The Trading Game is an insightful peep into the work and characters that people the desks of Investment banks. I found it fascinating. It explained so much and in such a simple easily understood way. For the first time I understood what a modern day trading floor looked like. At times it felt like a piece of fiction as the writing was so fluid and the characters so well described I loved it and shall buy it for others

I do not, as a rule, feel the need to use expletives but I am tempted to force myself to do so when describing this book. However, I have to choose another way to review it or my review will be "pulled". Personally, call me old fashioned, I can find absolutely no justification for the use of 500++ expletives in a book, even one as dysfunctional as this one.

Whilst I can well believe that the bare bones of this book are true, I find the whole writing style completely unnecessary. In fact I am loath to call it style because stylish it is not.

I did actually read the whole book and then had to have a really good wash!!

I shall be looking out for Gary Stevenson - so that I can avoid him. I just hope this is his first and last attempt at becoming an author. Would have rated the book 1 star but there was one bon-mot in there that gave it its 2nd star and I quote it; with expletives removed...

‘OK, go on then. I’ll tell you. It’s inequality. That’s the only thing that matters. Trade on that you’ll be a millionaire.’

Arthur guffawed for one final time, before quickly realizing I was serious. ‘Inequality!?’

‘Yes Arthur, yes, inequality . The rich get the assets, the poor get the debt, and then the poor have to pay their whole salary to the rich every year just to live in a house. The rich use that money to buy the rest of the assets from the middle class and then the problem gets worse every year. The middle class disappears, spending power disappears permanently from the economy, the rich becoming much richer and the poor, well, I guess they just die.’

I’m familiar with Gary Stevenson for his campaigning on inequality so I knew about his backstory as a financial trader, and how he got his start by winning a card game. It’s a great anecdote, but I wondered if there was enough there to fill a book. Well, there definitely is. Even if you don’t share his politics, The Trading Game is a thrillingly entertaining read.

It has the arc of a rock biography – the poor kid who wants to make it, the struggle for success, then disillusionment, just as he’s achieved it.

Stevenson grew up in a working-class family in East London, in the shadow of the towers of Canary Wharf. The financial district is in touching distance but a world away.

His talent for Maths wins him a place at the London School of Economics and he is determined to work hard to make the most of his ability. However, he describes his gradual realisation that gaining entry to a career in investment banking has little to do with academic success and is much more about having the right contacts and CV.

Then someone tells him that Citibank recruits one person each year based on a card game. The game requires both mathematical skill and trading nous. Stevenson puts all his energy into preparing for the game. At the end, he wins the opportunity to intern at Citibank and try to make his mark.

He goes from intern to the bank’s most profitable trader. He does this by betting that economic policies after the 2008 crash would escalate inequality and make most people poorer. The consensus among economists and policy makers was that as central banks pumped more money into the economy there would be a swift recovery. Stevenson saw that the money was benefiting large companies and wealthy individuals by inflating the price of assets at a time when wages were falling. They could use those assets to generate income and buy more assets, increasing the gulf still further.

Stevenson’s success makes him uncomfortable. He sees the injustice of the system which has enabled that success. His sudden wealth contrasts grotesquely with the lives of the people he has grown up with. He is also working incredibly long hours and is exhausted. He tries to leave, but Citibank don’t want to let him go, and they are holding onto his bonuses. Stevenson is determined to leave and take the money, so a war of attrition ensues.

Stevenson’s voice comes through vividly in The Trading Game. He sounds exactly like he speaks. (If you’re the sort of person who takes to Goodreads to lament the use of “curse words” you might want to sit this one out.)

He is brilliant at explaining economic and financial concepts in a user-friendly way. He has a very dry sense of humour which comes through especially in his descriptions of his fellow traders. His fish-out-of-water perspective skewers the absurdity of the world he finds himself in, but he also shows humanity in seeing their struggles and flaws.

He says little about his private life, perhaps to protect those close to him, but there are some beautifully understated moments, particularly about one relationship.

The Trading Game is a great page-turner which also has a lot to say about inequality, both as a policy issue and at the personal level: the way it is corrosive to society and to our closest relationships.
*
I received a copy of The Trading Game from the publisher via NetGalley.

So firstly took me a while to get into, bit it soon developed and what a wild journey. I feel Gary talks like he writes making him more connected when reading. Yeh so I'd so don't work in the big money industry, it will drain your soul.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Press UK for providing an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

The Trading Game is a riveting page-turner with the entertainment value of The Wolf of Wall Street, laced with serious sublayers of moral self-reflection, a much needed deeper understanding of how our economy is evolving and how the finance industry makes money from it. Loved it.

Recommended reading for not just finance professionals, but for all who want to uncover the nitty gritty of the City.

