Ever wondered what it’s like to trade millions and outpace competitors in the high-stakes world of finance? Want to discover the real cost of success in the cutthroat world of trading? How does a young man from East London defy odds to make a name in the world of high finance, and why does he choose to walk away from it all? Dive into the world of Gary Stevenson, learn about his journey from the streets of East London to the heart of Citibank, and find out why he decided to leave his dream job.

The Trading Game: A Confession

In a crowded lecture theater in the bowels of the London School of Economics, a young man from Ilford, Gary Stevenson, sized up a room full of finance hopefuls. He wasn’t dressed like them. He didn’t talk like them. But he had something they didn’t—a head start. 

The rules of the “trading game,” a supposedly fair Citibank recruitment simulation, had already been shared with him by a helpful classmate named Luke. It wasn’t much, just a few days' notice and a rough explanation, but it felt like the first real advantage he’d ever had.

He walked into the room buzzing with energy, filled with sharp-suited students from elite backgrounds. Many of them were sons and daughters of bankers, oil magnates, and diplomats. They came with perfect resumes, tailored suits, and accents polished by expensive educations. But none of them knew the game like he did. They were about to meet someone who saw numbers not as abstract theories but as opportunities—numbers that could be bent, leveraged, and traded into something more.

The rules were simple, at least on the surface. Each player got a card with a value. Some were high, some low, and three mystery cards sat in the middle. The goal? Predict the total and make bets. But beneath the surface, the game mirrored the mechanics of financial markets: spreads, market-making, and price-taking. For this young outsider, it wasn’t just a game. It was war. Every bet, every price, was a statement: I belong here.

He won that round handily, using speed, instinct, and a relentless willingness to take risks. While others calculated, he acted. While they hesitated, he pounced. With every transaction, he racked up points and confidence. He wasn't just winning a game—he was rewriting his own story. A second round followed. Then a third. And finally, the national finals, held in one of the tallest towers in Canary Wharf, a place he had once only glimpsed between the lamp posts of his East London street.

In that gleaming skyscraper, surrounded by glass, steel, and soft-spoken bankers, he was once again the odd one out. But by then, he had become the preeminent expert on the game, having obsessed over it for weeks. He played round after round until the moves were muscle memory, the spreads instinct, the pricing reflex. During the final, something strange happened. The game was rigged. The cards dealt were impossibly stacked against him. It was a mathematical impossibility—a one-in-eleven-thousand chance.

Still, he didn’t fold. He kept betting, kept fighting, pushing the price up, selling into it, even as it meant ruin. He didn’t just play to win; he played like he had no choice. The crowd roared at his collapse, his final score dipping below minus a thousand. Champagne glasses clinked in the background. He felt the weight of failure. Until, suddenly, the trader running the game—massive, confident, intimidating—stepped into the spotlight.

The man smiled and declared him the winner. It had all been a test. The game had been rigged on purpose to see how he’d respond. Would he back down or back himself? He’d done the latter, and that was what mattered most. That trader’s name was Caleb, and he extended a massive hand and said the words that would change everything: “I’ll see you on the desk.”

For the young man from Ilford, everything shifted. No one in his neighborhood had ever shaken hands with fate in a Canary Wharf boardroom. He had walked into that building a stranger to the world of high finance, and walked out with a ticket to the very heart of it. He didn’t get there through charm or connections. He got there because he refused to fold, even when the odds were clearly against him. That refusal to fold—that blind, furious defiance—was the beginning of a journey that would make him a millionaire, but nearly cost him everything else.

Because what he didn’t know yet, standing under those glass ceilings, was that the real game hadn’t even begun.

Did Gary Stevenson Really Defy the Odds and Win Against a Rigged Game at Citibank?

Long before the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf ever opened their doors to Gary Stevenson, he had been staring up at them from a cracked football pitch in East London. At the end of his street, just beyond the tall wall of a recycling center, the distant lights of those towers winked at him like stars through smog. 

For most boys in Ilford, those buildings might as well have been on the moon. But for him, they were a challenge—a question that needed answering. Could someone like him really make it up there?

