“Maybe I did outplay Citibank, maybe I outmanoeuvred them… Maybe I just kept getting up and kept getting punched in the face.”
The Trading Game – a Confession, by Gary Stevenson, is basically a Guy Ritchie caper movie meets Margin Call*, the US film about the 2008 global financial collapse. It’s an intriguing coming-of-age that takes us through Stevenson’s teens and early twenties, but really kicks off when the author has a blinding insight into how the global economy works – and his doomed role in it. The rest of the tale then streaks off to the nail-biting denouement.
Stevenson was a poor, hard-working lad from East London. Good with numbers. Good with thinking through the odds. Got kicked out of school for selling drugs, but otherwise destined to achieve a simple goal – to win. When you’re poor, winning means one thing. Money. Lots and lots of money.
A lucky opportunity offered by a major bank saw his teenage self win a game offering internships to a very lucrative career. The game was designed to winnow out those rare individuals suited for the trading floor, where the world’s money is poured from many containers into fewer, larger containers owned by the banks and the ultra-wealthy.
Stevenson didn’t just win a competition, he beat the game itself by reverse engineering it. The bankers overseeing the play saw their idea of the perfect trader – ambitious, single-minded, smart, ruthless – a bit of a cold bastard. One of them.
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His story in one of the world’s most boring professions is surprisingly engaging, in part because the sums of money being gambled with are staggeringly big, and the personal risk is enormous. But as stakes escalate, and the bonuses pile up, the underlying tension begs existential questions – ‘this is how the world works?’
Stevenson did well as a bastard. Spectacularly well, outplaying the best players and, eventually, realising what the game was really about. Then he made a mistake. The questioning mind that got him into trading, and enabled a personal fortune, couldn’t switch off. He started asking questions, and that’s not what real bastards do.
“By [going to university], economists learn to never ask the stupid questions, which are almost always the most important questions to ask.”
No spoilers, but at this point his rollercoaster ride goes off the rails. There’s a sudden shift, the floor drops away, the lights go on and suddenly all is revealed in the excoriating glare.
“It’s inequality. …The rich get the assets, the poor get the debt…and then the poor have to pay their whole salary to the rich every year just to live in a house.”
There’s a breathtaking brutality to trading and the life traders live. They leave the norms of the human race, and stand above us all, studying the nanosecond-by-nanosecond minutiae, swapping trades – loans and debts, and taking a cut for the banks they work for. The money pours through their computer screens, overflowing, gushing into the banks’ coffers, and at the end of each trading year, the trader is bequeathed their tiny cut of it all. Millions and millions of lovely cash money.
“…As ordinary families and governments got poorer, that would increase flows of interest, rent and profit from the middle class to the rich, compounding the problem. The problem would not solve itself…it would get worse.”
If you enjoy visiting a world you’ll never see in person, and love a good story told well, you’ll enjoy The Trading Game. Sadly, the price of that enjoyment will be confirmation, if any were needed, that our global economy, run by our corporate-controlled governments, isn’t sustainable. Unless we take back our democracies from the banks, the financial consultancies, the corporate miners and big agriculture, we don’t have a hope in hell.
“Inequality… would grow and grow… It wasn’t temporary, it was terminal. It was the end of the economy.”
Capitalism is dead, and global corporations, the finance sector and the very wealthy are feeding on the corpse. I look forward to Gary Stevenson’s next book outlining the solutions but, in the meantime, you probably need to read this one.
The Trading Game – A Confession, by Gary Stevenson, published by Allen Lane, Penguin Books, 2024, ISBN: 978-0-241-63660-2 RRP: $36.99
B.P. Marshall is a scriptwriter and author.
*Margin Call is a 2011, US feature film by J.C. Chandor, set in an investment bank in a critical 24 hour period before the 2008 global financial crisis. Sounds boring, isn’t.
