A Citibank prodigy turned whistleblower, YouTuber and ‘equitable economist’, Gary Stevenson is taking his knowledge of inequality to the masses
Sat in a slouchy, dark hoodie on Zoom, fresh off an interview with Piers Morgan, Gary Stevenson tells me how he made millions as one of Citibank’s most profitable traders by betting on the collapse of the economy. A former aspiring grime MC and expelled teenager from east London, Stevenson’s story is the premise of his No 1 Sunday Times best seller, The Trading Game – a gripping account of how he broke into London’s seemingly impenetrable financial sphere by winning a card game, mastered its faculties, then left, disgusted with the system in place. Now, with a rapidly growing YouTube channel and a self-fashioned title as an ‘equitable economist’, he’s campaigning to expose the corruption he walked away from. “I literally made millions of pounds betting on the collapse of our society, in full view of everyone,” Stevenson tells me. “And nobody at any point raised the question of whether that was a problem.”
His book has all the familiar ingredients of an epic underdog story: a hustler with humble beginnings, all raw talent and ruthless ambition, shrewdly scaling the walls of gate-kept institutions, facing colourful mentors and adversaries, before triumphing – but not without an inevitable moral reckoning. He describes it as the “tonic to Wolf of Wall Street,” foregoing tales of coke-fuelled excess to paint an industry so insular, self-serving, and detached that even its most successful players could barely process the ethical ramifications of their work. “So much of the media portrayal in TV and film is this unbelievable, hype-train, super-glamorised version of these places,” Stevenson says. “I’ve been in these places, and I think what you actually see is a lot of really sad, pathetic people, and I don’t think anyone had written that story. I thought there was a real space to make something that was way more real and experiential.”
Having grown up in Ilford in a single-income household – the son of a Post Office worker and an immigrant mother – Stevenson hustled from childhood, selling sweets at school before being expelled for a “drug-related transgression” at 16. Even so, his knack for numbers and promising grades secured him a place at the London School of Economics (LSE). Thrust into the nepotistic realm of international elite, he quickly realised academic brilliance alone wouldn’t land him a job in finance. “You can imagine what their extracurriculars were compared to mine,” Stevenson chuckles. “When I was a teenager, I was working in DFS, fluffing pillows. I was going to be a grime MC. I was delivering newspapers. And these guys were founding the junior United Nations and bullshit like that, all of this crazy shit that rich kids do. So, I was like, ‘I’m fucked,” basically. It’s ridiculous, but the way I was as a kid, I wasn’t really going to let that stop me.”
By his second year, his classmates were already cosplaying successful bankers – speaking in acronyms, attending finance society events, sporting crisp suits to class. “When I went to LSE, I thought it was going to be full of really smart kids, but because most of these guys come from very wealthy backgrounds, a lot of them actually don’t give a shit,” he asserts, explaining that their future financial positions were not determined by merit but instead who their parents were. “They don’t need the degree. They don’t care about their grades. They literally go to LSE to find a husband or a wife.”
Jarred by these strange new tongues and customs, with no clue how to get his foot in the professional door, Stevenson resolved to make himself unignorable. “I just became a dick. I would go to the front of lectures, shout out and correct the professors,” he recalls, bemused. “I knew I was good and just figured, if I can make myself noticed, maybe something will happen.” It worked. A student in the year above introduced him to Citibank’s backdoor hiring process: a single trader was recruited each year through a card game, a test of probability and risk that mimicked the real thing. “As soon as this guy told me, I just started obsessively memorising this game. There was a first round at LSE, which I easily won,” the final round was held at Citibank centre. “When I got to there, I don’t think the kids from posh backgrounds went there expecting to win the final. They wanted to network their way into a job […] But I was never very good at networking. I went there like, ‘I’m going to win this final.’”
That was how, at 21, Stevenson found himself in one of Canary Wharf’s towering office buildings, hazed into taking lunch orders for a trading floor of a hundred. Hungry himself, he devoured every lesson he could from colleagues whom his book depicts as varying shades of eccentric and unhinged (like bosses thumbing through Sports Illustrated to feign camaraderie on day one). But wading deeper into his trade bred a kind of detachment that, while the currency on the trading floor, became corrosive to his sense of self. “I think a lot of young people, especially young men, get into this space because they’re told the only thing that matters is money, money, money,” he observes. “If you’re the kind of person who can lose yourself in a game – and I am, I have to prevent myself from playing computer games because I’ll wake up three months later – you can become completely detached from your humanity.”
