How I Made Millions As The World’s Best Trader | Minutes With

on the first day this guy sent me to buy a lunch and I came back and i' bought lunch for like four people and I give him their lunch and then I give the guy back his change and I'd recorded exactly how much his change was going to be so his change is something like I don't know £12.74 and I put it on the desk it's 12274 he looks at it he's like what's that and I said it's a change he didn't say anything so just wait I was like it's £12 74 and he doesn't

say anything he just slides the money along his desk into the drawer and then he looks at me it looked to me like he was going to kill me and he said on this desk we keep the [Music] change well I gr is a very poor area Central ilford um I lived on a little Terrace Street called Frances Avenue uh yeah Street for the small terrorist houses uh the trains out from Essex went right through the back Garden Canary wolf skyscrapers I think the first one probably went up when I was something like seven or

eight something like that and then the latter ones went up maybe when I was getting into sort 10 or 11 and um we could see him go up on the horizon and um you know you forget it now obviously because London's F of skyscrapers but at the time those were the tallest buildings in the country and like as kids we were like we thought they were enormous and you could get the um the DLR dockin like Railways this for those who don't know not everyone's from London it's this set of like kind of toy trains

with no driver and you can sit at the front and it went through Canary wolf and I remember as a kid you take the train through like look sit at the front pretending to be the driver and I look up at all these skyscrapers which at the time they just seemed enormous they seemed enormous to us and as kids you see those skyscrapers gr up on the horizon it is a big thing you you kind of aspire to I was good at English at school and I remember my English teacher would say you have a

very mathematical style of writing when I was a kid I was obsessed with like rules my parents would know like if you want to get Gary to do something give him a Ru they would be they said to me you can have one chocolate bar a week and I would be like I would be like collecting six chocolate bars under my bed until my mom would steal him one day like I would just be I was that kind of kid in in some sense I was a natural Economist like I wanted to optimize the rules

that I was given it's it's weird it's weird in a way but I had I had to have a system and a set of rules for everything and when you were like growing up what was your like understanding or relationship with with money and the economy at that point I mean I knew knew that my parents were hard up and I think I like really internalized from a young age that I didn't want to take any money from my parents I wanted to make my own money so as soon as I turned 12 or 13

or whatever like the legal ages that's when I started my first payer round as soon as I turned 16 I tried to get Sunday job once we we I got to 15 you know people started taking drugs and there was a little bit of involvement in that and I ended up getting expelled from school when I just turned 16 at the beginning of year 11 I got expelled go from school for drugs I was a good student so everybody kind of thought and I went to this fancy grammar school that fancy grammar school is called

Ila County high school you go to the in the hall they having on the wall the names of the kids that went to Oxford and Cambridge and you just kind of assume I'm going to be on that wall and then suddenly you're expelled from school and everybody thinks you're going to go to prison basically and um it was tough I was young you know I just turned 16 you separated from all your friends I remember I woke up the next day and my parents were both at work my older brother was at work my younger

sister was at school and um you're just like what am I going to do like you know you don't have nowhere to go for the first time in your life you know you don't have anywhere to go and I went and I took a shower and in in my parents old house used to sort of you get this rubber hose and stick it on the Taps and sit in the bar I remember sitting in the bath like holding this little rubber hose and watching the water go down the drain and thinking that's your life if

you don't do nothing it was really hard to get into a SI form obviously because I had all these great grades but like I've been expelled from school and um I couldn't get into any local schools I remember I walked into there was a school in me called Valentine's which is where a lot of my friends from primary school ended up going to the local comp their teacher was a famous economics like teacher and he'd written my economics textbook and I walked in randomly in the summer and I was like into the office I was

like can I come me for six form he was like what are your grades and I was A8 Stars 3 a he said did you take economics and I said yeah I took economics he goes what did you get I said I got AAR he said what textbook did you did study and then I clocked he must be this guy and I said oh you're textbook sir and that was it he accepted me into the school I got four A's and I got into LSC which is for those who don't know London School of Economics

it's a super fancy prestigious economics University in central London where a lot of international like Millionaires and billionaires send the kids to study and I started there when I was 18 doing maths and economics southerly LC everybody knew who I was and I didn't know it was cuz of my grades cuz my grades weren't like the best basically they were good but they weren't the best and I said to my mate Sagal he's a lovely guy and I said to him why does everybody know who I am and he was like well it's CU of

