A working-class kid who was expelled from school, Gary Stevenson was paid seven-figure bonuses by Citigroup while still in his twenties. He tells Jim Armitage why he had to give up his job before it killed him.
When it came to playing the financial markets, Gary Stevenson had a superpower. It was a power that meant — in the gleaming towers of Canary Wharf in his twenties — he was perhaps the most successful trader at one of the biggest banks in the world, Citigroup. One year he earned a bonus of US$2.5 million ($4 million).
So what was that gift? Arrogance? He had that in spades, but no more than most City boys. Mathematical genius? Perhaps: he was good enough to shine as a student at the London School of Economics (LSE) — but, as he might say, hardly “Stephen f***ing Hawking”. Luck? Not really. He has been lucky, but he’s had bad breaks too.
No, to my reckoning, Stevenson’s superpower — as well as an ability to use the f-word every 92 seconds (I counted) — was growing up poor.
Today we are having tea and biscuits at his flat overlooking other multimillionaires’ yachts in London’s Docklands, but Stevenson remembers a time, as a child in Ilford, east London, when he had barely any clothes apart from his school uniform. That gave him a near-manic drive to succeed in the privileged world of the City, while also leading his rivals to underestimate him — and pay the price. “Rich people expect poor people to be stupid,” Stevenson says.
In early 2009, during his first year as a trader, he earned a bonus of £13,000 ($26,600) — which just whetted his appetite. A year later, aged just 23, he’d got it up to £395,000 ($809,000). After that, driven by a desire to be better than the posh men in fancy suits and pink shirts, he earned million after million. Then, still in his twenties, he burnt out and quit, never to return to the City again.
Now 37, he has written a book about his exploits. The Trading Game is hilarious, shocking and deeply sad — often in the same sentence. It is both a homage to and a critique of his former colleagues as they trade, booze, snort cocaine and womanise their way through the aftermath of the global financial crisis, making obscene bonuses in the process and, in some cases, driving themselves to destruction.
It is intended as a takedown of the way we do capitalism but it’s just as likely to be admired by many young men as an instruction manual to get rich quick. Stevenson has his own parallel. “It’s like American Psycho,” he says, recalling the cult 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis about a serial-killer investment banker that was made into film starring Christian Bale in 2000. “I knew young men at LSE who knew every line of [Patrick] Bateman’s dialogue off by heart. They think he’s a role model.”
Compact, shaven-headed and gym-toned, Stevenson talks like a London “geezah”. Albeit one who sprinkles his chat with references to Voltaire and Japanese cinema.
The son of an Italian mother, he went to several schools, in each of which he was in a small minority of white kids. “It was an immigrant culture,” he says. “It was, get on, make money.” He was stand-out bright at maths and got into Ilford County High, an excellent grammar school, only to be expelled in his GCSE year after being caught selling £3 of cannabis to a classmate. “Expelled! That’s a lot to put on a 16-year-old boy. I was no drug dealer,” he says. His mother cried when he told her. “And I was thinking, you’re not the one who’s got to fix this. I remember sitting in the bath for a shower and watching the water going down the drain, thinking, ‘That’s your life, that is.’ " He says he never took drugs again.
Despite his expulsion, the school let him sit his exams and he aced them, scoring eight A stars. He sat A-levels at Valentines High School nearby and got four As.
He was the middle child of three. His father was a postal worker who was earning “£20,000 ($41,500) a year”; his stay-at-home mother was volatile, he says. “It was a crowded house. She would kick off, just shouting and screaming.” How did he cope? “I became a ghost around the house. You disappear, you know. Stay out with your mates. But look, there are plenty of kids who have worse.”
His parents were Mormons and his mother in particular was “very, very religious” and entirely unmaterialistic. I ask whether his pursuit of money was a rebellion against their ascetic parenting. “It’s more complicated than that,” he says. When he started to make big money, “I didn’t spend it. It turned out I’m not that interested in material things.”
Looking around his flat, that’s apparent. He bought it with one of his mega-bonuses, but for a long time while he was still trading he says he was “pathologically unable” to buy any furniture and slept on a mattress on the floor. A friend’s electric guitar is propped up against a cupboard; the kitchen and bathroom have seen better days. Novels (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Bonfire of the Vanities) are scattered in piles, his football boots are drying on the balcony facing Canary Wharf.