[The right] want men to hate women. They want women to hate men. They want white people to hate foreigners. They want foreigners to hate white people. That’s what they want
In his first year of trading, Stevenson got a bonus of £400,000. He was 23 years old. But it wasn’t so much his college-earned technical knowledge that served his bets; it was his background. While other traders bet on economic recovery after the 2008 crash, Stevenson only had to look to his family and childhood friends to know that interest rates would stay at zero. His staggering bonuses were granted on his knowledge that things would only get worse for most people. “There’s no conscious moralising in the book. But you have these moments where I just made a two-million-pound bonus and cycle past this homeless person, and my first thought is, ‘how did he get such white bed sheets?’”
For years, he stifled the growing dissonance of his work and his surroundings. He reflects that, while today’s young people naturally question whether society is on the right path, such questions were far less common in his world at the time. “I grew up in the 90s and the 00s. Pre-2008, pre-Iraq war. The era of MTV Base, of throwing strippers into swimming pools, of excess,” he grins with a wry nostalgia. “I was living the dream that I was told was the dream, and I had this breakdown in full view of myself and everyone around me. And because I was making so much money, nobody was even able to conceptualise it was a breakdown – not even me.”
Using a mix of long-term interest rate swamps, he continued to bet against hikes in interest. Year after year, his paycheck was proof of the very inequality he bet on, the reason his childhood friends’ parents were unable to own their homes or feed their kids. It began to gnaw at his body before his mind caught up. “We all have these things that stick, but you push them down and pretend they don’t exist. And then you get physically sick – it’s a kind of rebellion of the spirit against the mind because you want to believe there’s no such thing as altruism or social responsibility. But part of me was saying behind the scenes, ‘No, no, it’s not right.’” After months of somatic warnings, a surreal moment at a karaoke bar in Tokyo snapped things into focus. He had to leave.
At 27, Stevenson walked away from Citibank at the height of his earnings. He went on to earn an MPhil in Economics at Oxford, then lent his insights to platforms like the BBC, The Guardian, and Novara. By 2020, he turned to YouTube, first unpacking overlooked drivers of inequality before shifting into full-scale economic advocacy, pushing to tax the super-rich. His channel exploded. Yet even now as he warns of an impending collapse, his inbox is flooded with variations of the same question: but how do I make money like you did? “It’s like Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there’s no such thing as society’ – it won. We’ve convinced young people that altruism doesn’t exist. When I was 16, 20, 23, I didn’t believe it either. But now, at 38, I think selfishness isn’t all we are.”
Stevenson recognises in his audience the same desperation for wealth – now really a matter of survival – that once consumed him. He knows the system is built to sustain itself, and that worsening conditions will inevitably bring political upheaval – either through progressive tax reform or reactionary nationalism. His platform fights for the former while sounding the alarm on the latter. “The billionaire-owned right-wing media is intentionally driving hatred and division amongst the working classes, amongst the public. They’re doing it on purpose. Hatred of migrants is the number one thing standing between the billionaires and higher taxes, and they are going to fund it.”
Beyond exposing the inner workings of financial systems, Stevenson dissects how government-fueled social and political tensions reinforce economic inequality, urging his viewers to stay wary. “The right is going to throw all of these wedge issues at you. They’re going to try and get you angry about immigration and gendered issues, about trans rights and all of this other stuff. They’re going to try to make you mad. But when they do that, they want to divide the working class. They want men to hate women. They want women to hate men. They want white people to hate foreigners. They want foreigners to hate white people. That’s what they want.”
While billionaires manufacture division between left and right, Stevenson insists the real conflict is top-down. “At the end of the day, 90 per cent of us are going to lose out economically. The economy is our common ground. I know it can be difficult when you’re getting these things that you’re very passionate about thrown at you, but if we cannot find common ground to protect each other’s interests on the economy, we’re going to lose our fucking houses.” Does he think things can get better? He pauses. “I work really hard at this, and the growth in my channel is just unbelievably rapid. That has to be a source of hope. You’ve read my book. I’ve not got a long history of losing. I don’t want to lose this one, and I’m going to try my best to win.”
The Trading Game by Gary Stevenson is published by Penguin.