Gary Stevenson claims to have been the best trader in the world. His old colleagues disagree

For someone who rails against the inequities of modern capitalism, Gary Stevenson sure does spend a lot of time boasting about the money he made on the trading floor.

For many fans of the trader-turned-inequality-campaigner, Stevenson’s self-proclaimed success on Citigroup’s foreign exchange desk is precisely what has made him such a compelling critic of the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Stevenson’s straight-talking videos have earned him legions of followers online. His recent memoir, The Trading Game, has become a best-seller, and just last month made the longlist for a business book prize in a certain salmon pink-coloured newspaper.

Having made millions at one of the biggest investment banks in the world, the son of a Post Office worker from the east London suburb of Ilford certainly has a knack for describing the cloistered world of big banks in terms anyone could understand. Here’s a flavour from a typically four-letter-word-filled recent interview:

You become the best trader in the world for one of the biggest banks in the world, and then somebody sits you down and threatens you basically like a gangster. It kind of makes you realise that they’re the same fucking people.

But was he as skilled a trader as he claims?

Because, as you may have noticed, Stevenson doesn’t claim to have been merely good or even great. He claims to have been the best. 

It’s an assertion that he has made at least as far back as this 2020 column in The Guardian, published at the height of the first coronavirus lockdown, in which he wrote that he had been “Citibank’s most profitable trader globally”.

And the bold claim has only got more colourful in the telling since. Take this characteristically brash excerpt from a video interview earlier this year:

I’m not fucking Mahatma Gandhi, I’m not here to talk about morality, OK. I was the best fucking trader in the fucking world and I’m the guy that calls it right every fucking year . . .  

These claims struck FT Alphaville as odd the first time we heard them in one of Stevenson’s videos. Stevenson was still in his 20s when he left Citi — a young age to even be handed high enough risk limits to smash the lights out so dramatically.

We wondered if the statement would be a little more qualified in The Trading Game, which chronicles both Stevenson’s heady rise on Citi’s trading floor and his eventual acrimonious exit from the US banking giant. Maybe Stevenson meant he was the best trader in Citi’s foreign exchange division, or perhaps just on the STIRT desk (that’s “short-term interest rate trading”) where he worked? It would still be no mean feat for such a youngster.

But no. Right at the start of the book, Stevenson coolly explains that he’s about to tell “the story of how I became Citibank’s most profitable trader, in the whole world”.

Stevenson does put a bit more flesh on the bones of this claim later in the book, giving the hard figure of a peak $35mn profit achieved for the bank in 2011. 

Yet while that number may sound big to the man on the street, it didn’t strike us as that wild for that era. Notably, it was only two years after Citi paid Andy Hall — the legendary oil trader nicknamed “God” — an eye-watering $100mn bonus (and note that was Hall’s personal share of a much higher profit generated for the bank).

After getting in touch with some of the professionals who played the trading game alongside Stevenson, it seems our scepticism may be warranted.

FTAV has spoken to eight former employees of Citi who worked with Stevenson at various points in his career, including some of the most senior managers in the bank’s FX business. All of them disputed his claim to have been the bank’s most profitable trader. 

More than one of his former colleagues on the trading desk alleged that Stevenson had “delusions of grandeur”, while several said they doubted his record would have put him in the top 10 in Citi’s FX division at any point.

For his part, in response to questions about his claims, Stevenson told us: “I stand by what I’ve said in the book, I have nothing further to add.”

Citi declined to comment.

Fiction or non-fiction?

Of the eight traders or former traders who agreed to speak with FTAV, the majority worked alongside Stevenson on the STIRT desk. 

Somewhat counter-intuitively, given it has “interest rates” in the name, the STIRT desk sits within FX rather than rates trading at major banks such as Citi. The desk deals in FX derivatives such as forwards — contracts between two parties to buy or sell currency at a fixed price on a set future date.

Some of those we spoke to also provided clear inspiration for characters in The Trading Game, in which names and biographical details have been changed, but often not dramatically so. 

Take, for example, Kent Bray. 

Bray worked alongside Stevenson for years and goes by the nickname “KB”. He appears to have been the inspiration for “JB” in The Trading Game. In the book, JB is a trader with a hefty cocaine habit who first takes Stevenson under his wing when he lands on the STIRT desk as an intern.

Speaking to FTAV, Bray candidly confirmed that he had a problem with cocaine during this time as a trader and that he has been in recovery for years. He now spends his time mentoring people working in the City, counselling them on how to avoid succumbing to the pressures of such a high-stress career. 

