The Trading Game

The cover blurb tries to make out that this is some sort of indictment of capitalism and a story of moral failure of a trader that we should see as a hate figure, but that is not how it comes across.

Yes, it is the story of a foreign exchange trader, but not a braying, Eton educated twat, but an East End boy who happened to be a maths prodigy and leverage that into a trading job. In fact, I couldn’t help really rather liking him.

The tale of his rise to a top trading position was interesting, and his cast of characters, finely drawn and often funny. There is excess in it, it is true, but it was their money and they did work hard for it.

The second half is, if not quite the fall, but the prolonged exit from that world, and if anything is rather sad. Our hero is far from happy, and in fact never really seems to be at any point in his career.

The story is well told, without clear heroes or villains, everyone is a victim of the system really. They are making money from others’ misfortune, but they are not the cause of that misfortune, and to a certain extent they do provide a financial service, albeit 99% of the trading that they do is on their own account to make profit for the bank, but those profits also help to pay my pension, so I’m just as complicit in the capitalist system as they are, perhaps.