The Trading Game
A Confession
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4.1 • 16 Ratings
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
#1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Best Wall Street Book of 2024”—Bloomberg
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former Citibank trader Stevenson's incisive and often humorous debut recounts his journey into and out of the financial industry. Growing up poor in Ilford, East London, Stevenson used a rubber tube connected to a faucet to take showers. Though he was kicked out of grammar school for selling drugs, his math acumen landed him a spot at the London School of Economics, where his shabby clothing and working-class accent garnered disdain. He got an opportunity to shine when Citibank held a student competition called "the Trading Game," a card-based simulation of financial trading whose winner would land an internship at the company. Stevenson took first place, and parlayed the internship into a full-time job in 2008. He quickly became Citibank's most profitable trader, netting $12 million in his first year. Gradually, however, he grew tired of the cutthroat environment and cognitive dissonance he felt when, for example, Citibank made $11 million after the 2011 earthquake and Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan caused interest rates to go down. In 2014, he left the company to pursue a degree in economics and educate the public about wealth inequality, launching a YouTube channel and publicly advocating for a U.K. wealth tax. Stevenson's sharp wit—he describes a coworker as having "the constant air of a 16-year-old trying to buy vodka"—enhances a fast-paced narrative that provides colorful context for his current wealth tax advocacy. It's an enlightening and frequently infuriating peek into the world of high finance.
Customer Reviews
Amazing story- easy read
Learnt more about the economy and trading in this book than a text
Book. Easy read and funny.