Here’s a picture of Stevenson and KB together on Citi’s STIRT desk back in the early 2010s:

KB insisted that he wasn’t “trying to run Gary down”, nor was he “bitter”. He recalled, however, that he was stunned when he first heard his former desk-mate’s claim to have been Citi’s top trader. 

“I contacted him, and I said: ‘Is this book fiction or non-fiction?’ And he said: ‘It’s non-fiction’,” Bray explained, adding that he told Stevenson then that there was no way he was ever even in contention for the title of the best trader at Citi. 

In Bray’s telling, a $35mn PnL year just wouldn’t come anywhere near that accolade in the years they worked together.

“It sounds like a lot of money for people not in the trade,” he said. “But in all the time I was at Citibank that’s not gonna make you the most profitable trader globally.”

As well as speaking to people who worked alongside Stevenson on the trading floor, we spoke to several senior managers at Citi who he reported to during his time at the bank.

One of those was Jeff Feig, who was global head of foreign exchange at Citi for a decade between 2004 and 2014. Like Bray, Feig appears to have inspired a character in Stevenson’s book.

“He did OK, but wasn’t exceptional, and over his career as a trader he wasn’t even close to being one of the stars,” Feig told us. “He was someone we liked, who we thought had talent and smarts, but wasn’t nearly fully developed.”

On Stevenson’s assertion that he was once the best of the best, Feig was damning: “His claim about being the most profitable trader at Citi in any one year is laughable and clearly just an outlandish fib.”

Another of Stevenson’s old bosses remembered him as a “nice kid”, but quickly added that “Gary was at no point ever even the highest PnL” among the 20 to 25 traders who made up Citi’s global STIRT team, let alone the whole bank.

“He didn’t even have the risk limits to be the highest producer, in any capacity,” he added, describing Stevenson’s $35mn PnL in 2011 as “not even close” to the highest profit in STIRT that year.

Taking too much credit 

Just about everyone we spoke to had one big issue with Stevenson’s claim to have been Citi’s “most profitable trader” (or the “fucking top trader in the world in 2011” as he has also put it): how would he even know?

In The Trading Game, Stevenson explains that Citi had a website allowing the FX traders to see each other’s PnLs:

It wasn’t just the STIRT traders who could see one another’s PnL. It was all available on an internal website that everyone on the whole floor could see.

Several former FX traders we spoke to disputed the claim, saying the system did not allow for quite this level of transparency. 

Feig told us that he actually built this website. As he remembers it, the system allowed FX traders to look up the PnLs of their immediate team, while desk heads had a wider view of how their “global business” was doing. 

“So someone like Gary could certainly see how the guys on his desk were doing. Maybe he could see how other forward traders are doing. He couldn’t see anything else,” Feig said.

Crucially, the emerging markets currency traders had “different systems” to those trading major G10 currencies such as Stevenson.

“He sat 10 feet away from the Russian trader and the Polish zloty trader, but he would have no idea what their PnLs are,” Feig said.

Three other traders from this time agreed with Feig that the PnL system would not have allowed a STIRT trader to see the whole of FX. 

But even if, for the sake of argument, we accept Stevenson’s claim that this internal system allowed anyone to look up the PnLs across the FX trading floor, rather than just his specific sub-desk, everyone we asked was clear that there was certainly no way for any trader to bring up a wider list of all the individual PnLs of everyone across every division of the bank (such as credit, rates and equities).

And while people would obviously gossip about big windfalls they had heard traders had made elsewhere, there was never an official global ranking of the bank’s most profitable traders that was handed out to top-performing employees.

“It’s not like it’s the Oscars or the Grammys or something,” said Bray.

Feig was more blunt: “There is a zero per cent probability he could know where he ranked in terms of trader profitability in Citi.”

To get a sense of how Stevenson’s $35mn PnL in 2011 would stack up against the money made on another desk, FTAV spoke to a credit trader whose time at Citi overlapped Stevenson’s. (Amusingly, Stevenson pours scorn on credit traders throughout his book, at one point alleging that they “were all pricks”, while frequently deriding their supposed penchant for “pink monogrammed shirts”.)

The former corporate bond trader explained that he “vaguely remembered” Stevenson from the latter’s time as a grad trainee, noting with a chuckle that the east Londoner was “very cocksure” for a new arrival on the trading floor. (Stevenson notes in his book that he spent his first week as an intern on the credit desk, so perhaps they crossed paths during that period, who knows?)

