The Trading Game: A Confession by Gary Stevenson
| The Trading Game: A Confession by Gary Stevenson | |
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| Category: Autobiography | |
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Reviewer: Sue Magee
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| Summary: A warts-and-all look at the trading floor of a major bank in the last decade. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 432 | Date: March 2024 |
| Publisher: Penguin | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-0241636602 | |
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If you were to bring up an image of a city banker in your mind, you're unlikely to think of someone like Gary Stevenson. A hoodie and jeans replaces the pin-stripe suit and his background is the East End, where he was familiar with violence, poverty and injustice. There was no posh public school on his CV - but he had been to the London School of Economics. Stevenson is bright - extremely bright - and he has a facility with numbers which most of us can only envy. He also realised that most rich people expect poor people to be stupid. It was his ability at what was, essentially, a card game which got him an internship with Citibank. Eventually, this turned into permanent employment as a trader.
His first bonus arrived in 2009 - only months after the banking crisis. It was £13,000 - more than half of what his father made in a year as a postal worker. His next bonus is £395,000 and after that, he's into the millions. His obsession - it can't be described in any other way - is to become the most successful trader in the world. It dominates his life - but he does realise that as the bonuses grow, so does the gap between himself and the people he grew up with. He's never going to be one of the people he works with and he's lost the intimacy with his old group of friends. There's the occasional girlfriend but it's an unsatisfying life.
And then there's the struggle of trying to leave it...
I did wonder if I was going to like this book: vast sums of money made from betting on disaster horrifies me. A few pages in, I realised that I had to judge the book, not on whether or not I admired the values of the author but on whether or not I valued what I was being told. I found that I did. I gained real insight into the way that a trading floor operates - and why it doesn't always operate well. I appreciated just how risky it is.
There was a downside for me. The book is subtitled A Confession. I expected more in the way of introspection and self-examination than I found. I suspected it was there - Stevenson was one of a group of thirty millionaires who signed an open letter in 2021 calling for increased taxes on the rich - but little of it emerged in the book.
I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy of the book to the Bookbag. As well as reading the book, I listened to an audio download (which I bought myself) narrated by the author. I warmed to Stevenson more when I listened to him than when I read what he had to say.
For another disruptor in the banking industry, you might like to read Banking On It: How I Disrupted an Industry by Anne Boden.
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