Review: The Trading Game by Gary Stevenson

Rating: 4/5

Synopsis: The Trading Game is half memoir and half scathing account of a life working as a currency trader for Citibank. Gary Stevenson was born to working class parents, and often dreamed of going to work in the tall skyscrapers he could see from his house. With hard work, and a bit of luck he does manage to achieve his dreams, but, to use a cliché, his dream turns into a nightmare.

Review: The Trading Game

Minor Spoilers Below

Gary Stevenson (Pictured above) now campaigns for wealth inequality

This book is well written. Despite being a maths prodigy Gary Stevenson clearly is talented when it comes to writing. This is not a book I would generally have picked up, I tend to stick to fiction, while this book is a non-fiction memoir. I picked it up as it was the book of the month for a Book Club that has since ignored my email asking if I could join. Though I enjoyed reading it, I often had to psych myself up to read it, since I didn't overall find the story super compelling. This may have been because I didn't find the premise super compelling. Much like what happens to the author, the increasingly large numbers earned, lost, traded start to become very abstract after a while, and it sort of lead to me being rather detached from the whole affair.

At the start of the book Gary Stevenson comes of as quite sympathetic, he comes off as the underdog but once he has the job, a lot of his actions become in line with those you'd expect from a city trader. It is the last third of the book where Gary comes to some harsh realisations, and starts to become disillusioned with not just his own bank, but the whole system of finances in the world. Related to this are the mental health problems Gary suffers to during this period. It is this part of the book that became compelling again and Gary once again becomes sympathetic as he takes out one of the largest banks in the world.

A lot of my reservations about memoirs are that they will just make the author look good. And while I have no doubt, some things are excluded there it does seem to be a very honest look at this point of his life, which doesn't actually last that long. I have done some googling, and there seems to be a few disagreements about some of the claims in the book, by people he worked with but more about technicalities rather than the core substance of the book.

Gary Stevenson has gone on to campaign for a wealth tax, and for ways to tackle wealth inequality, and has a YouTube account where he talks about these things, so if you want to learn more about this, I recommended looking at them here: https://www.youtube.com/@garyseconomics