The ex-credit trader described Gary’s central claim as “horse shit”, noting by way of example that the investment-grade credit traders in New York averaged around $30mn to $40mn PnL back then. And that was just the average.

“There were people making hundreds of millions in a year,” he said, noting that the volatility around the Greek sovereign debt crisis yielded some traders outsized profits in 2011. “The whole thing is just ridiculous.”

Flow rider 

The credit trader also noted that not all traders are created equal. 

He explained that some areas of FX and rates benefited from a massive amount of what traders call “flow” — essentially a constant stream of incoming orders from buyers and sellers that traders would match up — compared with some of the lower-volume areas of riskier credit.

“That flow equals a kind of quasi-risk-free PnL, and so your payout ratio is much lower,” he explained.

In other words, this steady work tends to attract lower remuneration than those profits achieved by risking your own capital taking bets on the market: so-called proprietary or “prop” trading.

Many of the former FX traders we spoke to explained that different seats within the STIRT desk enjoyed more flow than others, with traders dealing in derivative contracts linked to more liquid currencies benefiting from a naturally higher level of client activity. This meant that the trader could make high dollar amounts of PnL simply from “market making”.

One of Stevenson’s old colleagues broke it down in language the great British public can understand: “Someone selling Oasis tickets is going to make a lot more profit than someone selling tickets for a band you’ve never heard of.”

By 2011, Stevenson was overseeing the so-called short-end euro book. This meant he dealt in derivative contracts for counterparties looking to buy or sell euros in the near future, 30 days or fewer. One of his former bosses described it as arguably STIRT’s best “franchise” — his term for the market-making side of trading — because there are a lot of clients looking to exchange euros in the near term. You could easily end up with a PnL in the top 10 of STIRT with that book, he said, without really having to swing the bat.

“We didn’t pay him like that [as one of the top 10] because we also understood the level of franchise he sat on,” he said, arguing that the majority of money Stevenson made in his peak year probably came from market making.

In The Trading Game, Stevenson himself notes that the “junior euro trader” was “a good job” — in which a prior trader had made $100mn one year — with the demand for short-end swaps translating to a hectic amount of trading activity:

The end result is, with no exaggeration, that the junior euro trader does more trades than all of the other traders on the desk put together. If you can hold it together, you can make a lot of money.

Rather than money earned from market making, however, Stevenson primarily attributes his 2011 windfall to an outsized bet on interest rates staying low.

It is one of the book’s pivotal moments, providing a through-line to Stevenson’s campaigning on economic inequality today. He writes that while many of the rich guys on the desk lazily assumed that economic recovery and interest-rate rises were on the way, Stevenson could see the pain the families of his old friends in Ilford were still going through and bet the other way. 

Among his former colleagues, there was a lot of debate over the accuracy of this account. Several argued that there were plenty of other traders betting that interest rates would stay low around that time, while one former colleague noted that the short-end euro book Stevenson was trading that year was by its very nature not particularly interest rate-sensitive.

Feig, however, said that it was certainly possible Stevenson made money that way. He noted that while STIRT traders “had a ton of good flow”, they also “made a lot of prop bets”. And the money earned from flow in a seat like short-end euro could give a trader “cushion with which to take proprietary views”.

Either way, Feig was clear that the money Stevenson made that year was not exceptional. “Thirty-five bucks? There’s no way he was the most profitable trader in the world,” he said.

The artist 

So if not Stevenson, who was the most profitable FX trader of that era?

When talking to former occupants of Citi’s STIRT desk about the years that Stevenson was there, one name kept cropping up: Rob Lloyd.

Now retired from the City, Lloyd is by all accounts a no-nonsense Liverpudlian who traded sterling derivatives at Citi. He had a largely unspectacular career until the financial crisis rolled around. Then, in 2008, his intricate knowledge of the financial plumbing that underpins markets helped him make a killing when it all started to break.

Lloydy (as KB affectionately refers to him) was known for taking big prop-style bets rather than happily clipping the spreads from market making. And in the years during and immediately after the financial crisis, Lloyd regularly put up annual PnLs well in excess of $100mn, several ex-Citi traders told us (Sarah Butcher of eFinancialCareers also identified Lloyd’s widely acclaimed trading record, in a piece that was early to kick the tyres on Stevenson’s claims).

“If there should be a book written about anyone, it’s Rob,” said one of his former colleagues.

The thing is: there sort of is a book written about Rob Lloyd. It’s called The Trading Game.

