This month’s book review is The Trading Game: A Confession by Gary Stevenson.
Billed as a rag to riches story (in many ways it is) this is a tale of the excesses of global trading within investment banks, and the ease with which money was made, and the huge bonuses and excesses off the back of it. It was pure gambling.
Gary Stevenson was born in East London and although he was expelled at 16, he excelled mathematically and went on to study at the London School of Economics.
There he broke into finance by winning Citibank’s card-based ‘Trading Game’ competition. He won his ticket into Citibank not through sheer calculation, but by bluffing and manipulating others to his advantage. In the final round he pulled the worst card yet behaved so confidently under pressure that the judges who were deliberately testing his character chose him as the winner.
This secured him an internship and eventually a job as an interest rates trader in 2008 at age 21.
He claims to have become Citibank’s most profitable global trader by 2011 (roughly $35 million profit), though former colleagues dispute the claim as exaggerated.
Trading is portrayed less as requiring intellect and more as performance under pressure, a gladiatorial environment drenched in adrenaline, paranoia, sleep deprivation, and emotional sacrifice. The biases and addictive incentives of bonus-driven trading foster a toxic lifestyle, one that isolates and warps relationships with loved ones and friends.
Excesses abound in the book. One particularly striking scene involves a group of traders who, after receiving their year-end bonuses, rent a private jet for a spontaneous, booze-fueled weekend in Ibiza. The trip, entirely unplanned, ends in predictable chaos with debauched partying, hotel trashing, and fights among colleagues. For many, it wasn’t about luxury or rest, but status and dominance: showing who could spend the most, drink the most, or behave with the least restraint. One trader boasted about buying £10,000 worth of champagne in one night, only to pour most of it over himself in a nightclub for effect.
Bonuses were all important in his environment. His first bonus arrived in early 2009 at £13,000. He described it as thrilling yet alienating: he overwhelmingly moved away from his old friends, alienated by the gap in lifestyles. By the next year, his bonus was nearly £400,000. He became hooked on the rush, shutting out family time and normal life and the bonuses got bigger and bigger, but those payments were linked to future performance too and kept him tied to the bank.
Stevenson says that what matters is not textbook economics, but bluffing, human psychology, and lived insight. That served him better than pure academic knowledge. His colleague Bill dismissed economics as a profession, claiming real-world insight is what’s needed. Bill physically ripped up Gary’s economics textbook, furious that abstract theory has no place on the desk. That confrontation crystallised a belief in grounded information over academic models
In 2010, acting on conventional wisdom, he erroneously bet on Swiss rates rising only for the Swiss National Bank to shock markets. The loss forced him back to fundamentals and economics texts, triggering a period of self-reflection and a quest for deeper understanding of monetary systems
Despite wealth, Stevenson became what he called ‘emotionally bankrupt’. When offered a Tokyo transfer, it proved a tipping point. He found it isolating: little action on the desk, oppressive managerial oversight, and no sense of purpose. He eventually collapsed under stress, entered a six‑month medical leave, and worked in a non‑trading admin role: eventually pleading to leave, became depressive, and negotiating a deferred bonus to exit in 2014 (£1.5-2m)
The Trading Game is a personal memoir exploring the contradictions of high‑finance success: how brilliance and ambition can be both exhilarating and corrosive, wealth can be both a weapon and a prison. Through anecdotes like winning a rigged card game, facing financial collapse, and enduring a breakdown in Tokyo he humanises a world most only glimpse on screens. He doesn’t come across as a likeable person in the book in my view though. It was very difficult to have any sympathy for what happened in Tokyo.
I know that many now see him, including Gary himself, as a campaigner for reversing wealth inequality, encouraging patriotic millionaires and advocating wealth taxes and tax reform. I’ve not really seen any of his content beyond this book but I certainly didn’t see much reflection or interest in this as I read it. It seemed to be more a muted version of Wolf of Wall Street until it all became too much for him. I enjoyed the stories and the book as it stood but didn’t find any moralistic message in it (not that I was looking for one though!!)
