I listened to this audio book after watching a few of Gary’s videos on YouTube.
It’s an autobiographical book with amazing insights into the world of high stakes trading for mega rich banks. Gary became the youngest ever trader at Citibank where he managed to get a job by winning a game and this is his story.
As someone who grew up in relative poverty his rise into the world of corporations and people all trying to make as much money as possible it is certainly entertaining. But as you can imagine when suddenly being exposed to such eye watering amounts of money it changes how he thinks about the world and his place in it.
He shares how he is treated by brokers and other traders and gives you insight into the life and minds of some of the best traders in the world. A lot of them are unhinged! But ultimately when life in that world all gets too much for him he wants out. The allure of making millions isn’t enough to change his mind. But his bosses will do anything to try to get him to stay.
Sometimes it’s laugh out loud funny and other times you genuinely fear for his well being. An entertaining read well worth it. The fact it’s a true story only adds to the value.
Favourite quotes from the book:
Whatever the fuck you do, you remember these three letters. C, Y, A…. Cover Your Ass…. You do not leave a trace of you on it. Not even the tiniest hint of your smell. – 8:00, Chapter 2.5
There’s no such thing as a trade which makes you a lot of money without you taking a significant amount of risk. That’s another good rule for life. – 10:15, Chapter 3.2
Lending money is betting that rates will stay low… they cut rates to try and get you to spend money and they raise rates to try and get you to stop. – 18:36, Chapter 3.2
What real world situation is a risk to my bundle of trades? What good trades are there that would do really well in that scenario? – 20:50 Chapter 3.2
The price now and the price at the end are not the only thing that matters. You must also be there at the end. – 31:57 Chapter 3.3
Having the right trade is not all that matters. It’s also important that you survive. Every trader has a pain threshold. Every trader has an amount they can lose. You could have the best trade in the world but if you hit your pain threshold it doesn’t matter. You’ll lose all your cash. The lesson then is never hit your pain threshold. – 32:24 Chapter 3.3
Two rules for life. 1 Be right at the end. 2. Be alive at the end…. When Billy said you don’t fuck with a trade without knowing the risks I should have listened to him but I didn’t. That’s ok. We all make mistakes, just don’t make them twice. – 32:24 Chapter 3.4
Look at the world with your fucking eyes. – 07:00 Chapter 3.4
You don’t become the best at anything by copying people… seconds hand tactics, second hand skills, it’s not good enough. – 8:17 Chapter 4.1
If you want to understand the real world, the time comes when you have to go out and look at it. – 9:00 Chapter 4.1
Making Money trading is not about being right. Its about being right when everyone’s wrong… he made his money when something happened that no one had forseen… When people are wrong their predictions are wrong, when peoples predictions are wrong their prices are wrong and when prices are wrong we make millions… the economy was a real thing. The economy is people, houses, businesses, loans. We had all been trained to see it as numbers. – 10:19 Chapter 4.1
The best trading you do it with your nose. It smells like stupidity. – 11:55 Chapter 4.1
Opinions are like assholes. Everyone’s got one. – 1:28 Chapter 4.2
We thought the banking system was broken but fixable. We thought confidence had collapsed but would recover. What was really happening was that the wealth of the middle class, of ordinary hard working families… and also of almost all the World’s largest governments was being sucked away from them and into the hands of the rich. Ordinary families were losing their assets and going into debt. So were governments… the problem would not solve itself. In fact it would accelerate. It would get worse. The reasons economists didn’t realise this is because almost no economists looked in their models how wealth is distributed. – 12:03 Chapter 4.2
How do we ever know which of our wins and which of our losses were from luck and which ones were from skill? – 3:53 Chapter 5.18
We can do something. You can do it to. We can bet on it. We can be on the end of the world. We can bet that interest rates will always be less than inflation, that the economy will always collapse, that house prices and stock prices and gold prices will go up. Making the rich richer while wages stagnate and in real terms collapse. We can do that, right? We can all do that and if we do that, then we can all get rich from it can’t we? As long as we’re lucky enough. We can all of us get rich from the end of the world. But not stop it. Just watch it collapse. – 6:24 Chapter 5.18
Overall: 89%