Lloyd is quite clearly the inspiration for the character of Bill. A no-nonsense scouser with a journeyman career, Bill joined Citi’s STIRT desk as its sterling trader and made a fortune for the bank during the financial crisis. As a further possible hint, Stevenson’s book gives Bill three middle names: “Douglas Anthony Gary”; Lloyd’s two middle names are “Douglas Gary” according to the FCA register.

Bill is cast alongside Stevenson himself among the main heroes of the story. At one point Bill gives the protagonist a piece of advice that he describes as “the most important thing I ever heard” (essentially: get your head out of economics textbooks and take a look at the real world if you want to understand how the economy really works).

Stevenson is also pretty clear that Bill was the best trader on STIRT, describing him as an “artist” who “built palaces” out of his trading portfolios. Bill, like the real-life Rob Lloyd, nets more than $100mn a year on several occasions and Stevenson even writes that in 2010 he became “the most profitable trader in the bank for the third consecutive year”.

But by 2011, the year Stevenson claims that he took his mentor’s crown as the most profitable trader in the bank, Bill is in “semi-retirement”, having stopped quoting the sterling FX swaps book and shifting to just taking “massive bets on the UK economy”. The Trading Game suggests Bill didn’t have a good year, citing money lost during the market ruptures following the Fukushima nuclear accident and a misplaced bet on economic recovery that meant he was barely keeping his “head above water”. 

Some of those we spoke to were adamant that there was no year Stevenson outranked Lloyd. Others suggested that, sure, maybe there was a year when a trade went against Lloyd and his PnL took a hit. He did take a lot of risk after all.

We have not been able to ask the man himself. Lloyd did not respond to several messages and voicemails asking to have a chat about it all. 

The game was rigged. Literally

Given that everyone we spoke to was in agreement that Stevenson was never Citi’s most profitable trader, we wondered if any other major elements of The Trading Game might have been embellished.

Perhaps the most extraordinary story in the book is about the card game that gives Stevenson’s memoir its name.

After panicking in his final year at the London School of Economics that mathematical ability alone may not be enough to bag a coveted investment banking internship, Stevenson learns that Citi runs an annual card game for students, called The Trading Game, in which the winner of the grand final bags a two-week placement at the bank. The game has elements taken from Texas hold ’em poker — with players holding one “hole” card, alongside several community cards that are slowly revealed — and requires players to make markets around what they think the total of the numbered cards will be at the end game. 

Stevenson soon realises that the game is as much about bluffing as it is maths and makes light work of his competitors. But then, in the crucial final round, Stevenson totally blows up, after running into a perfectly awful set of cards.

He can’t believe his bad luck (estimating the odds of such a terrible hand at just 0.0087 per cent), until a Citi trader steps forward and announces that Stevenson was the winner after all:

Gary’s scores in the warm-up games were so far ahead of any other player that we decided to test him. We wanted to see how he reacted when every single thing turned against him, so we rigged the game. It’s important to know whether a trader will back himself, or back down. Gary, you backed yourself, and we like to see that. Well done.

It sounds a little unbelievable. A streetwise kid wins a place on a bank trading floor after winning card games so comprehensively that the organisers rigged the deck against him in the final round, to see how he would react.

And yet several people we spoke to confirmed that this part really happened. 

The Trading Game was a card game Citi FX traders played on the desk. One person claimed it had originally been invented by a German broker. Another said it was sometimes called “Fix It”, but they tended to use that name less as the years went by as the connotations around price fixing became more problematic.

Citi started running competitions for graduates at various universities precisely to find people like Stevenson, who had the instincts to make good traders, but lacked the social polish that can enable those from more privileged backgrounds to glide more easily into an investment bank internship. More than one person verified Stevenson’s account, right down to the final round being rigged against him. 

“The story about The Trading Game is 100 per cent true,” said Feig, who added that Stevenson is an “exceptionally smart guy”.

Taking stock

Away from the card game, lots of people we spoke to had an issue with one anecdote or another in the book. That’s hardly surprising. Memories of events from more than a decade ago are always going to differ. It is also worth noting that The Trading Game is billed as a “confession” and Stevenson is upfront that he “didn’t treat everyone the best” (including KB’s alter-ego, JB).

One aspect several of his former colleagues consistently took issue with, however, was Stevenson’s account of his battle with Citi to keep his deferred stock.

In the book’s final act, Stevenson is growing disillusioned with his life on the trading floor. On the encouragement of the senior trader who first spotted his potential during that final round of The Trading Game, he moves to Tokyo, but the change of scene does little to reignite his passion.

