Gary Stevenson grew up poor, got rich in the City β then found himself wrestling with depression. I rack my brain distressingly slowly, like a librarian using a card index for the very first time, thinking: which bit of the news? LA is on fire; Gaza is on fire; Ukraine is on fire; a bunch of Teslas are on fire.
Oh, that news. Interest rates are at 4. But the thing is, the traders are probably right. The middle class is dying. What is the actual plan here? And Stevenson knows a lot about the rich. Stocks, gold, commodities, property, everything. The rich have got a lot of money, they can buy everything. The government has got to compete with that.
I had one drawer under my bed with everything I owned in it. Politics and economics are increasingly gonna be everything people care about, because this gets worse.
Six months after The Trading Game was published, former colleagues lined up to tell the Mail and the Financial Times it was nonsense. And besides, his mentor and colleague Billy a pseudonym was.
While living in Japan with his girlfriend, called Wizard in the book, Stevenson had a breakdown, which was a long time in the making. When he goes, life is nothing but the numbers. He does an impression of himself, staring. It is funny, and it is genuinely unsettling. There was a wonderful reclamation of humanity through defeating these guys by being mad, rather than by playing their game.