He grew up surrounded by the chaos of working-class survival: mothers on second shifts, friends ducking trouble, and street corners echoing with nonsense and threats. Money was the thing that mattered most, not because it was loved, but because it was absent. At twelve, he started selling penny sweets. At thirteen, newspapers. At sixteen, his hustle evolved into something a little greyer, a little more profitable. But the endgame was never sweets or money or street cred. The endgame was the skyline.

He didn’t know what economics really was, but someone once told him that the London School of Economics was a golden ticket. That was good enough. He applied. He got in. And from the moment he arrived, he stood out. Not in the way that wins hearts, but in the way that raises eyebrows. While others arrived in silk shirts and understated wealth, he turned up in a blue-and-white Ecko tracksuit with a rhino on the chest and a backpack from JD Sports.

The Russians didn’t talk to him. The Singaporeans didn’t understand him. His accent, thick with East London grit, marked him as someone from the outside. He didn’t care. He had math. Math was the one thing they couldn’t gatekeep. While others played networking games and sipped cocktails at finance society meetups, he sat in the front of every lecture and made sure he understood every word.

But then came second year. Everything changed. The air on campus thickened with ambition and anxiety. Students began speaking in acronyms—CDS, M&A, ABS. They showed up to class in suits. They disappeared into investment society events. They stopped caring about lectures and started caring about internships. Everyone, it seemed, was gunning for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, or some other financial deity. Everyone knew something he didn’t.

He turned to his friend Matic, a well-dressed Slovenian with insider knowledge. Matic laughed kindly. “Second year is internship year,” he said, as if that explained everything. And in a way, it did. Everyone at LSE knew the game. Everyone except him. The rules? Get a summer internship or get left behind. No internship, no job. No job, no future. He had no network. No polished resume. His most impressive job had been fluffing pillows at a DFS showroom. His greatest extracurricular was being a failed grime MC.

Still, he tried. He went to a finance society talk titled “How to Get a Job at an Investment Bank.” A towering man with slicked-back hair screamed about hustle, about sacrifice, about selling yourself like a product. It felt like a cult of ambition. The message was loud and clear: memorize the acronyms, apply to thirty banks, never stop networking, and don’t sleep. He walked out feeling smaller than when he entered.

So he gave up on internships. He wasn’t made for this suit-and-smile game. But something else was happening behind the scenes. Whispers were circulating about him. People he didn’t know began nodding at him in the library. Strangers studied with him. A Chinese student even stopped him in a corridor and stared at him, silently, for ten seconds before walking away. It was confusing—until his friend Sagar explained.

“They know how well you did in your exams,” Sagar said. “They’re just surprised, that’s all.”

He didn’t understand. “But I’m good at math,” he said. “I’ve always been good.”

“Yeah,” Sagar replied. “But they didn’t expect it from you.”

The realization hit hard. For the first time, he saw the quiet prejudice stitched into the fabric of the place. Rich kids didn’t expect a working-class brown kid in a tracksuit to be clever. He wasn’t just surprising people. He was unsettling the natural order.

So he made a new plan. He didn’t apply for internships, but he did set out to dominate every classroom. He asked more questions. He corrected professors. He studied harder than ever. He didn’t know where it would lead—but he knew he wasn’t going to play dumb just to fit in.

Then, one day, Luke Blackwood—the awkward, tall guy with a mop of dark hair—approached him in the library. “You’re good at math, right? Citibank’s got this thing called the Trading Game. You should go.”

It sounded like a game. It was a game. And for the first time, the game wasn’t rigged. It didn’t matter if you’d interned at your uncle’s hedge fund or played oboe at the Royal Albert Hall. It only mattered if you could win. He practiced. He prepared. He memorized strategies. While others were networking, he was studying price spreads and card probabilities.

And when the day came, he walked into that lecture room not as a student, but as a hunter. He wasn’t there to fit in. He was there to win.

From East London Streets to Citibank Triumph: Gary Stevenson's Unyielding Rise

The skyscraper that had once looked so distant from Ilford was now Gary Stevenson's daily commute. Getting the job at Citibank wasn’t just a win—it was a total rewrite of what he thought was possible. But starting on the trading floor wasn’t glamorous. He didn’t get a desk. He didn’t even get a seat. Instead, he grabbed an old office chair and parked himself next to the filing cabinet behind the youngest trader, Snoopy, and just listened.

