Judging by this autobiography of Gary Stevenson's early life and career working for Citibank, he's been the sort of man who it's been easy to overlook or underestimate his capabilities. Born in Ilford to working class parents, Gary might appear to be a bit of a 'geezer' with all the cultural assumptions and class presumptions in how this can be misinterpreted. Though he is in possession of an extremely sharp mind, equally adept with maths and working out investment strategies that recoup the most money for him. He's also an acute observer of people.
I was surprised by how engaging and thoughtful a writer he turns out to be. The Trading Game is full of colourfully recounted incidents and he is equally adept at penning pithy portraits of his many truly odd ball work colleagues. He drags you into this strange otherworldly, almost counter intuitive logic of working the percentages, of buying and selling, betting on future interest rates. I've personally never had a firm grasp of maths, so most of his explanations of the trading mechanisms just went way over my head. But it wasn't that important half the time, because Gary also gives you the emotional feel of trading, the highs, the emotional lows. How earning millions of dollars in bonus from your yearly trading, can actually be paralysing. That professional economists disguise the fact that, actually, they don't fully understand how economies function. How much of the trading game is about being simply better at bluffing..
There is a certain type of alienated individual who can productively stare avidly at multiple computer screens all day long, and still remain sane. The reclusive Bill who is always top trader, but no one knows quite how he does it, because he keeps his cards held tightly to his chest. Then there are the brash alpha males like Rupert, who's just an out and out bully, who gets explosively jealous and throws tantrums. And JB who over the period of the book starts to look seriously ill, physically drawn, becoming an alcoholic as he gradually looses vaster and vaster amounts of money and can't recover from it. This is like watching a ship go down in slow motion.
Gary himself, tells you how his own inner sense of himself gets fucked up by too much stress and nonstop intense work. He ends up hardly having a life outside of Citibank. He can afford to buy himself a spanking new flat, but never gets around to buying furniture for it and sleeps on its bare concrete floor. He knew he needed to get out of Citibank, but in a manner that didn't lose him all his staggered bonus earnings. And so he keeps making a series of short term compromises with his mental health. And when he finally says he must leave, to realise Citibank were effectively holding him financially a prisoner. Can he somehow play them at their on game and come out of it with the bonus money they still owe him?
There was also dawning on him, the immorality built in to how he became unspeakably wealthy.That the whole economic system is permanently fucked, due to the massive levels of inequality. And what he has done is trade on that stagnation never changing. He got rich on the financial ruin of others, and that does nothing but slowly corrode his self esteem and health. In this analysis of why our economy no longer functions properly, lies the seed of his future mission in life.
This is a truly fascinating page turner of a read, which makes you admire him all the more for his blunt honesty and genial frankness.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
No comments:
Post a Comment