THE TRADING GAME

A British master of finance shows how the world of investment and trading isn’t so far removed from organized crime.

As a child, writes Stevenson, he would gaze up at the skyscrapers of the financial district, “those gleaming, towering temples of capitalism.” A math whiz, but definitely an outlier in England’s hidebound class system, thrown out of high school for selling a pinch of pot, he excelled in his studies at the London School of Economics and bested the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful. “The way I saw it, there was only one path for me into the City—beat all the Arab billionaires and Chinese industrialists to a top first class degree, and just pray to God that Goldman Sachs noticed,” he recounts. Instead, Citibank came calling when Stevenson trounced other applicants for internship in a trading simulation that he steered through, even when the powers that be rigged it. Before long, he was earning millions of pounds per year. Granted, he notes, some of his earnings came at terrific cost to other people, as when he made millions on the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011: “Some people thought the nuclear plant might blow up. That was good for my position. Up three and a half million dollars. Up four and a half million dollars. By a week in I was up six million.” Along the way to wealth, Stevenson had disregarded a wise warning from a veteran—“Once you get in, you’ll never get out”—and when he decided that the trading game was no longer for him, it was as if he were trying to quit the Mafia or a bike gang, a story he relates with considerable panache.

A warning to would-be Wall Streeters that while the money is good, it can come at the expense of your soul.