The Trading Game is a story of financial madness, moral decay and ultimate greed.  A young man preferably male protagonist is traditionally attracted to Wall Street to seek his fortune. But Gary Stevenson the poor kid kicking broken footballs on the streets of East London in the shadow of affluent Canary Wharf’s skyscrapers,  wanted something much better and bigger for himself.  After winning a competition run by a bank “The Trading Game” he got the golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader in the whole city of London.  Where your colleagues are dysfunctional maths geniuses, overfed public schoolboys and borderline psychopaths, yet they start to feel like family. Where you are 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. The Trading Game glimpses inside into the high-pressure, high-reward, ultimately disillusioning life of traders. Some rogue traders like Nick Neeson and Baring Bank ( All that Glitters 1998), Michael Lewis  ( Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street (1989), his memoir of the heyday of Salomon Brothers, which was later acquired by Citigroup.

But The Trading Game is about his experience of Citi’s Bond trading floor at the London Canary Wharf, as he became briefly one of its highest paid traders following that 2008-2009 financial crash  got burnt out and finally written  this confession.What happens when winning starts to feel like losing? When the easiest way to make money is to bat on millions becoming poorer  and poorer and as the economy starts slipping off a precipice, your own sanity starts slipping with it? You desperately want to stop, but you can’t because nobody ever leaves, if you quit it meant risking everything.

Stevenson is the son of a Post Office worker, attended the London School of Economics ( like Michael Lewis)  and broke into finance by winning a recruitment trading game hosted by Citi. 

The Bank’ short-term interest rate trading desk turned out to be accommodating home with its “ramshackle mob” of macho traders talking in “ real accents from real places”. The role of Stevenson’s desk was to sell foreign exchange swaps to customers, but he makes it clear that he and the others  were chiefly motivated by making as much money for the bank, and by extension themselves,  as possible. Ambition and greed the grinding culture and stark incentives of the trading floor induced ruthlessness competition and paranoia.” The only people you will see here are survivors.  This Hunger Games atmosphere did not make the victors happy but in fact it made them lots of money, and it offered the prospect of the day being able to  walk away with their spoils. What would Stevenson do with two million pounds the annual bonuses  he said “ I could do anything, I could retire, I could be free”.

However, many time despite the finance industry’s harsh glamour, there are many times story of disenchantment and stress, but people keep on being drawn to Wall Street or City to make a fortune, or to try.

The Trading Game: A Confession by Gary Stevenson, Allen lane £25, 432 pages.