His unusual Mormon upbringing also gave him an acute ability to question norms. For a banker whose life depends on spotting mispriced odds that no one else has noticed, that is another superpower. As he puts it: “I’m uncommonly willing to contemplate the idea that the communally shared beliefs of the group that I’m in might be bullshit. And that probably does come from a childhood being raised in what was basically a religious cult. You get to 10 or 11 and you suddenly think, ‘Hang on, all these guys around me believe in a bunch of bullshit.’ "
It was at the LSE studying maths and economics that Stevenson got his big break. His wealthy fellow students were using their fathers’ contacts and impeccable manners to bag themselves highly coveted investment bank internships. Stevenson, on the other hand, barely even knew what an intern was. Then he heard of a competition being run by Citigroup: a maths game intended to simulate financial trading that pitched undergraduates from the best universities against each other, with the top prize being an internship on the trading floor. Stevenson jumped at it.
“I decided I’d show ‘em we’re not all stupid, us kids in tracksuits,” he says. He didn’t just beat the other players, he butchered them, winning round after round. And so began his City career.
He arrived as an intern in 2007, aged 20, just as the financial world was going to hell. Traders — including some on the Citigroup trading floor — had blown up the financial system. Millions of people around the world lost their jobs and homes as a result. The culprits did this by betting big on loans they didn’t understand — trillions of dollars of mortgages and other forms of credit given to people who could never afford to pay them back. When it exploded, City bankers were the first to get culled.
Yet while there were huge cuts at Citigroup, just as there were at all the big investment banks, they were — at first, anyway — mainly among the traders who’d been making those crazy credit bets. Generally, Stevenson says, “the poshest people from the poshest schools in the nicest suits”. Stevenson’s team were in another department, a group of oddballs trading an esoteric, deeply unfashionable type of loan called an FX (foreign exchange) swap. Their desk was called Short-Term Interest Rate Trading, or Stirt, to give it its James Bond crime cartel-like acronym.
When the financial crisis ripped through the banking system, nobody would lend to anybody — apart from the Stirt desk. So, with desperate clients, Stevenson’s “pirate ship crew”, as he calls them, could charge a fortune. He recalls one colleague pumping his fists with delight after making a US$2 million ($3.2 million) profit on a trade, while across the office staff were losing their jobs. His bear-like desk head earned so much that, at just 29 years old, he retired to California and built a house for his family.
Being a trader is a uniquely selfish job. You get fired if you don’t make money and you only make money if the other guy loses it. It skews your morals. Stevenson learnt this as a 23-year-old rookie when one of the top traders in his department in New York, a man nicknamed “the Frog”, phoned him full of excitement about a can’t-lose trade on Swiss francs. Stevenson thanked him and bought in. But the trade quickly turned out to be a disaster. It was only when he was down £8 million ($16 million) that he realised the seller of the “rubbish” he’d been buying was the Frog. “He’d used me as the dustbin.”
Yet with a speed that seems impossible to those outside the world of finance, Stevenson was rapidly given hundreds of millions of dollars to trade with. As the shock of the Lehman collapse receded, his less astute colleagues started following the mainstream economists’ view that the central banks would print money and the world’s economies would begin improving.
Stevenson didn’t buy it. He went back home to Ilford to take the economic temperature in the real world. What he found shocked him: his friends and family were losing their homes, jumping the barriers at the Tube, unable to afford the fare, walking around with holes in their shoes. “It became clear to me that the market was wrong,” he says. “Not just the market, but the economists, the universities, the monetary policy committee in the Bank of England, the dickheads on the news, the whole shitshow.”
Stevenson realised he had found his bet, the trade that would make him a fortune. In 2011 he started gambling against a recovery — and gambling big. Soon his trades were making his bank hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. That meant millions for himself in bonuses.
He gained a reputation as a trading svengali, courted by the top traders who begged to treat him to lavish dinners at the best restaurants. But he was exhausting himself, working harder and harder. One night he rowed with a flatmate who’d brought some traders home, whom he found snorting cocaine off the dining room table. After kicking them out he told him, “I can’t afford to make mistakes.”
He obsessed about work day and night. His weight dropped to 54kg. He’d wake at 2am in a cold sweat and go for a run on the treadmill at the gym in his building. “I got my 5km down to nearly 18 minutes.” He’d go back to bed, wake at 5.30am, read 500 emails from the trading floor then cycle into the office before sunrise. Before long he was shuffling around the office in battered trainers and a hoodie. His trades were still making millions but he felt crippling exhaustion and had chest pains all the time. He became insular and deeply resentful of his bosses.
