Overview

The best job a concert pianist can get nowadays is trader for Citibank. It pays very well

This is an okay book. It’s left-field enough to escape the centrist dad category.

The plot itself isn’t riveting: Gary is good at maths, Gary is poor, Gary wants money, Gary becomes a trader. He wins a card-based trading game at the LSE, the game gets him an internship at Citibank, the internship gets him a seat on the short-term interest rate desk, and the desk makes him a millionaire in his mid-twenties.

I can’t say I learned loads about trading, but it was nice to see class drawn so clearly. Gary describes getting into a good university, working hard, and then discovering a world of internships, interviews and suits that he hadn’t been let in on:

I’d believed it when the teachers back at school had told me: study hard and do well in your exams and you will get a good job. I had been an idiot. I had been a fool.

Stevenson is a character in this story, not just its narrator. It’s clear that he struggle(d/s) with his moral failings. Sometimes he makes excuses for them and sometimes he doesn’t. Anecdotes about his parents are sprinkled throughout, particularly about how he never helped them out much despite earning far more than them. At one point his colleagues force him to buy a Sky TV subscription for his dad, which he eventually cancels. Airing all this out when it isn’t pertinent to the plot suggests that, somehow, it is. The zero-sum mentality of the trading floor feels cruel when grafted onto day-to-day life.

The book obviously takes inspiration from Liar’s Poker: there’s a Big Bad Bank full of gluttonous characters like “the Slug”. Like Liar’s Poker, it is also part memoir. Stevenson takes the time to delve into his interests and hyperfixations alongside his deteriorating mental health. His 5k times get a mention, as does a tour of Tokyo’s cuisine.

Some of the book’s factual claims have been disputed, specifically whether Stevenson really was the most profitable trader at Citi. I don’t think it matters much if he’s lying. If anything, the possibility makes the book better. He’s an unreliable narrator offering a perspective rather than fact.