How are we gonna get paid?

Gary Stevenson's The Trading Game: humor & tragedy in high finance

I think I’ve wasted my life. All my friends from university who studied finance, they latched onto a lucrative trajectory I was too dim to grasp at. I mean fuck my wallet, Gary Stevenson made £395,000 his second year at Citi. What have I done that will ever compare to that? I’m buying sandwiches on payment plans while Gary’s earning a daily bonus of £1,082. At this point I put The Trading Game down for a few days, I had to regroup. I was angry at the malfunctioning circuitry that disables me from making more monetizable decisions.

Jealousy aside, I like Gary a lot. We’ve got something in common you see, we’re both shite at maintaining relationships. If we were alone on an island together for six years, we’re the type of the people who wouldn’t send each other Christmas cards after we’d been rescued. You definitely shouldn’t take relationship advice from either of us but damn, if you’re curious how to write a great non-fiction book then Gary is your guy. The Trading Game is a literary gift, a real pleasure stim for the senses. I was particularly pleasantly pleased with the conspicuous absence of sugarcoating.

“Yes Arthur, yes, inequality. The rich get the assets, the poor get the debt, and then the poor have to pay their whole salary to the rich every year just to live in a house. The rich use that money to buy the rest of the assets from the middle class and then the problem gets worse every year. The middle class disappears, spending power disappears permanently from the economy, the rich becoming much fucking richer and the poor, well, I guess they just die.”
That hung in the air for a second and I could see the cogs move in his brain.
“So…What about interest rates?”
“Interest rates stay at zero.”
“Hmm…Do you think we should buy green Eurodollars then?”
Fucking Arthur. Smarter than he looked.

Gary wastes no ink trying to convince us that he’s a good person. Precious few of the anecdotes in this book paint him a favorable light. Excellent! That’s how an autobiography ought to be in my opinion.

There’s a human tendency to view ourselves as the hero of our story, to paint our person with brighter more benevolent colors than the palette we use for the others. But I think such sugarcoating distorts reality. When I analyze my actions what I see is vast swathes of ambiguity. I am morally average on my best days, and so is Gary I guess. At least that’s how he comes across within the confines of this tale. Whenever a bell rings an angel gets their wings. Whenever a great gob of citizens get demonstrably fucked by the financial system, Gary makes three million dollars. Curing cancer this is not.

Spengler had always been a fiend. He loved to make money and he loved to rip customers. He was a trader right down to his bones. Once, back in July, he’d ripped a customer so hard that the salesperson had come back and complained to Caleb, and Caleb had asked Spengler what he had been doing and Spengler, who was seated, had looked up at him as if aggrieved, with his arms spread out wide, and said to him, “It’s not my fault Caleb, it’s my job!”

And Caleb had looked down at Spengler like a father looks down at his son and put his arm round his shoulder and leaned into him and said, “It’s not your job to rip the customers Spengler. Your job is to rip them, and leave them smiling.”

By day five my less than noble feelings about Gary’s exorbitant paycheck had abated and I picked up the story where I’d left off. I returned just as Gary was preparing to stick several toothpicks into a well-stocked cheese platter of exquisite physiological deficiencies. Neurotic exercise, incessant heartburn, poor appetite, Steve Jobs OCD furniture decisions, crappy sleep, a maddening propensity to listen to Barbra Streisand albums…

Gary’s soul sapping job at Citi (making money betting against economic recovery) was causing him go unfashionably insane. But his descent into hell didn’t make me feel vindicated for failing to study finance. I just felt sad. As readers we care about Gary and can understand his decisions. Who among us hasn’t considered what moral boundaries we’d deprecate if millions of dollars were on the line?

Maybe I should clue you in to what this book is about. The Trading Game is the story of a working class bloke with a Cockney accent who’s good at math and has dreams of not being poor.

The ambitious young children of East London look up to the skyscrapers that cast shadows on their houses, but the skyscrapers don’t look back. They look at each other.

