The Trading Game
The No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- €15.99
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- €15.99
Publisher Description
*NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*
'An unforgettable story of greed, financial madness and moral decay' Rory Stewart
'Hilarious, shocking and deeply sad — often in the same sentence' Sunday Times
'The Wolf of Wall Street with a moral compass' Irvine Welsh
An outrageous, white-knuckle journey to the dark heart of an intoxicating world - from someone who survived the trading game and then blew it all wide open
'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 footballs on the streets of East London in the shadow of Canary Wharf's skyscrapers, Gary wanted something better. Something a whole lot bigger.
Then he won a competition run by a bank: 'The Trading Game'. The prize: a golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader in the whole city. A place where you could make more money than you'd ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional maths geniuses, overfed public schoolboys and borderline psychopaths, yet they start to feel like family. Where soon you're the bank's most profitable trader, dealing in nearly a trillion dollars. A day. Where you dream of numbers in your sleep - and then stop sleeping at all.
But what happens when winning starts to feel like losing? When the easiest way to make money is to bet on millions becoming poorer and poorer - and, as the economy starts slipping off a precipice, 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?
Number 1 Sunday Times bestseller, March 2024
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The Trading Game is as entertaining as it is enraging. Gary Stevenson joined Citibank’s London office in the late 2000s, becoming the youngest trader in the city. His memoir provides a potted history of the global economy—and the crises therein—from this period into the 2010s, while explaining how in that time, often betting against a recovery, he made himself a 20-something multimillionaire. But Stevenson is as interested in the personalities he was surrounded by—who, unlike the writer himself, largely grew up wealthy and coddled—as he is their trading positions. Through his careful attention to these characters—a motley crew of figures who are repulsive then somehow momentarily charming but then, yep, still repellent—the trading floor comes to life. They populate the story of how he made his way to the top of the game; how he almost got trapped there against his will; what he earned; and, as his health deteriorated and his personal life crumbled, what it all cost him.
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.