Feeling increasingly listless, Stevenson tries to find a way to leave Citi while still keeping his deferred stock (banks pay bonuses that vest over time through this mechanism, in order to stop traders walking out the door after their bonus lands).

Stevenson remembers that a boss (who is called “Caleb” in the book) once used a “charity clause” to leave the bank with his deferred stock intact, before returning a few years later. Stevenson goes to him and asks for the same deal: if he leaves Citi to go and work for a charitable organisation, can he keep the £1.5mn to £2mn in deferred compensation he has accrued?

Instead, the banker who previously gained his freedom under the very same clause not only tells Stevenson he can’t leave and keep his stock, but over dinner at a ramen restaurant pointedly tells him the story of a trader at another bank who tried to leave early and ended up mired in legal difficulties.

“Sometimes bad things happen to good people. We can make life very difficult for you,” he finishes the tale, menacingly (this supposedly gangster-like threat is what Stevenson was referring to in the interview we quoted at the start of this piece).

Therein begins an epic battle of wills with Citi’s HR department, in which Stevenson gets signed off from work by a doctor for six months, and on returning is taken off the trading floor and transferred to a meaningless administrative job. After Stevenson endures a year of this drudgery, the bank caves and lets him leave with his deferred stock.

Stevenson casts his bosses as no different to mobsters shaking him down for money that was rightfully his. Yet it is pretty standard for banks to deny traders their deferred stock when they leave. The whole point of these programmes is retention. Sure, banks have clauses that give them wriggle room to let some lucky people leave with their stock, but they are usually written to give them discretion on how they are applied.

Bankers of far grander stature than Gary Stevenson have been denied their deferred compensation over the years. One only has to remember the time UBS unexpectedly refused to pay out the deferred comp of investment bank president Andrea Orcel when he signed on as Santander chief executive, sparking one of the biggest employment disputes in modern banking when the Spanish bank rescinded his offer as a result. 

The people we spoke to said it was very unusual for a trader to leave while keeping their deferred stock. The real-world inspiration for “Caleb” was a rare exception, they said, largely in recognition of his work transforming the STIRT desk from an obscure corner of the trading floor into a moneymaking centre by the time the financial crisis hit.

In contrast, Stevenson explains in The Trading Game that by the time he requested to leave he was regularly taking naps in his chair on the trading floor. His “lack of work ethic was embarrassing for all”, Stevenson confesses.

One of Stevenson’s former colleagues noted that they too had been denied their deferred stock on leaving Citi, even though they had left the bank on very good terms for a job at a client rather than a competitor. They thought it was “unfair”, but they had to suck it up.

The “charity clause” was not some kind of magic bullet, several people explained. We found a 2015-era deferred stock contract in Citigroup’s SEC filings, which includes a subclause specifying that management approval is required:

Voluntary Resignation to Pursue Alternative Career. If Participant has not met the conditions of Section 3(k), and Participant voluntarily resigns from his or her employment with the Company to work in a full-time paid career (i) in government service, (ii) for a bona fide charitable institution, or (iii) as a teacher at a bona fide educational institution, and/or otherwise satisfies the alternative or additional requirements (including written management approvals) that may be imposed by then applicable guidelines adopted for the purposes of administering this provision (an “alternative career”), unvested Awards will continue to vest on schedule subject to all other provisions of this Agreement . . .

It is, of course, always possible that the clause was added after Stevenson’s dispute. Nevertheless, Stevenson recounts how Caleb told him deferred comp would be possible only with the approval of bank management, which would not be given.

Jeff Feig remembers that the “charity clause” came in around the mid-2000s, but that it had always required sign-off from management and that over the years Citi “really tightened it up”. 

“To my memory, by the time Gary wanted to use it, it was essentially gone,” he said, adding that it was also never intended for a trader so early in their career. 

“If you’ve only been there a few years, you shouldn’t be getting your stock.” Feig added. “It’s not yours.”

Stevenson did leave with his millions of dollars’ worth of stock, however. And he’s apparently now making good money as a popular commentator on economic disparity, telling the FT in an interview earlier this year that he is now “one of the best-paid economists in the entire fucking world” (we imagine the likes of Larry Summers, Hal Varian and Andrei Shleifer may want to have a word).

While Bray described the claim that Stevenson became the best trader in the world from betting on a broken economy as “delusional”, he said there was still much for which his former colleague deserved credit.

“What has to be acknowledged here is that a kid from a pretty humble East End upbringing gets into the bank trading game. He does make money, and he does write a good book,” Bray said. “Where I’m a little bit offside is: parts of it are not true.”