The Trading Game : A Confession

“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 streets of East London in the shadow of Canary Wharf, Gary Stevenson dreamed of something bigger. And he was good at numbers. At the London School of Economics, Gary, wearing tracksuits and sneakers, 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 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.

What happens when winning starts to feel like losing? It’s 2008 and now you have a front-row seat to the global financial crisis. A time when the easiest way to make money is to bet on millions becoming poorer—like the very people you grew up with. 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.