The floor was chaos incarnate—phones ringing off the hook, traders swearing, Bloomberg screens flashing. Everyone seemed to be shouting in acronyms. He watched and learned. Traders moved like they were born for this: brash, rude, efficient. One man, Billy, a squat Liverpudlian, looked like he’d emerged from a football brawl into finance. Billy made money. Lots of it. But he didn’t read books, didn’t talk theory. He read the street. And that was a lesson our protagonist wouldn’t forget.

He still tried to study though. During lunch breaks and slow afternoons, he cracked open economics textbooks. That lasted exactly two days. On the third, Billy slapped the book out of his hands and shouted, “Does this look like Jackanory?” There was no time for theory here. Billy laid it out bluntly: if you wanted to understand the economy, you had to look at it. Walk down the high street. See the homeless. Count the boarded-up shops. That was the economy. Not equations.

It was a revelation. The world wasn’t numbers—it was people. And the people were struggling. His friends weren’t spending because they had nothing to spend. Their parents were drowning in debt. Mortgages were choking. Wages were flatlining. And yet, in this glass palace of finance, billions flew around like Monopoly money. The disconnect was brutal. But in that gap—between what the models said and what the streets showed—was profit.

He started to trade. He didn’t just mimic what others were doing. He studied the real world. While the other traders bet on growth and recovery, he saw a broken economy. He made trades based on what he heard from friends, family, and the rhythm of the streets. And those trades started to make money. Serious money. In his first few months, he raked in millions. More than most full-time traders.

Billy noticed. Rupert noticed. Even Caleb—the smooth, godlike figure from the trading game—took note. His reputation grew quietly, like steam rising from a pot. But he kept his head down, mostly. He still fetched lunch orders. He still sat on the edge of desks. But the numbers didn’t lie. By the end of that year, he had made more than any junior in recent memory.

He understood now that trading wasn’t about intelligence. It was about information and conviction. The best traders weren’t the smartest—they were the clearest. Billy wasn’t quoting economic theories. He was watching the world unravel and making money off the seams. And now, so was he.

But the money changed things. It shifted the air around him. Friends looked at him differently. Colleagues spoke to him with a mix of envy and caution. He was still young, still rough around the edges, still slipping back into his Ilford accent when excited. But now, he had power. And power is intoxicating.

At first, he didn’t even know how much he was worth. His bonus came in like a tidal wave—nearly £400,000. It was more than his parents had made in a decade. He spent it cautiously at first, giving some to his mum, helping friends. But the feeling it gave him—that rush of validation—was more addictive than any substance.

With every profitable trade, his belief grew. He could see patterns others missed. He could feel shifts before they hit the screens. One day, while everyone bet on recovery, he stood firm. The economy was sick, and pretending otherwise was just financial cosplay. That day, he made millions. Billy nodded silently across the floor.

He had arrived. But something had also changed. Somewhere in that glass tower, his ambition had mutated. He didn’t just want to make money—he wanted to be the best. Better than Billy. Better than Rupert. Better than the smug traders who mocked his accent and sniffed at his hoodie. And slowly, quietly, a new goal took shape: not just wealth, but domination.

This wasn’t a job anymore. This was war.

Is Gary Stevenson's Trading Revolution a Blueprint for Financial Domination?

Gary Stevenson was no longer the new guy. Now, he was the young prodigy. The traders around him might not have liked him, but they couldn’t ignore him. His bets were too accurate, his profits too large. He had become, without much ceremony, one of Citibank’s most profitable traders in the world. At just 22, he was raking in more than traders twice his age. The money, the influence—it was real now.

But so was the pressure.

Every morning he arrived before the sun rose, wired on adrenaline and coffee. His days were a blur of charts, trades, and constant tension. He didn’t take lunch breaks. He barely slept. Everything was the market. Everything was his position. And when he was winning, he was euphoric. When he was losing, he was sick. It was like gambling with his own nervous system.

He wasn't just battling markets anymore—he was battling egos. The culture of the floor was testosterone on steroids. Screaming matches, posturing, casual cruelty. The traders treated losses like personal betrayal and wins like conquest. It was an arena, not an office.

