Expelled from his East London school at 15. Citibank’s youngest trader at 21. €2.3m bonus at 24. A breakdown at 26
LIKEallgoodthrillers, The Trading Game starts with a moment of intense jeopardy. Gary Stevenson, a Citibank trader desperate to escape his job, is sitting in a dimly lit restaurant while his boss cautions him against leaving, explaining: ‘We can make life very difficult for you.’
Thus begins the latest memoir to recount gobsmacking amounts of money, legendary excesses and moral decay in the City of London. The Trading Game is an account of the years Stevenson was a foreign currency swaps trader for Citibank, before he became unable to stomach the inequality he saw between the super-rich and the rest of us.
It follows in the tradition of books such as Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker and Geraint Anderson’s Cityboy in showing how the golden handcuffs that go with such jobs can come at a terrible cost.
At the beginning, you root for Stevenson – he’s an engaging narrator with a compelling back story.
From working-class East
London, expelled from school at 15 for dealing drugs, he’s rescued by his extraordinary maths ability – to the London School of Economics.
There, he realises that he’s out of his depth again, surrounded by over-privileged kids – but he triumphs thanks to two things.
First, he realises that those posh peers of his persistently underestimate a working-class boy, and he can use that to his advantage.
Second, he uses his abilities in a Citibank contest, the trading game of the title, in which the winner is to be given an internship.
The game, presented as a simulation of trading was, as Stevenson realised, in essence a numbers game – using eight cards from a selection of 17. The five contestants had to make bets on what the total value of the cards were.
What Stevenson did was to prepare by obsessively practising the game to consider all combinations – and then play it much more aggressively than anyone else.
He swept through the first round and the second, but in the final he inexplicably failed. The game had been rigged against him to test his mettle. But his steely nerve meant he was awarded the internship anyway, and eventually a job as the youngest trader in the firm.
And so follows a story of headspinning money in the aftermath of the world financial crisis of 2008, and the callousness that can result in an insular world.
In one scene, a colleague makes a €1.8million trade and does a fistpumping celebration in the office – in front of co-workers who are losing their jobs. Stevenson says he became successful because he still had a foot in the real world. Most of his peers worked on the assumption that consumer confidence and spending would soar again after the crash and bank bailouts. But Stevenson went back to Ilford, East London and saw friends struggling to pay mortgages. So he bet against a recovery and made a fortune. Or as he puts it: ‘You don’t make money by being right, but by being right when others are wrong.’
The tensions are admirably captured. Stevenson also does his best to explain the theory behind how such trades operate and the ramifications of continued low interest -rates on the world economy.
And yet, you come away thinking that he never seemed to enjoy it that much. His first bonus was €15,000 and with it he bought his dad a Sky Sports subscription, instead of going to the football with him – the first steps towards his eventual isolation from family, friends and his girlfriend, Wizard. He received a €2.3m bonus when he was just 24. Yet he was still wearing holey trainers with Leyton Orient socks and shrank to 8.5st.
The toll the job took on his wellbeing was as extreme as its rewards. He was earning seven figures but sleeping on the
‘His posh peers underestimated the working-class boy and he used that’
‘He was earning seven figures but sleeping on the floor of a bare flat’
floor of a bare flat. His day started at 5.30am reading 500 emails, he had constant heartburn, was unable to sleep, and punished his body running 5km after 5km until – his ill health exacerbated by the bank sending him to Tokyo – he eventually went on sick leave. Stevenson doesn’t spare himself. He recounts how selfish he can be, and rails against a financial system that is creating inequality. But he doesn’t develop this fully and the last third of the book becomes more about his struggle to extricate himself from Citibank.
In the end, the book follows a similar pattern to his career – at the beginning it’s unputdownable and exciting.
By the end you’re full of disbelief for what the bank makes him do. Aged 27, he quit. In the final showdown between him and the bank, he talks about a conversation in which ‘everything changed’ – but which he fails to reveal.