The Trading Game: A Confession

Written by Gary Stevenson

Narrated by Gary Stevenson

#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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9780593828328

Reviews for The Trading Game

[infjsarah · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This a fascinating book. I was served up Gary Stevenson via the YouTube feed as I watch a lot of financial related videos. He has a wide boy London accent and an axe to grind on inequality. I listened to the audiobook read by the author and it is like watching a car crash. It is his perceptions of how things were of course so you have to be sceptical at points. He is not a very likeable man. But his description of how traders operate and make money is both fascinating and rage inducing. It was also how strange to me that it took him so long to realise he was spiralling downwards into extreme depression. He just wanted to make more and more money but he wasn't even spending it - it wasn't FOR anything. But his colleagues didn't seem much different. It could just as easily be titled The Trading Game - a warning.

[deusvitae · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Have you seen The Big Short or read the book on which the movie was based? Did you want to believe anything changed after all that?

Rarely do you get a glimpse into the world of high finance. It’s a world mostly populated by the wealthy elite, and it’s how the wealthy elite stay that way. The wealthy elite generally don’t write tell all memoirs about how the sausage gets made.

But Gary Stevenson was not from the wealthy elite; far from it. He was among the much poorer classes in Ilford, East London. He was one of the very, very few “meritocratic success stories,” and became for a moment one of the most successful FX swap traders in the world.

He tells his story and how and why he left in A Trading Game: A Confession.

If you saw The Big Short, you are aware of the expletive laden speech which seemed to mark the economic traders of our world, and this book is replete with them.

But the language is not the most cursed thing described in the book.

The author calls it his confession, but don’t expect a lot of contrition or shame. Instead, it’s more of a revelation.

The author was enormously successful because his education at the London School of Economics gave him openings to display his street smart skills and awareness of what was going on in the real world so he could see through the delusions which permeated the market in the Great Recession.

Because that’s the timeframe for most of the book: the author gets to the trading floor for the first time right as the economy seemed to be collapsing. He made his reputation as a trader from 2010-2012.

And what did he see which others did not? He saw interest rates would not go up for a very long time. He perceived the “economic exchange” of the moment was deepening inequality: the rich would get richer on the backs of the poor who were paying more in fees and losing their houses.

And so he, in the normally more humble field of FX swaps, was able to make millions, because he knew how to play the game.

His desire for success in the game eventually overwhelmed him. He was successful beyond his imagination; he had made millions; he was the champion on the trading floor. But he wasn’t eating and wasn’t doing well. He wanted to escape.

But Citibank had put restrictions on his bonuses, paying it out over years. He didn’t want to stay for years. The final acts of the book display how he attempted to manipulate the situation so that he could both get paid his bonuses and leave Citibank. It took a lot of duress and ridiculousness, but Gary eventually won.

And he’s probably made a lot more investing according to his philosophy than he ever did from his bonuses as a trader.

If you saw The Big Short, how did you feel about its protagonists? You certainly wanted the arrogant elitists who were making all the money from the whole mortgage fiasco to get what was coming to them, of course. But you should’ve felt some ambivalence about those protagonists. Sure, they got paid; but they got paid because they bet against the sure thing which wasn’t so sure. They made money when everyone else was losing theirs.

You certainly want to root for the author in comparison to most of the people around him. His insight is likely accurate: the only difference between the traders on the floor and drug dealers on the street was circumstance and opportunity. Had the same people been swapped out at birth, they would have likely been in the mirror position. It’s all the same manipulative hustle.

You’re always conditioned to want to celebrate the underdog, the guy from poverty who used his skills and made a lot of money.

But how did he make that money? He moved money around. He bet obscene amounts of money on interest rates staying low, and they stayed low, and Citibank made obscene amounts of money and he got a small cut.

Sure, it was bank on bank. But where were those other banks getting the money which would ultimately become Gary’s paycheck?

This confession is the ultimate indictment of how our society values people and money. So many in the financial industry make obscene amounts of money in what is hard to distinguish from legalized gambling. It was thus before 2008; it remains thus to this day. Not a little of the populist discontent manifest across the Western world is an effect of this trend of rising inequality, present since 1980 but supercharged in the 21st century. Sure, Gary got his. But a whole lot more of the people who grew up around him didn’t.

It’s all a game in the end. It’s definitely a game to those in that rarefied air of high finance. They may try to pretend otherwise, but they live well on it, so why bite the hand that feeds you?

You can make a lot of money that way. But what will it do to your soul?

[1randal-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In my quest to open my mind up to new things, I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. I have to admit, I know nothing of stock/bond/futures trading, other than what I saw in movies like Wall Street, and the Wolf of Wall Street.
The author has exposed me to a world I never knew existed. The competition, the greed, the long hours, the networking, the partying, the burnout.....all was covered in this book. Granted, what Stevenson was doing was way, way over my head, I still don't understand what a "FX swap" is or means really. But one really doesn't need to understand the process to enjoy the book. He has written an interesting peek behind the scenes on the trading floors. The book is pretty easy to read (if you don't get held up by the acronyms) and has a good flow to it. The characters are amazing! What a bunch!
The author presents himself in an honest light. He has A LOT of flaws. Someone could spend years trying to unpack all his personality quirks. In the end, he finds his peace, and starts to actually produce some value to society. I wish him luck.
It's a good read, and I recommend it.