The Trading Game

A Confession

By: Gary Stevenson

Narrated by: Gary Stevenson

Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

'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 footballs on the streets of East London in the shadow of Canary Wharf's skyscrapers, Gary wanted something better. Something a whole lot bigger.

Then he won a competition run by a bank: 'The Trading Game'. The prize: a golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader in the whole city. A place where you could make more money than you'd ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional maths geniuses, overfed public schoolboys and borderline psychopaths, yet they start to feel like family. Where soon you're the bank's most profitable trader, dealing in nearly a trillion dollars. A day. Where you dream of numbers in your sleep - and then stop sleeping at all.

But what happens when winning starts to feel like losing? When the easiest way to make money is to bet on millions becoming poorer and poorer - and, as the economy starts slipping off a precipice, 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?

This is an outrageous, unvarnished, white-knuckle journey to the dark heart of an intoxicating world - from someone who survived the game and then blew it all wide open.

©2024 Gary Stevenson (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

Compelling, intensely readable, unsettling. An unforgettable story of greed, financial madness and moral decay. (Rory Stewart)

An incredibly important and timely book, very much of its era. The Wolf of Wall Street with a moral compass, it lays bare the spiritual vacuity of the systems and processes that both dominate and reduce our humanity. (Irvine Welsh)

Astonishing, enraging, extremely funny and exquisitely sad - a magnificent exposé of the 'masters of the universe' whose greed imperils us all. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. (The Secret Barrister)

The Trading Game is the best finance memoir I’ve ever read. Gary Stevenson's tale of plundering Wall Street like some kind of cockney pirate is by turn hilarious and harrowing. A thrilling read that raises profound questions about who runs the global financial system. (Zeke Faux, author of Number Go Up)

Amazing look behind the curtain

what a nice change to hear a frank, no holds barred account of the inside of these institutions that hold so much power. Gary is a great writer and narrator. interesting to hear the differences between his accent on the audiobook and his YouTube channel or podcast appearances.

highly recommended

excellent story well told

the sheer honesty of the telling of the events in a world of high jinx and misdirection

Good story, great message.

A bit too light on the finance stuff but compelling and well told! Check out his youtube, its good!

fascinating read

a real page turner; very well told account of life behind the scenes at an investment bank

To the void of cynisism and back

Never would I have dreamed to be riveted to a book of a trader. Very inlightening. Now I understand a bit more of that madness.

Eat the rich bruv

The first hand account of the a long term issue of wealth inequality and how we as the people of the world must come together to solve this problem.

What a performance - never have I heard an author narrate their own book so well. Gary is clearly a polymath.

An alternative narrative of the financial industry - unputdownable 10 nine ten eleven twelve out of twelve

Unique

A great, entertaining and illuminating insider/outsider critique of the absurdity of high finance in contemporary society. In the end it is a story of how meritocracy works only by accident, and how financially reward is out of kilter with productivity or any other meaningful metric. A great listen even if you are not interested in macro-economics or finance in general. It is, at its heart, an engrossing autobiography of a smart young man's experience of a world most of us will never know anything about. Highly recommended.