Gary Stevenson is a former foreign exchange trader and now well-known YouTuber who runs Garys Economics, with regular videos highlighting how traditional economists get it wrong and why inequality is the main driver of recent society.

His memoir, The Trading Game: A Memoir, covers his time as a smart working-class kid who gets into the London School of Economics, wins an undergraduate trading game for an internship (hence the book’s title), and becomes–in his words–the best trader in the world while working at Citigroup.

The Trading Game Book Cover

There are quite moving sections, especially early on, covering his time as a student and learning the ropes of trading. Think lots of getting lunches for people, coffee, and peering over shoulders trying to ask questions. Soon enough, he has his “own book” for trading and starts to make serious money. In the process, he becomes more and more removed from his friends and family.

The book is obviously inspired by Michael Lewis’s 1989 book, Liar’s Poker, also featuring a young trainer fresh out of LSE. In both books, colleagues are larger-than-life characters given nicknames like The Slug or The Front, who swear constantly, drink like fish, and manage to make millions of dollars. Amidst a sea of otherwise unlikeable and not-particularly bright characters, there is a solitary trader who is different, seeing what others don’t, and serving as a yoda of sorts to our young author. In Liar’s Poker, it is a New York trader whispering secrets over the phone to Michael Lews; here it is Billy, a rare working-class person from Liverpool who is the best trader in the firm and tells Stevenson that the most important thing is to ignore the economics textbooks and look around at the underlying decay in the financial world 2008 onwards.

As a foreign exchange trader, Stevenson was betting on movements in currency and his central thesis was that interest rates would remain almost zero indefinitely as the rich become richer and asset prices inexoribly rose. Classic economics tells us that interest rates can’t stay very low for a long time, and they did, starting in 2008 after the financial crisis and persisting for the next 14 years, something that had never happened before and by all academic descriptions shouldn’t be possible.

The author started his career in 2008 (good timing) and rode this wave too, again, in his unverifiable words, record profits. Although he was making upwards of a 100 smaller trades a day, setting prices, ultimately he made only a handful of huge year-long bets that resulted in the majority of his overall PnL (profit and loss) extending into the tens of millions. Given the going rate of 7% as bonus, that meant in his best year, profits of $35m for the bank resulted in $2.3m bonus for mid-20s Stevenson.

We can debate how much of his success was the result of true insight and skill versus being in the right place, at the right time. The author doesn’t seem to have any doubts that it was his particular brand of genius that made the difference. And despite lengthy sections on the market and how stupid central bankers are, he is suspiciously quiet and indeed doesn’t mention at all the massive LIBOR scandal going on at the time at Citigroup and other banks.

Somewhat remarkably as a writer, he does manage to make the early third of the book quite gripping, even as the reality is that he’s sitting in an office for 11 hours a day, staring at screens, and talking to brokers via a Bluetooth headset.

The larger issue with the book is Stevenson himself. He does not come across well, to put it lightly. He carries around a chip on steroids on his shoulder and genuinely seems to dislike basically everyone else in the book, including people who gave him jobs, tips, and generally seem to care for him. In the book, Stevenson is arrogant to an extreme and regularly describes almost everyone around him as fat, drunk, entitled and stupid. Only Bill and the authors’ girlfriends, most notably The Wizard, who he treats terribly, get a pass.

You have to wonder how much of what he’s saying is true given the relentless moral failings of everyone else around him. His constant bragging about his trading prowess also wears thin. It’s impossible to prove his claims that he was the best trader at Citi and one of the best in the world. For all the 100+ trades he did each day making markets, it seems most of his gains were based on 4-5 huge annual bets against interest rates. That’s hard to square with claims of genius and one wonders why he bothered doing so many small trades at all if he could just make a huge gamble each year and either take 7% of the profits or presumably get fired and just leave if it failed.

Even more suspiciously for the best trader in Citi, Stevenson is sent out to Japan after several years—hardly an ideal outpost for an extreme trader. This coincides with what appears to be a mental breakdown of sorts, where he becomes depressed and lives in a large apartment without furniture. Yet there is almost no introspection about this, only description. And the same goes for his portraits of others throughout the book: quite portraits, no depth.

I liked the book quite a bit initially, less as it went on, and near the end I’m writing a review quite different than what I expected at the start.

I’ve enjoyed the author’s YouTube channel and its persistent emphasis that inequality is the core issue and mainstream economists won’t fix it because they are themselves wealthy, indoctrinated by years of study, and the best economists work as traders making money and have no reason to tell the truth. That all rings true to me and squares with my experiences studying economics and working briefly in finance.

So what to make of the book? It is hard not to come away with a dislike and suspicion of the author. He’s not Robin Hood. The last 80 pages of the book are about him trying to keep his bonus. There’s no “confession” from the subtitle at all. He seems to have disdain for almost everyone and everything and pats himself on the back for profiting off of it.

In short, I liked him via his YouTube channel a lot more before I read this. That’s not to say he’s incorrect, either his general critique of the financial system or his efforts to educate people on it, but it is hard to fully trust someone who writes a memoir like this.