The Trading Game

MUST READ POLITICAL AND SPIRITUAL ESSENTIAL READING BY A BRILLIANT YOUNG ECONOMIST & INVESTOR WATCH HIS PODCASTS TO UNDERSTAND HOW OUR ECONOMIES CURRENTLY FUNCTION

Great book. Wish he wrote another one on the topic. Very interesting, and particularly insightful if you are wondering what it’s like in the world of trading/high finance, especially in the 2010s.

Gary Stevenson’s memoir rattles along with real urgency. One moment he is hanging around bus stops in Ilford, the next he is planted in front of a bank of Bloomberg screens, gambling amounts of cash that barely seem real to the rest of us. At just shy of four hundred pages it is not slim, yet I polished it off in two sittings because his walk-through of swaps and interest-rate trades is so clear and free of waffle. He explains the maths without turning the whole thing into an evening class, which is handy when you have just wrestled a four-year-old into bed and only want to keep your eyes open for another chapter. The colour is supplied in spades, from boozy steak dinners to those bleary five o’clock finishes when only a taxi home will do. The first half crackles. When the story shifts to Tokyo the pace does dip and his bout of soul-searching feels a little thin. Stevenson also points out the yawning gap between the trading floor and the real world but does not push very far beyond observing the problem. That said, the inside view he offers is still a treat. The writing is sharp, often funny, and light on jargon so even readers with no City experience can follow the action. The hardback itself feels sturdy, the print is clear, and the price strikes me as fair for the window it opens on a world that is normally closed off. If you enjoy tales of high finance but doze off the moment somebody fires up a PowerPoint, this one is well worth a look.

Amazing book. Very entertaining to read, I basically skimmed through it in a couple of days. It’s written with a typical British style with great humour and phrases. Gary also gives insights to the details of a trading floor at a major corporation. There are some quite basic lessons and principles about macroeconomics which most people would think is irrelevant for themselves, but it’s more relevant for everyone than anything else. Gary’s bet on the never recovering world economy and widening gap between rich and poor withstood the test of time and is one of the biggest problems every country faces in the world. Fully recommend to anyone who is a little bit interested in economics, finance or just want an entertaining read

Started off by watching Gary Stevenson's videos on YouTube and then went on to his book. He takes seemingly complicated financial concepts and breaks it down into information that a layperson like me can easily understand to educate myself and be less of a sheep.