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The Trading Game
#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.
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Reviews
The book has a strong opening, but towards the end, it falls apart. The pacing slows down, and just kind of meanders until it laps across the finish line. Additionally, I have seen a couple of reviews of this book that make it pretty clear that Gary is speaking way too highly of himself in this book, based on what folks in the book have said to reporters. Beyond that, there are a pile of sloppy grammatical choices that at times make it confusing what Gary is trying to say. (That said, the book is entertaining for the most part!)
By perfect_squircle
It is good for two-thirds the start a downward spiral. I do not expect the story to be rainbow and sunshine but the last third would make depression seem fun.
By martiniour
I believe what Gary is telling and see it happening everyday about the rich getter richer and regular working class affording less and less. We (working class) need to organize and get a game plan to vote in change…
By jk - taxtherich
Outstanding. A soulful book about being a capitalist, if such a thing is possible, .…..
By aspen fan