The Trading Game: A Confession: Summary & Key Insights

My childhood in East London shaped everything that would come later. I was the son of a working-class family where money was always tight, and comfort was something we glimpsed only through television. My parents worked hard, yet no matter how many hours they put in, there was always this sense that we were surviving rather than progressing. It was here, in the narrow streets and small flats, that I first began to feel the reality of inequality—not as an abstract theory, but as daily life.

At school, I learned quickly that intelligence could be a ticket out. I studied relentlessly, driven not just by curiosity but by hunger for change. My friends and I would joke about becoming rich one day, but beneath that laughter was a quiet desperation. We all wanted a way out of the grind that defined our parents’ lives.

When I got accepted into the London School of Economics, it felt as though the world had cracked open. Suddenly, I was surrounded by wealth, by students who had grown up in privilege, by conversations where people spoke casually of investment banking internships and property portfolios. I realized then that intelligence wasn’t enough—connections, background, and opportunity played a huge part. Still, I believed that if I could understand how money worked, I could learn to play the game on my own terms.

At LSE, I discovered the language of global finance. Numbers became stories, markets became mechanisms of power. Yet, even as I learned to decode the system, a question lingered: why did the rewards seem to go to those who already had the most? This question would follow me into the heart of the City itself.

When Citibank offered me a place on its trading floor, I was hooked. Imagine it: a vast, electric room filled with flashing prices, shouting voices, and the constant surge of adrenaline. The financial crisis was still fresh in everyone’s memory, yet to us young recruits, it was thrilling—we believed we were the new generation that would rebuild finance smarter, fairer, and more modern. How wrong we were.

My early trades were small at first, but success built quickly. I had a knack for reading markets and for understanding the subtleties of emotion beneath numbers. Before long, I was making millions in profit for the bank, and bonuses followed suit. To my friends back home, it looked like I had made it. Yet success in trading has little to do with understanding the economy as people live it; it’s about predicting how others with capital will behave. You’re not helping the world recover; you’re extracting value from its deepest imbalances.

During the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, I realized that inequality wasn’t just a background condition—it was the very engine of profit. As governments lowered interest rates to stimulate economies, the rich used cheap money to inflate asset prices, while ordinary families saw their wages stagnate. On the trading floor, we bet on those dynamics, making money when inequality widened. Every trade that made me richer also confirmed that the world was becoming less equal.

I began to see that the recovery was an illusion. The system was being propped up, not healed. And in that illusion, people like me thrived, while the rest were told to be patient.