The Trading Game
A Confession
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The Trading Game
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Narrated by:
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Gary Stevenson
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By:
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Gary Stevenson
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
*NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*
An outrageous, white-knuckle journey to the dark heart of an intoxicating world - from someone who survived the trading game and then blew it all wide open
'If you were gonna rob a bank, and you saw the vault door there, left open, what would you do? Would you wait around?
Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken footballs on the streets of East London in the shadow of Canary Wharf's skyscrapers, Gary wanted something better. Something a whole lot bigger.
Then he won a competition run by a bank: 'The Trading Game'. The prize: a golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader in the whole city. A place where you could make more money than you'd ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional maths geniuses, overfed public schoolboys and borderline psychopaths, yet they start to feel like family. Where soon you're the bank's most profitable trader, dealing in nearly a trillion dollars. A day. Where you dream of numbers in your sleep - and then stop sleeping at all.
But what happens when winning starts to feel like losing? When the easiest way to make money is to bet on millions becoming poorer and poorer - and, as the economy starts slipping off a precipice, your own sanity starts slipping with it? You want to stop, but you can't. Because nobody ever leaves.
Would you stick, or quit? Even if it meant risking everything?
'An unforgettable story of greed, financial madness and moral decay' Rory Stewart
'Hilarious, shocking and deeply sad — often in the same sentence' Sunday Times
'The Wolf of Wall Street with a moral compass' Irvine Welsh
©2024 Gary Stevenson (P)2024 Penguin Audio
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Critic reviews
If you are looking for a Wolf of Wall Street type tome, this ain’t it. What you do get is a genuine feel for the culture of large Finanical institutions and the ethics and moral challenges that come with it.
An excellent listen.
Excellent
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For me this massively adds to the depth of the story as you find yourself listening as if your in his situation.
Cracking book, well done fella !
Genuinely the Best audio book, I’ve heard!
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Noteworthy is the authors own admission that if he hadn't had the luck to go to university and work in the city he may have sold drugs on the street instead and that morally there is little to separate the two or the type of people who often work in the corporate or banking world. Often it's just about which class you were born into: a council estate and without morals you become a drug dealer, middle class public school and you work for the rear end of a bank. And who really does the most damage in this world?
My own father worked in the city as a trader in the 1970's and so I had to read this book. His experience in the city seemed the same as the author and he too crashed out though for different reasons but the stories were the same.
There is a criminal underworld for the working class and a criminal over world for the middle class. An exaggeration? Not really, just look at what the city and corporations do. One lot are criminalised, the other the law protects and where does all the world's drug money get laundered anyway?
This is the realisation the author made, that they are all the same; the type of people are the same and they both profit from the misery of others, it really is no different.
This book is a valuable insight into this murky world and how the financial system works. A trader who couldn't take the filth anymore.
We need banks and corporations, but surely there is a better way than this, all this that is described in the book.
At the end of the day, we all make a choice and after being part of the problem the author has made his. I hope he succeeds in his new life.
Excellent insight into life of city and mind of those who work there
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The greatest book of all time
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Superb.
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