Bloke Gary leverages an apprenticeship at Citi into a full-time trading job. He becomes one of their most profitable traders while his peers are still glorified coffee getters, but the money doesn’t make him happy. Gary is bafflingly bad at spending the stuff! His sneakers have more holes than his relationships.

Spend the fucking cash! I scream at my Kindle as I dream of all the nice things I’d buy with that green. Have you seen OLED TVs? Do you know how good they look, Gary? Are you listening to me Gary? They make cars with 500 horsepower and Mark Levinson audio systems Gary, do you realize that? Can you hear me mate?

I guess he didn’t check his voicemail. After a few years of making but not spending money, Gary tries to quit his job. If only it were that simple… You see, Citi won’t just let him leave. Gary’s relationship with the bank is closer to indentured servitude than magnanimous employment. In the rear half of the book the game for Gary is no longer how to make the most money, but how to convince Citi to let him go while still paying out the massive bonus they owe him. He pursues this game as doggedly as he pursued trading. I’ll leave it at that.

Change

Confessions of an Economic Hitman, by John Perkins, is another book about a gentleman making an obscene amount of money while inching inexorably towards human huskhood. Hitman has many similarities to The Trading Game, and in my review of the book I referenced the Alec Baldwin shooting incident.

Baldwin shot and killed a cinematographer while filming a movie. It was a horrible accident, and what should have been a life-changing moment for Baldwin. The old way is gone, in tragedy there is a call to cast off what didn’t work and begin something new. Maybe Baldwin would never act again. Perhaps he could have helped the victim’s family and started a charity. Started a course to teach actors how to use guns? Expanded that into a firearm safety course for all Americans? I don’t know what is called for, but if Baldwin were open to the process he could have discovered the new path.

However, Alec is refusing the call. He appears to believe that if he fights hard and long enough, he can get his old life back. Alec is suing the film’s producers, doing interviews and refusing to acknowledge that the game is over. Alec will live a diminished life stuck in the old paradigm because he’s too scared to take a step into the unknown.

Baldwin is, as my Australian friend would say, a gumpty. In writing lingo he is a character with a “failed arc.” When presented with an existential crisis demanding personal growth, Alec Baldwin refused to pick up the call. He retained lawyers, hired PR firms, and spent untold monies trying to make this life-altering event disappear. The whole debacle is fucking pathetic.

Unlike bumblefuck Baldwit, Gary completes his arc. A name and birthdate are the only features that Gary at the beginning and end of the book have in common. Transformation like this is beautiful, it’s at the heart of many of our favorite stories.

This book is funny

Despite the grim themes, I wouldn’t advise you to read The Trading Game on the subway (or the Tube, if you hail from the old country). You’re going to laugh so hard that your fellow commuters will be honor bound to treat you like an especially deranged looney. Which, I suppose, means they’ll ignore you even harder than before. This is the most that a book has made me laugh in ages, which certainly isn’t what you’d expect from a story about a nasty bank.

Bill had his own designated taxi driver, who would drive him home after broker dinners to his Hertfordshire manor whenever he missed the last train. One time I had a drink with that driver—his name was Sid—and he told me that whenever Bill was extra drunk, as a point of principle, he would make Sid stop off outside the Bank of England, so that he could sneak into an alley round the side of it and take a piss on the back of the Bank. Sid said that Bill would insist on that, even if it was not at all on the route home. I respected that a lot.

To conclude, if you buy The Trading Game what you’ll get is choice writing, British slang, a perfectly adequate amount of cocaine use, financial depravity, delectable humor, personal growth, and a positive mention of my favorite movie of all time: Cool Hand Luke. This book has it all, it even inspired me to write this thing…

Gary Gary quite contrary,
Got his dream job and found it scary.
He asked to leave and take his money,
And the bank thinks that’s too damn funny.
On a whim they ship him to Japan,
And make a slew of unreasonable demands.
But Gary is a stubborn Cockney fuck,
And he never stops believing in luck.

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