your grades and this guy Sagal was number one in the Mass Department in first year so I was like well your grade is better than mine and he said well yeah of course but nobody expected it from you suddenly Elis you realize these these Posh boys think we're dumb they actually think that we're stupid and then I think that sort of that sort of little a little bit of a fire which made me sort of think well you know let's let's show them that we're not stupid yeah I think that motivated me as well it's

a threeyear course and first year was quite easy you get to second year and everyone suddenly had gone mental basically and like people had become obsessed with Investment Banking internships right they they started wearing suits people would com to University in suits like for no reason and they would they started they were applying for like 35 internships at a time and they started to speak using all they would use they they would use these acronyms you've never heard of cdss and cdos and nbs's and NBA and IBD and you'd be like what are you got

and you'd ask them what is acronym and they' be like I don't know but this is just like everyone would just start and you you just be like what is go going on basically and so you speak to your matate like why is everybody G mental because you're thinking well I'm going to get the best grades I'm going to get get the best job and then my mate was like well this is internship here you're okay what's internship here and the way you get a job is you get an internship now you can't get a

job unless you get internship now and this is a problem right because I don't have my grades yet you know and I'm hoping I'm going to compete on the back of my grades but you don't have your grades yet so you're like okay well how do we get an internship and what what it is is you got to send CB and cover letter you got to send 35 CBS and 35 cover letters right and you know my grades are undergrad were good but everyone at ls's undergrad grade like a levels are good everyone at Oxford

Cambridge all their a levels are good right so how do you stand out at that level it's basically extracurriculars on your CV so everyone all of these guys from Rich families their families knew this and they'd been making sure they had this extracurricular stuff so like this guy would have been head of the junior United Nations or this guy would have like founded a charity that like drives dirt bikes through the Sahara Desert for some reason or this guy would have like played the OB the Royal Albert Hall you know so basically you realize you

come in here and you're like 19 years old and you realize all right I see these jobs are going to be distributed based on how good we are at clarinet you realize like there's no way I'm going to get this joed and then you you can't I would like to say that I realized then that the world was unfair blah but the truth is as 19 I was just like all right what's the next plan because I think you you're a kid in London coming from a poor background you just kind of expect these doors

to be slammed in your face so I was just like all right fine I'm not going to get an internship so what are we going to do next and what did you do next what was your plan I was in the library one day and uh this lanky Northern guy with kind of like Beatles haircut he wanded up to me i' never met him before and he said um are you Gary Stevenson and I was like yeah and he I never met this guy in my life he said to me City Bank car has one

Trader a year through a card game it's called the trading game and if you win it you can get an internship and I was like well that's good because I'm terrible at clarinet so this is probably something that we can we can use why do they do that to be honest I I think it's partially just because it gives them a little bit of a rep on campus like oh aren't City cool and different they're like hiring somebody through a trading game but then if you actually go back and look at the traders that City

hired through the trading game a a lot of them went on to become extremely successful Traders at City Bank and I think actually if you're hiring 30 Traders based on how good they are at clarinet it kind of makes sense to hire one guy because he's good at a mats game you know trading is not a mats game but it is a game and if you if you're able to come into this game and win it it probably is a sign that you might be a good Trader you know what is the trading game it's

a betting game basically it's kind of a poer Style game basically they had their own special made dec of cards so there's some low cards and some high cards we hand all the cards out it says five of us are playing we all get a card and there's three cards on the middle which get turned over as we play the game and basically we bet with one another what the total of the cards are going to be I knew straight away what the LSC students would do so if you've studied maths or economics or statistics

or something like this straight away you're going to do this like mathematical calculation in your head which is to calculate the expected value of the total cards given the card that you have in your hand this it's not licated math anyone who studied math will be able to do this they'll instinctively do that and then they'll start betting around what they think the total is going to be which is a very stupid way to play the game although it's obvious because if you know you've got a high card and this guy over here has a

