Gekko's job title?

There is no evidence that Gekko manages money for other investors, like fund managers do. Gekko is presented as the founder and head of Gekko & Co, an investment company, but no mention is made of any outside investor in the company. Moreover, when Bud and Marv discuss Gekko's past performance, they talk about much money he made on different deals in absolute amounts, not about rates of return or the kind of metrics one would use to discuss the performance of an investment fund. And finally, would Gekko have been rewarded with a Fortune magazine cover hailing him as "Gekko the great - the king of Wall Street" if he was merely managing money for the benefit of others instead of operating independetly?

If you want to describe Gekko, the term corporate raider (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_raider) is probably the most appropriate. Corporate raiders attracted a lot of attention in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the availability of junk bonds suddenly enabled them to accumulate sizeable "war chests" and take on large companies, whose sheer size had previously shielded them from hostile takeovers and greenmail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenmail).

In a Los Angeles Times article http://articles.latimes.com/2008/oct/05/entertainment/ca-wallstreet5, co-writer Stanley Weiser stated that Gekko was based on several personalitites, notably Ivan Boesky (a fund manager who heartily indulged in insider trading) and Carl Icahn (a corporate raider who was fiercely independent and did not want to deal with investors). One gets the feeling that Gekko thinks like Icahn as far as independence and outside investors are concerned.