belfort said, lambasting the stock-trading app’s decision to temporarily block users from buying GameStop shares last week.