low card and you both start quoting based on what your card is you'll be betting it's going to be the total is going to be say 70 he'll be betting the total is going to be like 50 and I can just buy it 50 sell it 70 buy at 50 sell at 70 again and again and again and again and again so there were two rounds basically there was a lsse round which I won very easily and then there was a final where they had students from like Elite universities across the country City Banks Target

universities whatever Oxford and Cambridge and this kind of thing and at that at the final everyone had already played the game they kind of knew the strategy and them between the first round and the final I just didn't go to class I spent three weeks like obsessively memorizing this game so by the time I got to the final I was like probably the world's like preeminent expert on this game I had another strategy which again perhaps typically of myself was to be very loud and a bit obnoxious in the game and try and like Bully

the market basically bully the price score I wanted it to be and I had an extremely low card in the final and my plan was to like Bully the price up really high and start selling at this high price because it I know it can't be that high CU I've got this low card and um the cards in the middle turn over and they were quite high so I just pushed the price up and I was just trading really really aggressively the game finishes and everybody turn their cards over there's eight cards in the game

right five players three in the middle I had the lowest card possible the other seven cards were the seven highest possible cards which is basically statistically impossible it's like it's like one in like 10 million chance or something like this like it's impossible happening and you realize straight away the game's been rigged against me and of course I lost enormously because this thing that happened is basically statistically impossible and um I was sort of sitting there in this like it was on the in this like high floor in this city Bank skyscraper I just asking

myself like why have they rigged the game against me and then the guy who run the games comes the front and he says the winner of the game was Gary Stevenson and he said we wanted to see what he would do if everything turned out against him we wanted to see someone who would back himself and he did so uh Gary's a winner so yeah they they they rigged the game against me which I think is a a little bit of a metaphor for the world that we live in I think and then you get

onto the trading floor yeah can you talk me through like that first moment that first day so it's it's Canary wolf City Bank the trading floor is only on the second floor it's not on the top floor go in I was wearing I remember I was wearing a blue shirt and a yellow tip fat yellow TI which is and a like a terrible fitting suit jacket from next um which is the stuff I used to wear to like go work at DFS the sofa store us used to work you get taken up these escalators in

this massive massive room trading floor is so vast enormous room like you walk in and it seems to like endless like right left forwards and it's everyone has these massive walls of screens nine screens 12 screens that kind of go up around them like this on the first day this guy sent me to buy a lunch and I came back and i' bought lunch for like four people and I give them their lunch and then I give the guy back his change and I recorded exactly how much his change was going to be so his

change is something like I don't know 12274 and I put it on the desk his1 74 he looks at it he's like what's that and I said it's a change he didn't say anything so just wait I was like it's £274 and he doesn't say anything he just slides the money along his desk into the drawer and then he looks at me he looked to me like he was going to kill me and he said on this desk we keep the change just like that and I was like these guys are mental basically but then

I was like fine all right and then I started buying everyone lunch cuz I was keeping the change just making loads of money and then they started kind of like testing me by like oh go buy lunch for this guy go buy lunch for that guy did all the like really complicated orders from like different things to see if I could like kind of testing me like as if I'm going to fail to get lch correctly right part of me didn't like to be treated like that a little bit but I think I was I

was willing to take whatever I had to take to get what I needed to get basically you know I I grew up in a very poor background that job was going to make me a millionaire what is weird is you might think coming from a poor background I would experience like class Prejudice but the trading FL of all the places I've ever been these guys loved me from the start and I think it's cuz they have this idea of this the cotne wide boy Trader and also they have this idea the trading flow is like

a super meritocratic place so when a kid actually turns up from the local area it makes them feel like yeah we are meritocratic and I think also like of all the places that I've been in this was the only space where rather than being like poor kids are dumb they were smart enough to realize if this guy's managed to get this far looking like that and speaking like that he's probably got something about him basically what were the people that you met on the trading FL like I met this guy he was a very wealthy

guy he went on to become an amazingly profitable Trader and um he had his own designated taxi driver he would drive him home every time he um got too drunk and his Taxi Driver told me one time that every time he gets too drunk he insists that on the way home I drop him outside the bank of England so he can go around the back of the bank of England and take a piss on the bank of England on the way home and um I thought he was hero I worked with some Maniacs there's another

guy he's called rer who I think I describe as um looking like he was unexpectedly dropped off at boarding school 8 years old and not picked up till he was 21 which I later found out to be not far from the truth this guy was just very I think his dad was in the Army absolute like British Blue Blood like everything has to be straight everything has to be completely narrow nobody can cross the line very like rigid angry he he told me once he said to me I've got a problem which is every time

