Portrait of the Trader as a Young Rebel
Gary Stevenson’s story of trading floor excess and moral turnaround is one of personality-driven critique, tailor-made for the British media’s idea of dissent. Just don’t ask too many questions about Citibank — or capitalism.
Former financial trader and author Gary Stevenson speaks at a rally in support of a wealth tax last week in London. (Wiktor Szymanowicz / Future Publishing via Getty Images)
A weak Left, struggling to navigate a hostile media environment, must sometimes rely on proxies to transmit its ideas. It often falls to fellow travelers with more establishment credibility to advance dissenting positions in mainstream outlets. One such figure is the financier-turned-YouTuber Gary Stevenson, whose memoir, The Trading Game — which has now spent seven weeks at the top of the UK bestseller list — describes his ascent from working-class East London to the foreign exchange desk at Citibank, followed by his growing disillusionment with high finance. The book’s success has raised Stevenson’s profile as a campaigner against inequality, and he posts regular video explainers about the death spiral of the British economy and the likelihood of mass immiseration. It has also allowed him to drum up support for his proposed solution: a wealth tax, which he presents as “not a left or right issue” but a matter of simple common sense.
Though The Trading Game is billed as a confession, the tone of the book is more swaggering than penitential. Stevenson writes that he was “born to be a trader,” recalling a hard-knock childhood hustling candy, newspapers, and eventually drugs. His math skills earn him a place at the London School of Economics, where he coasts through his studies and becomes a campus celebrity. When he hears that Citibank is organizing a competition for students, with the victor promised an internship, he knows immediately that he will win. Soon enough he is in LA partying with Carmen Electra and Jay-Z. His bosses are fighting with each other to take him under their wing. He is given an unprecedented £395,000 bonus at the age of twenty-two.
How did he do it? Stevenson recalls that it was “easy” to make a killing off lending dollars in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, when demand for the world currency was soaring. But his singular intellect and courage “may have played their parts as well,” he reckons, since no one else had ever had “the nerve . . . to put on such big trades at such a young age.” As he puts it:
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