The Trading Game: A Confession

by Gary Stevenson

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Following a career in finance, Gary Stevenson is here to tell-all — pulling no punches — about the volatile world he lived in. With an eye on the flaws of capitalism paired with hilarious observations of the financial world, this is a riveting read for anyone posing a quizzical eye towards the economy.

#1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER • A “vivid” (Financial Times) rags-to-riches memoir that takes readers inside the high-stakes drama and hubris of the trading floor, a “darkly funny” (Guardian) tale of Citibank’s one-time most profitable trader, and why he gave it all up

“Darker than [Liar’s Poker], but if anything even more of a rollicking read . . . the clearest account I’ve ever read of how trading desks really work.”—Felix Salmon, Axios
 
In development as a limited series • Longlisted for the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year

If you were gonna rob a bank and you saw the vault door there, left open, what would you do? Would you wait around?

Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken soccer balls on the run-down streets of East London, Gary Stevenson dreamed of something bigger. As luck would have it, he was good at numbers.

At the London School of Economics, wearing tracksuits and sneakers, Stevenson shocked his posh classmates by winning a competition called “The Trading Game.” The prize?: a golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader at Citibank. A place where you could make more money than you’d ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional geniuses and insecure bullies yet start to feel like family. Where against the odds you become the bank’s most profitable trader, closing deals worth nearly a trillion dollars. A day.

Soon you are dreaming of numbers in your sleep—and then you stop sleeping at all. But what happens when winning starts to feel like losing? You’re making a killing betting on millions of people becoming poorer—like the very people you grew up with. The economy is slipping off a precipice, and your own sanity starts slipping with it. You want to stop, but you can’t. Because nobody ever leaves.

Would you stick, or quit? Even if it meant risking everything?

The Trading Game is an outrageous, unvarnished, white-knuckle journey to the dark heart of an intoxicating world—the trading floor—from someone who survived the game and then blew it all wide open.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593727218
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/05/2024
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	31,434
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Gary Stevenson, since leaving his trading career behind, has studied for an MSc at Oxford, worked with economic think tanks, and founded a YouTube channel where he teaches people about real-world economics. He regularly appears on television and radio and has written for Fortune and The Guardian.

Read an Excerpt

1

In some ways, I was born to be a trader.

At the end of the street I grew up on, in front of the tall, concave wall of a recycling center, a lamp post and a telegraph pole stand four meters apart from one another, forming the perfect set of impromptu goalposts.

If you stand between those two posts, take ten big steps backward and stare upward and between them, into the far distance, the light of the tallest Canary Wharf skyscraper will peek over that high wall, and wink at you.

After school, as a child, I would spend long evenings kicking battered foam footballs in and around those goalposts, wearing battered school shoes and my brother’s school uniform. When my mum would come and call me home for dinner, I’d look back and watch that skyscraper wink at me. It seemed to mean some sort of new life.

It wasn’t just the streets of East London I shared with those gleaming, towering temples of capitalism. There was something else too, some kind of shared belief. Something about money. Something about want.

The importance of money, and the knowledge that we didn’t have much of it, was something I always felt deeply. In one of my earliest memories, my parents gave me a pound coin, and sent me to the Esso garage to buy lemonade. At some point in the trip, I dropped that pound coin, and lost it. In my memory, I searched for that pound coin for what seemed like hours—crawling under cars, scrabbling in the drains—before returning home, empty-­handed, and in floods of tears. In reality, it was probably only thirty minutes. But thirty minutes is a long time when you’re a child, I guess, and one pound was a lot of money.

I don’t know if I ever really lost that love for money. Although, now, when I look back and think about it, I’m not sure that love is the right word. Perhaps, especially when I was a kid, I think it might have been more of a fear. But whether it was fear, or a love, or a hunger, it only got stronger as I started to grow, and I was always chasing those pounds I didn’t have. At twelve, I started selling penny sweets in school; at thirteen, I started delivering papers, 364 days a year, for £13 a week. By sixteen, my high school sales business had become considerably more adventurous, more profitable, and more illicit. But those small kills were never really the end game, and every evening, after the sun went down, I’d always look up at those skyscrapers, winking down at me from the end of the street.

But there were many other ways in which I was not born to be a trader, and those ways were and are, very important.

Because there are many, many, young, hungry, ambitious boys kicking broken footballs around lamp posts and cars in the shadows of East London’s skyscrapers. Many of them are smart, many of them are committed, almost all of them would make all kinds of sacrifices to put on a tie and some cufflinks and go walk into those tall, shiny towers of money. But if you step onto those trading floors, which take pride of place in those glimmering skyscrapers where young men earn millions of pounds every year in the heart of what was once East London’s docklands, you will not hear the proud accents of Millwall and Bow, of Stepney and Mile End and Shadwell and Poplar. I know, because I worked on one of those trading floors. Someone once asked me where my accent was from. He’d just graduated from Oxford.

The Citibank Tower in Canary Wharf has forty-­two floors. In 2006, which was the year I first entered that building, it was the joint second-­tallest building in the UK. One day, in 2007, I decided to go up to the top floor of the building, to see what the view was like, and to see if I could see my home.