I meet someone I need to know straight away whether they're better than me or whether they're worse than me and if they're better than me I hate them I hate them because they're better than me but if they're worse than me I despise them I think that's why he likes hanging out with me because we were from such radically different class backgrounds I think he felt that he didn't have to compare himself to me because people like me just don't register just don't register on on the scale basically and he would take me out like

his little Cockney sidekick uh in Clapper got me really drunk one time and uh I got in trouble cuz I I come in the next day I threw up I had to go to the bath and threw up got sent home and the next day I come in really early and the boss Caleb said to this guy R but Gary said it was your fault you got drunken there was an empty seat next to me and he was one seat there and I just thought don't look at him because he'll be going mental just gently

at first I heard him like like like growling slightly growling [Applause] like like listen I just don't just don't look at him he starts growling like louder and louder and louder and I was just really trying not to look him until he was was growling like so loudly I thought like I better look at him I heard this bang and he kicked the we had these doors the like the computer like Towers behind the doors he kicked the doors and they bang against the brackets and I looked around at him he was turned around to

me and he was nashing his teeth like like that like a like a like a dog or like a wolf at me like like growling and like barking at me on the TR in front of everyone for like 20 seconds oh this is the room full of millionaires right like people get paid million pound a year to do this I don't want to point fingers too much at these guys as individuals because they're not all bad guys they're real people at the end of the day I think for me it's it's a crazy space and

I think it's the space that makes the people go crazy in my mind you land a full-time job with City Bank what are you earning in the first few years of your career my first big bonus was when I was was in the beginning of 2010 when I just turned 23 and that was just under £400,000 and that was so much more than I had been expecting thing I I knew traders made a lot of money but I think people from my background when they think of a lot of money they think of like 100

Grand they think oh my God 100 Grand 100 Grand is a lot of money and that's what I thought these guys were making and in fact that had been my aim to make 100 Grand and I'd ask my boss what do I need to do to make 100 Grand and he told me make $10 million for City bank so I made $12 million and I got paid this 400 Grand and I think it was that bonus when I was 23 that kind of blew my mind and what was the most amount of money that you

lost well I lost $8 million in the week when it when I was in 2010 when I was still 23 I lost $8 million in the week and that was mad cuz I graduated in 2008 so a lot of my mates couldn't get jobs obviously that was the financial crisis right and I was like halfway through this week by that point and I'd already lost like 5 million in 3 days and all my mates around just like playing Pro Evolution and you're just thinking like I've lost $5 million like how much more can I lose

probi get lose my job um it really dehumanizes you it's the stress and the pressure of it and it really for me it really separated me from my for my friends and my family you can't turn around and tell them I lost $5 million this week you know they're not going to understand and and also like you don't want to bid you know what I mean but at the same time you can't think about nothing else you can't think about nothing else and then I got called into a meeting early 2011 with one of the

City Bank soop economists and he went through the financial situation of a lot of the world's governments so I don't know if you remember in 2011 there was this big crisis with the governments of Italy Spain Portugal Greece Ireland this is before that kicked off and it was like all of these governments going massively into debt every year they're spending more than they can make they're having sell off their assets their debts are exploding including the governments of the UK US Japan these the biggest governments in the world you know and I come out of

that meeting I was like how can it be my friends are losing their houses and going into debt their families are doing that the world's governments are losing their assets and going into debt like where are the assets going who is the debt to like it's not possible we can't all go into debt somebody has to be on the other side of that we can't all lose our assets somebody has to be getting the assets and I was sitting there I used to have to take the sandwiches to that meeting so I had all these

sandwiches around me sitting on the desk com at this meeting where you realize like all of the governments in the world are totally basically and you look around and surrounded by these like fat millionaires in pink shirts and you realize like it's us isn't it we we are we are the guys who are accumulating like you know I myself was on the verge of becoming a millionaire at that point you know what I mean you realize this is it like we are accumulating the assets from the middle class from the government and and then you