And into this arena stepped “You Want Some?” moments. Verbal sparring that could escalate into shouting across desks. A senior trader once barked at him across the floor, mocking his accent, his strategy. “You want some, then?” he snapped back. It wasn’t rhetorical. It was primal. The floor fell quiet. The trader backed off. Respect came not just from numbers, but from the willingness to fight.

But under the bravado, he was beginning to fray.

The hours were endless. The screen never stopped flashing. The money felt meaningless now—it was just numbers ticking higher. He stopped spending. Stopped celebrating. He lived like a monk, obsessed with one thing: the next trade. Colleagues offered holidays, parties, even escorts. He declined it all. His only pleasure came from being right.

Outside of work, his life was shrinking. Friendships withered. His girlfriend drifted. Even family became distant. He didn't know how to talk to them anymore. What could he say? That he was betting millions based on housing data and the moods of central bankers? That every decision he made could move the market?

He began to live in isolation. Moved into a flat in the Docklands—a high-rise, minimalist box close to the office. He stopped decorating, stopped unpacking. He ate the same takeaways, wore the same shirts, listened to the same playlist on repeat. Routine became religion.

And then came the crash.

The economy he’d been watching slowly unravel finally snapped. While others panicked, he doubled down. He knew the signs. The data had screamed collapse for months. He went short—betting everything on decline. And it paid off. Millions more poured in. The higher the market burned, the richer he became.

But the success felt hollow.

He began to notice the costs. His body ached from sitting so long. His back spasmed. His hands trembled. He was 23 and had the health of a pensioner. Mentally, he was volatile—either high on wins or spiraling in paranoia. The other traders laughed it off. “Burnout,” they called it, like it was a rite of passage.

One night, alone in his flat, he looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the face. It wasn’t the Ilford kid anymore. It was someone sharper, colder, haunted. He had won. He had climbed the tower. But he wasn’t sure who he had become.

And worse—he wasn’t sure he could stop.

Gary Stevenson: Citibank’s Young Prodigy and the Cost of Trading Glory

By now, the success was undeniable. Everyone in the firm knew Gary Stevenson's name. His face appeared on internal newsletters. Senior managers referenced his trades in meetings. The whispers were loud now: he was the best. But with that spotlight came danger.

He had become too visible.

Caleb, once his mentor, had grown distant. Friendly smiles turned into neutral nods. Traders stopped joking around him. There was respect, but also fear. He was no longer the underdog. He was a threat.

And then came the sabotage.

It started subtly—rumors, backchannel complaints, emails that went missing. Then, one day, his desk phone stopped working. IT claimed it was a system issue. Then his Bloomberg permissions were restricted. A trader from another team smirked: “You’re too hot, mate.” He was making too much money, too fast. It was making people nervous.

The final straw came in the form of a meeting. He was summoned by Caleb. The tone was cold, corporate. Caleb praised his performance. But then, the warning: “You’re making enemies. Maybe it’s time to slow down. Take a break. Or go home. Ask your mum.”

It wasn’t advice. It was a veiled threat.

He went home that night seething. He had played their game, beaten them at it, and now they wanted him out. He wasn’t from Eton or Oxford. He wasn’t part of their club. He didn’t belong. And now they were closing ranks.

He considered quitting. Walking away. Taking the millions he’d earned and disappearing. But he couldn’t. Not yet. He had unfinished business. So, he stayed—and fought back.

He leveraged every contact he had, built relationships with senior traders, defended his turf. He used charm, data, and the brutal truth of profits to keep his seat. It worked—for a while. But the tension never went away. Every meeting felt like a test. Every email a trap.

Outside, the world was falling apart. The crash had gutted economies. Housing markets were in freefall. Unemployment was climbing. He should have felt vindicated—he’d seen it coming—but all he felt was dread. The more money he made, the worse things became. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was profiting off misery.

His dreams turned strange—numbers bleeding into nightmares, screens exploding, voices whispering acronyms. He woke up sweating, then went to work like nothing happened.

The walls were closing in.

He had once promised himself he’d leave when he made enough. But what was enough? He couldn’t define it anymore. The money didn’t excite him. The power didn’t thrill him. All that remained was fear.

He wasn’t trading for wealth. He was trading to survive.

Is Gary Stevenson's Unstoppable Rise a Threat to the Firm's Fragile Balance?