Then, during a dressing-down for insubordination, he told his boss he couldn’t do it any more. He needed a break. But management refused, he says, posting him to the Tokyo office instead, where, lonely and alienated in his luxury apartment, his depression deteriorated into a full-blown breakdown. He recalls going to the company doctor and crying. Even then, Stevenson claims, the bank would not help.
He runs his hands over his scalp with incredulity. “I was saying to my bosses, like, ‘I’m f***ed here. I need a sabbatical.’ And they would just up my salary. Every time I tried to express problems about my mental health, they would just give me more money. These guys are so obsessed with money.”
He felt trapped, knowing that if he quit he’d lose out on millions in bonuses, payment of which is deferred in yearly instalments. The bank’s doctor eventually signed him off as sick, but he says his bosses started getting angry. Having been brought up in a neighbourhood where people roll with guns and knives, Citigroup’s out-of-shape executives did not scare him so much. “Mate,” he writes of one. “Don’t talk like a gangster if you’re not a f***ing gangster.”
He fought back, working to rule for months in dull back-office jobs until the bank finally caved in. He won, leaving with his colossal bonuses intact.
His mind, it seems, was not quite so complete. Even today he has an air of vulnerability about him, like a man tiptoeing through recovery. He is still wary of his tendency to go into overdrive at work. He has now established himself as something of an equality campaigner, calling for wealth to be distributed more fairly away from the super-rich. He broadcasts a weekly YouTube show called Garys Economics, watched by tens of thousands of people, claiming the “bifurcation” of wealth between rich and poor will lead the economy to its inevitable destruction.
It’s quite a turnaround for a millionaire trader — and some might say a bit rich. He has made his money. Isn’t he part of the problem? “I had someone text me recently to ask, ‘Why do you care?’ Well, it’s true, I could be on a beach in the Philippines drinking piña coladas, but I don’t want the world to be shit. My mum’s not rich. My sister’s not rich. The girls I’m dating aren’t rich. Yet people still ask me why I care?”
For Stevenson his move seems normal. “When I was a young man, a trader, I was not a political person. My job was to analyse the economy. What I saw was an economy on fire. That politicised me.”
He hopes his YouTube videos — which he says earn him no money after the filming and production costs — are his way of making a difference. In them he has called for a 1-2 per cent tax on the wealthy’s assets above £10 million and says he wants to educate people to fight for it. He repeats a mantra that the £800 billion or so of extra debt run up by the government since Covid has all ended up in the hands of the wealthy.
Furlough money, he claims, trickled up to rich landlords in rent or to lenders in mortgage payments. It has primarily served to pump up the value of the wealthy’s property and share portfolios, he argues. Eventually this will hollow out the middle class by making housing and other living costs unaffordable, sending western economies into Brazil-style extremes of wealth and poverty, and fuelling anti-immigrant blame politics.
It is a gloomy view, and one disputed by more established economists. Much of the government borrowing Stevenson cites, they point out, saved people from destitution and ended up being held as gilts in the pensions of the middle classes.
I ask if his world view is a manifestation of a depressive mental state — a by-product of a life in which, as he admits, his rapid accumulation of wealth left him “weird” and alienated from friends and family.
He laughs bitterly, then says, “Do the analysis!” before criticising the media for failing to ask the right questions. “The government gives away £800 billion and nobody even asks, ‘Who, at the end of the day, is going to get £800 billion richer?’ "
He still trades with his own money — his big bets are that gold, shares and property prices will continue to rise. And, despite his conversion to equality warrior, he is not a bank basher. “I don’t love the school of thought that banks are evil and we should get rid of them. Not because I love banks but I think it’s probably the modern descendant of centuries of antisemitic, anti-usury thinking. There’s a load of dodgy s*** in banking, there’s a lot of waste, corruption, bad behaviour, but they do facilitate trade.”
Eleven years after quitting Stevenson still regularly dreams about his days as a trader. “Oh yeah, I miss the trading floor. I loved it, especially at the beginning. At least on the trading floor, I say something’s gonna happen, you say no, we put our money on the table and at the end of the year I’m the f***ing king. It doesn’t matter that you’re some famous economic commentator and I’m some dickhead from Ilford. There’s a genuine meritocracy. An incentivisation for people to actually know what they’re talking about in a world full of people who are just chatting s***. And a willingness to take the hit if you’re wrong.
“And I miss that,” Stevenson says. “I miss that space where it’s enough just to be right.”
The Trading Game by Gary Stevenson (Allen Lane) is released March 12.
Written by: Jim Armitage
© The Times of London