realize it's not going to get better because if the middle class families can't afford to pay the bills when they own their own house well their kids definitely won't when they don't own their own houses if governments can't run a balance budget when they're not massively in debt well they definitely can't when they are massively in debt and you what you what I saw in that moment was it's going to spire it's going to get worse and worse and worse that wealth would continue to be sucked out of the middle class and towards the rich

and I realized straight away that there would never be an economic recovery and I put this massive bet on I was an interest rates Trader so my specific bet was the interest rates would stay zero for like three years everybody thought interest is going to come up really quickly and that bet was super successful basically and and I I made $35 million for the bank and I I got paid millions of dollars myself um basically on the back of this bet that that the Glo glal economy would collapse and the society would collapse suddenly I

was a multi-millionaire surrounded by multi-millionaires betting the economy was going to collapse and I just thought what the am I doing here why am I here I don't need any more money but at the same time I'd worked so hard to get to that space you know what I mean and I was the best Trader in the world at that point and you you you're getting paid millions of dollars a year you don't want to walk away from it but I think this is the that is the point of my career in my life where

this voice starts to come in that says is it right to be doing this I don't think it's wrong for for poor people to to do what what they have to do to make money as long as you're not directly hurting no one I think rich people should be giving more I think rich people should be doing more and at that stage of my life I wasn't a poor person anymore I was a rich person and I think I knew in my heart I had to be doing more as well and how did you get

out of the trading game the trading world I got called into a meeting with my boss I start the thing is this I hated that boss I really hated him but I had to laugh at his jokes for 6 months and then suddenly I get this bonus I don't have to laugh at the guy's jokes no more and I was just like ripping the piss out of this guy every day and we start to like argue a lot and he called me into his office and he was shouting at me screaming at me and then

I just thought what the am I doing what am I doing and I just looked up to my boss said I need to quit and my boss was like because at that time I was City bank's top Trader in the world right and then Senior Management went mental and eventually they decided okay don't quit we're going to move it to Tokyo and I thought at the time that was a bad idea but I thought I said to him I don't think that's a good idea and he said to me you don't understand you have to

go and I was like well if you're going to be about it then I'll go and take another bonus thing which I did and I move to Tokyo and uh that begins the the final fight you could say between me and City Bank me leaving the bank what was life like after you left I went through a difficult couple of years leaving it wasn't easy to leave but um it was nice that that happen in Tokyo I basically had two years of like cycling around Tokyo eating Ramen in little like Corner Ramen bars thinking about

what it means to be walking away from a $2 million year job um it was weird you know but I I decided like I wanted to do something about Society collapsing maybe I'm aing idiot but that's what I decided to do and that's what I've been doing ever since what's your motivation for the work you do now I mean is it money are you I don't want Society to it's funny people ask me this you know I I made millions of pounds betting that the average British family will collapse into poverty desperate poverty I'm talking

about Charles Dickens Oliver Twist that is the future of this country if we don't deal with growing inequality that is what I see what are the biggest problems that we face in this country it's well I mean it's wealth inequality it's wealth inequality listen if you allow wealth to flow at an unbelievably rapid rate out of your middle class away from ordinary Working Families away from the government towards the super rich then living standards will collapse housing will become unaffordable this should be matters if we're playing chess and you take all of my pieces one

at a time I'm going to lose that chess game that is what I see when I see the economy we've seen government debt explode we've seen living standards collapse for all no working people at the same time the biggest and fastest ever increase in the wealth of millionaires and billionaires and nobody's connecting these two things the reality is we've created a world which tells you you need to be rich to be happy happy you need to be rich to be of value and yet which simultaneously makes it almost impossible for them to get rich listen

don't buy don't buy the hype on it you know yeah work hard to take care of your family and be proud of yourself be proud of the things that you achieve because they're selling you a dream that they never gave you a chance to getting and and if you buy that dream you're going to be unhappy and I've Got Friends that work really really hard and struggle to pay the bills and I want I want those people to be proud cuz that was my dad and my mom yeah people to be proud of the work

that they do and realize that that this these Stars they're putting in your eyes are for them and not you we got offices in Hong Kong in maias in Denver Colorado um this calendar year will have um sold over half a billion dollars worth of product which is again crazy