Yzabel Ginsberg's Reviews > The Trading Game: A Confession

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Quite an interesting memoir in many ways, from an ex-trader whom a lot of people must have seen as an unlikely candidate for such a job (or, at least, I bet a lot of people would expect traders to come from a more specific pool with families closely related to financial matters, for instance).

Gary Stevenson worked at Citi for a few years after university, and managed to find his place there… or did he? For not everything was so peachy, even though he made money and things looked, for all intents and purposes, as if they were going the right way… for him, not necessarily for the rest of the world caught in the 2008 crisis. And reading about that was definitely interesting, because it is no secret that as a lot of people suffered from that very crisis, there were also those who managed to get an upper hand, so to speak, and leave the table rather wealthier. Which is partly the moral dilemma that Gary went through here, finding it more and more difficult to reconcile his success with the realisation that the markets were going crazy, and soon going down in flames.

I had a bit of a harder time, though, with the portrayal of the trading world—entertaining in a way (everybody in there seemed to be a prick of some sort or other), but it’s the kind of portrayal that grows a little… stale after a while? Note: I have no idea how people behave on the trading floor, it may or it may not be that this environment is pretty toxic in general and in nature, and I wouldn’t be surprised if indeed it was. It just grew old after a while. Also I was somewhat annoyed at the last part of the book, because in the end it read more like constant anger cum trying to get as much money as possible from Citi before leaving, but without the deeper introspection I would’ve expected from this?

Conclusion: 3 stars, it is an interesting read, the author just doesn’t come off as very reliable or relatable. (Not sure if he was supposed to be, to be fair.)