#TheTradingGame #NetGalley

A memoir by Gary Stevenson who used to be a trader at Citibank – and not just any trader, but one of the most successful traders for the bank ever. But Gary had a slightly unusual background for a trader – he came from a working-class background, grew up in Ilford and was expelled from school as a teenager. However, his maths skills saw him doing a degree at LSE and he eventually won himself a place at Citibank where he started trading.

It was when he started trading by basically betting that interest rates would not only go low but stay low that he really started making a whole lot of money, both for himself and the bank, hence him becoming one of the most successful traders of his time.
I’d always imagined that traders worked very long hours all the time but actually there does seem to be quite a bit of time where Gary doesn’t appear to be doing very much at all – but there are a lot of boozy lunches/dinners going on and he starts early and ends up going home very late. His colleagues tend to have arrived via top private schools (Eton) and having wealthy well-connected family so Gary is something of an anomaly because of his background. But, although the descriptions of some of the people he works with are negative, Gary himself doesn’t come across particularly well either. When he gets his first massive bonus he eventually buys himself a flat but doesn’t give his parents anything other than a subscription to Sky – which he cancels as soon as he moves out, despite his father’s love of football.
Gary dwells on the immorality of making money (and lots of it) while the economy crashes but he doesn’t seem to spend any of it on anything other than a flat which he fails to furnish. He drops his closest friend from school – admittedly his friend has developed a massive drug habit but Gary doesn’t try to help him in any way.

It’s clear too that Gary is on the verge of a nervous breakdown but even though for much of the book it’s clear he doesn’t actually like his job or, really, any of the people he works with, he is adamant that he won’t leave the bank until he gets the massive bonuses he feels are his due. Although I have sympathy with someone who is driven to the edge by work, given that he’s already earned huge amounts of money (more than most people would ever earn in a lifetime), given that he doesn’t seem to have ridiculous outgoings, I really couldn’t understand why he was so desperate to get his last bonus – I totally understand that it was a LOT of money but the determination to get it seemed to make him ill, and he already had enough money to live on.

Finally, I’m not normally bothered by swearing but there’s so much of it in this book I wondered why some of it wasn’t edited out. Yes, it’s his memoir but it just seemed unnecessary to keep it all in.

The Trading Game is a honest memoir from Gary Stevenson about life as a trader. From growing up in London's east end he was not the stereotypical trader plying his business in one of the worlds largest banks. Gary was different though and from an early age had a way with numbers. On leaving school he entered the London School of Economics as a step towards the banking world. He had a dream of being a millionaire and was determined to make that dream a reality.
Entering the banking world was totally alien to Gary with traders dressed in expensive suits and monogrammed shirts. He entered in a cheap suit and was forever going to be different. There was a new language he had to learn very quickly, one that included a considerable amount of acronyms . Every department and trade seemed to have its own abbreviation and acronym. It was quite apparent that the business is very cut throat with other traders reluctant to share their secrets to success and brokers wining and dining the traders in attempts to garner trust and their business.
This story tells the tale of his rise through the ranks and the many different techniques used to be successful. Despite describing the processes throughout I was still left confused. What was very apparent was that wealth does not necessary give you happiness. The wealthier Gary got the more his health suffered as did personal relationships. The banking world, if this book is to be believed, is full of gambling, excessive drinking and fine dining. It is also not a place to make lasting friendships.

Unfortunately The Trading Game was not for me. I felt the information about trading was a bit too much throughout the book. I did find it interesting reading about how Gary worked his way up and the way the trading floor works and the people he worked with. I think it's too long though and I struggled to finish it.

The Trading Game is the type of book where while reading it, I wanted to talk to someone who’d read it but also wanted to throw it out the window at the same time.

Gary Stevenson is a recovering trader. After a working class upbringing in Ilford, he secured a spot in LSE studying maths and economics (he’s a maths genius), and from there secured a prestigious internship and job at Citigroup from the summer of 2008, just as the financial crisis was tipping the world economy into chaos.

He worked at Citi for around six years as an FX trader, making millions by betting that interest rates would keep going lower and stay low, while everyone else believed they couldn’t possibly go lower and the world economy would bounce back.

Stevenson says he saw what others didn’t - that as the economy crashed, the value of assets rose and the cost of borrowing crashed, turning the fundamental rule of capitalism on its head, thereby making the rich richer and everyone else working their arses off to pay for it.

Stevenson portrays everyone he worked for as absolute pricks, most of them utterly unhinged with it. This is very entertaining at times but wears thin too. I found the idea that he abhorred the amorality of it all dubious - I mean, this is the guy who refused to leave under any circumstances until his exorbitant bonus was guaranteed to be paid to him. He has since called on Rishi Sunak to introduce a wealth tax and he runs a successful YouTube channel on economics. The vibe is more embittered finance bro than Robin Hood in the book - he comes across every bit as egotistical and full of self-loathing as his erstwhile colleagues.