The thermostat in Gary Stevenson's flat was broken. For months, it blasted heat even in summer, turning his home into a pressure cooker. But he didn’t fix it. The heat became part of his mental landscape—a physical representation of how he felt every day: trapped, boiling, close to breaking.

His health collapsed first. Panic attacks. Insomnia. Twitching muscles. He saw doctors. They told him to rest. He didn’t. How could he rest? He had trades open. Positions to manage. People to prove wrong.

Then his relationships imploded. His girlfriend left. Friends stopped calling. Even his family grew quiet. He missed birthdays, funerals, conversations. He was physically present but emotionally erased.

One night, while staring at the ceiling fan, he realized something terrifying: he no longer knew who he was outside of this job. He was a function, not a person. A vessel for stress and speculation. The markets weren’t just on his screen—they were in his bloodstream.

He tried therapy. It helped for an hour. Then the markets reopened, and the noise returned. He made another million. It didn’t help. The silence after success had become unbearable. There was no applause. No “well done.” Just the next target.

Eventually, he made a decision.

He would walk away.

Not because he was weak. Not because he had lost. But because he had won—and it wasn’t enough. The game had taken everything from him. His joy, his identity, his peace. And now it was threatening to take his future.

He left Citibank without a press release. No golden parachute. Just a quiet exit from a world that had almost consumed him. The money was still there, but the madness wasn’t.

He stepped out into the city as a different man.

The skyscrapers still loomed. But now, they didn’t wink. They stared.

And for the first time in years, he stared back.

Breaking Free: Gary Stevenson's Escape from Citibank's Pressure Cooker

Gary Stevenson entered the bustling auditorium at the London School of Economics, standing out with his casual attire amidst a sea of polished finance hopefuls. Unlike the others, Gary had an edge—a fellow student, Luke, had tipped him off about the rules of Citibank's "trading game." While the room was filled with elite students, Gary saw numbers as opportunities, not just theories. 

The game was simple: each player had to predict card values and make bets, simulating real financial markets. Gary, an outsider from Ilford, attacked with instinct and speed, outpacing his competitors. He won round after round, eventually reaching the national finals in Canary Wharf. 

There, in the gleaming skyscraper, Gary faced a rigged game. The odds were against him, yet he persisted, betting relentlessly. His score plummeted, but the game was a test. The head trader, Caleb, revealed Gary's indomitable spirit as the true victory. He was invited to join the Citibank desk, a dream realized through sheer defiance.

Gary's journey began on the streets of East London, where he dreamed of the skyline beyond. His path to the London School of Economics was unconventional, marked by hard work and an instinctive grasp of mathematics. He stood out, not just for his background, but for his determination to dominate every classroom, even when others doubted him.

At Citibank, Gary was thrown into the chaotic world of trading. He quickly learned that real-world observation trumped textbook theory. As the economy faltered, Gary capitalized on the disconnect, trading with insight gained from his community's struggles. His success was meteoric, earning millions and respect.

However, the pressure was immense. Gary was pulled into a relentless cycle of trades and tension, his life shrinking to the size of a screen. The isolation grew, as did the realization that his wins were hollow. He was profiting from a broken system, and the cost was his health and relationships.

Despite earning immense wealth, Gary found himself ensnared in a toxic environment. He became too visible, too successful, prompting sabotage from within. The corporate world closed ranks, viewing him as a threat. The stress was suffocating, and his personal life crumbled.

Ultimately, Gary chose to walk away. He realized that he had won the financial game, but lost himself in the process. Leaving Citibank, he stepped back into the city, ready to reclaim his identity and face the world anew. The skyscrapers, once distant dreams, now watched him as he moved forward, free to redefine his future.

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The Trading Game: A Confession

Gary Stevenson

7 Key ideas

28 MINS

4.8 (652)

Ever wondered what it’s like to trade millions and outpace competitors in the high-stakes world of finance?

Want to discover the real cost of success in the cutthroat world of trading?

How does a young man from East London defy odds to make a name in the world of high finance, and why does he choose to walk away from it all?

Dive into the world of Gary Stevenson, learn about his journey from the streets of East London to the heart of Citibank, and find out why he decided to leave his dream job.