The top floor of the Citibank Center was used only for conferences and events. This meant that, when it was not in use, the entire space sat totally empty. A vast, uninterrupted country of lush blue carpet, bordered on all sides by thick glass windows. I floated across the soundless carpet to the window, but I couldn’t see the place where I lived. From the 42nd floor of the Citibank Center, you cannot see East London. You can only see the 42nd floor of the HSBC Tower. The ambitious young children of East London look up to the skyscrapers that cast shadows on their houses, but the skyscrapers don’t look back. They look at each other.

This is the story of how I, of all the kids playing football and selling sweets in those shadows, got a job on the Citibank trading floor. It’s a story of how I became Citibank’s most profitable trader, in the whole world, and it’s a story about why, after all of that, I quit.

These were the years when the global economy started to slip off the precipice from which it’s still falling. At times, my sanity slipped with it. At times it still does. God knows, I didn’t treat everyone the best. Harry, Wizard, JB, myself. All the others who really should have had names. I hope you can forgive me for telling your stories. They’re all part of my story, you know?

I’ll dedicate it to Anish’s grandad, who, when we were drunken teenagers, and he was a drunken old man, would mutter to us endlessly the only sentence that he knew well in English.

“Life is life. Game is a game.”

We never really figured out what it meant. I still hope that one day we will.

Editorial Reviews

“Hilarious, shocking and deeply sad—often in the same sentence.”—The Times

“A well written and often darkly funny book that makes a convincing case that high finance is as toxic, reckless and deeply cynical as ever.”—The Guardian

“Stevenson is a fine wordsmith. . . . His portrayal as an unlikely hero, brimming with wit and a low tolerance for nonsense, makes for an engaging read.”—Turney Duff, The Telegraph

“Vivid . . . Stevenson is a sharp observer, with a gift for colourful if merciless description.”—Financial Times

“A rollicking read . . . Stevenson gives the clearest account I’ve ever read of how trading desks really work, how they’re lubricated by inter-dealer brokers, and how hard banks make it to quit.”—Felix Salmon, Axios

“For quizzical observers of the madness of the twenty-first-century money world, [The Trading Game is] well worth reading.”—The Times Literary Supplement
 
“Gary Stevenson’s rags-to-riches memoir exposes a system where the rich can’t lose and the economy is choked by inequality.”—The New Statesman
 
“An incredibly important and timely book, very much of its era . . . The Wolf of Wall Street with a moral compass, The Trading Game lays bare the spiritual vacuity of the systems and processes that both dominate and reduce our humanity.”—Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting

“A thrilling story of high finance—and its low points . . . Gary Stevenson captures what really happens on the trading floor, and he does it with a vivid and original voice and a ton of style.”—Matt Levine, Bloomberg Money Stuff columnist

“Gary Stevenson’s book is a rare parable of empathy overtaking greed. It’s also an absolute page-turner, one you will close with more wisdom and compassion than when you opened it.”—Andy Dunn, bestselling author of Burn Rate

“Not since Liar’s Poker has a book brought the trading floor into such vivid, boisterous life. . . . A switchblade-sharp exposé of the wealth-making factories of modern finance.”—Diana B. Henriques, author of The Wizard of Lies and Taming the Street

“The best finance memoir I’ve ever read. Stevenson’s tale of plundering Wall Street like some kind of cockney pirate is by turns hilarious and harrowing.”—Zeke Faux, author of Number Go Up

“Compelling, intensely readable, unsettling . . . an unforgettable story of greed, financial madness, and moral decay.”—Rory Stewart, author of How Not to Be a Politician

“Astonishing, enraging, extremely funny, and exquisitely sad.”—The Secret Barrister

“Incisive and often humorous . . . an enlightening and frequently infuriating peek into the world of high finance.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“A British master of finance shows how the world of investment and trading isn’t so far removed from organized crime. . . . a story he relates with considerable panache.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2024-01-05
A British master of finance shows how the world of investment and trading isn’t so far removed from organized crime.

As a child, writes Stevenson, he would gaze up at the skyscrapers of the financial district, “those gleaming, towering temples of capitalism.” A math whiz, but definitely an outlier in England’s hidebound class system, thrown out of high school for selling a pinch of pot, he excelled in his studies at the London School of Economics and bested the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful. “The way I saw it, there was only one path for me into the City—beat all the Arab billionaires and Chinese industrialists to a top first class degree, and just pray to God that Goldman Sachs noticed,” he recounts. Instead, Citibank came calling when Stevenson trounced other applicants for internship in a trading simulation that he steered through, even when the powers that be rigged it. Before long, he was earning millions of pounds per year. Granted, he notes, some of his earnings came at terrific cost to other people, as when he made millions on the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011: “Some people thought the nuclear plant might blow up. That was good for my position. Up three and a half million dollars. Up four and a half million dollars. By a week in I was up six million.” Along the way to wealth, Stevenson had disregarded a wise warning from a veteran—“Once you get in, you’ll never get out”—and when he decided that the trading game was no longer for him, it was as if he were trying to quit the Mafia or a bike gang, a story he relates with considerable panache.

A warning to would-be Wall Streeters that while the money is good, it can come at the expense of your soul.

Kirkus Reviews