Conpulsive reading but also, I kind of hated it! It lacks the self-reflection to be truly thought-provoking though it’s undoubtedly very compelling. Read it but don’t blame me if you hate it too 😂. 3.5/5 ⭐️

*Many thanks to the publisher for the arc via Netgalley. The Trading Game will be published this Tuesday 5 March. As always, this is an honest review.

I really enjoyed reading this book as it helped give you a clue why the world economy collapsed and why it hasn’t yet fully recovered from. Gary is very frank and open about all things and that helped with the enjoyment of it.

Gary Stevenson’s memoir concentrates on his career as a trader and provides a lot of detail about how he became involved in the first place, the atmosphere of trading rooms at the time, how exactly they make money for banks, and (which I found fascinating!) how the 2008 collapse of the global banking system resulted in an environment which for a time made it easier for traders to make money for their banks and ultimately for themselves. The writer is candid about how the system enables the rich to become much richer, arguably contributing towards the growing wealth inequality, and is clearly disgusted by this; however, his attempts to demonstrate his moral superiority to the other traders is undermined by both his mockery of others and his determination to get his 'cut' out of the system. It is evident from reading this that you need some inherent 'nastiness' to thrive in this environment, which made for some uncomfortable reading. Nonetheless I applaud this writer’s unflinching honesty and think the book is definitely worth a read!

What a fantastic story a proper rags to riches tale that had me hooked from the start, a really interesting book that really gets to you. Funny and dark and witty it was fantastic!

A real rags to riches read. I have to say the numbers had me baffled but a gripping and sometimes dark read.
My thanks to netgalley and the publisher for my copy.

Not my usual genre of choice, but The Trading Game was an interesting read, giving an insight in how to get into, and what your life would be like working in this particular trade. Overall a good read.

An interesting subject explain how trading works. I enjoyed the explanations at first but as the novel went on they became tedious and more difficult to concentrate on. The characters described throughout played greatly onto my stereotypes of what these people are like. Obviously this was not a book for me.

If you ever thought that making millions each year on the trading floor in a major bank was a job to covet I suggest you read this compelling confession of Gary Stevenson as to how he found it.
Gary, a boy made good . He goes from state school to The London School of Economics to a job with Citibank. From newspaper delivery boy to millionaire. Sounds like the dream come true but, in reality, for Gary at least it became anything but.
His narrative vividly captures the pace and ruthlessness of the Trading Floor along with exposing the isolation of working from 6am until late at night dealing on screens in short term interest rate instruments. There are moments of real humour contrasted with the extraordinary aggression he sometimes experiences from the people he works with. It is only blind faith in his own decisions, allied to his ability to think outside the box, that creates his extraordinary success. But at what cost?
The trouble is, however many millions he was making for himself, he was making hundreds of millions for Citibank and Citibank weren't about to let him go. His battle to leave drives him into a downward spiral in which his health, friendships and belief in his colleagues all collapse. Like Icarus, Gary falls prey to flying too close to the sun.
A salutary tale perhaps perhaps confirming the adage that money isn't everything.

All hail Gary! What a ride. A rags to riches story and the dark side of wealth. I found the memoir an eye opening look into the banks and how they make their money, and I was astounded at the amounts that could be made per trader. I really related to the struggles Gary had and it reassured me that when I myself had doubts about earning money compared to doing what felt right that I made the right choice.

I was gripped from page one, I just wish it had a little bit about what Gary's been up to since, maybe an epilogue?

Gary is a a trader and at the top of his game. The book is very fast moving and details mans greed and obsession. I haven't read such a fast paced book and couldn't put it down. I was sorry when it was finished. Having worked in a high finance environment it was a 5* for me. Thanks to NetGalley for a great ARC.

Wow, I didn't expect it at all! This gave proper Bret Easton Ellis vibes, with a major bonus of it being a true story. I picked it up because I work with Financials and thought it would help me understand them better. I didn't know this would take me on a pretty wild and dark journey which made the reading experience amazing. I loved the writing style - it was very punchy, gripping and visceral. The observations were on point. Great balance of irony and darkness. I loved being in Gary's head from when he's still green and has no idea what it happening to "robbing" the bank and being acutely aware of the inequality in the world. The last part set in Japan was very powerful - it had such a surreal quality to it and I could imagine it so well. Overall a brilliant memoir. Loved it

Gary is a trader - not just any trader but the biggest one ever.
This is his life story from looking and admiring the skyscrapers in the City of London as a kid to working at Citibank via the London School of Economics.
This is Gary’s confession and it is a very well put together novel with interesting characters and a compelling story.
I really enjoyed reading The Trading Game and would recommend it with 5 stars.