How Millionaire Bankers Actually Work | Authorized Account | Insider

Gary Stevenson steps into the world’s tallest casino—one of the biggest banks on earth—where numbers move faster than sleep and status is measured in Profit & Loss. In 2011, he becomes Citibank’s most profitable trader in the world. Then someone sits him down and threatens him—like a gangster. That moment sears one idea into his mind: it’s the same type of people.

This is what he’s authorized to tell about the job, the lifestyle, the power games, and the exit. The world he enters is dizzying—hazing rituals, celebrity parties, bonuses that warp your sense of scale, bosses who throw phones, and brokers who glide through restaurants and VIP rooms with quiet, transactional gravity. He rises fast from poor beginnings to the top of a global bank, betting not on bull markets but on weakness—on the quiet mechanics of inequality and collapse. And when he tries to leave, the subtext is simple: we can make your life very difficult.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the journey—lifestyle, brokers, bosses, the money floor, the job, recruitment, getting out, and the future—told exactly as it happened.
The trading floor feels like the afterlife of ‘90s football locker rooms—loud, laddish, full of hazing rituals and excess. In Gary’s first week, he’s told to buy and carry 100 burgers around the floor. People are whisked off to expensive restaurants, clubs, holidays. Before he even starts full-time, he’s taken to Vegas at 21, goes to a Jay‑Z after-party in LA, then Carmen Electra’s birthday. One night in Vegas runs $20,000–$30,000. It’s all surreal for someone from a very poor background: he’s at a VIP table in LA with mid‑thirties men paying girls—who look like the girls he knew at uni—to hang out.

His specific desk starts making enormous money. He’s super young; some colleagues are wild and quickly “get big for their boots.” One gets a secretary pregnant in a week. As revenue surges, the day rate for just “sitting in the seat” also jumps. If you’re making $100,000 a day simply by being there, you can lose $100,000 on bad bets without officially being “down.”

The stereotype that traders take cocaine hangs over the culture. Gary had been expelled from school at 16 for selling £3 worth of cannabis and swore off drugs forever. He never took cocaine. Meanwhile, he watches colleagues party until 2–3 a.m., then show up at 5 a.m. By his late twenties, some mates do coke—talking quickly, boringly, obliviously—and he realizes that dynamic had been his whole career: were they just on cocaine the whole time? Later, a colleague upset about the book admits he spent £80,000 a year on cocaine. Gary had thought the guy was just an alcoholic.

The maddest episode: Rupert, very rich, who sponsors Gary’s career and is often generous, takes him out with his Clapham crew—Movida, expensive restaurants—and keeps pushing him to stay later so he won’t miss the last train. Gary ends up sleeping at Rupert’s place, wakes up wrecked, goes to the office, vomits, gets sent home. Next day, the boss teases that Rupert did this to him. When Rupert arrives, the boss says Gary said it was him. Gary knows he’ll be furious. Rupert sits two seats left—an empty seat between them—and Gary avoids eye contact. He feels Rupert’s stare burning through his cheek, hears a low growl—“grr”—getting louder. Then a bang: Rupert has kicked the door to the computing stations so hard it smashes into the brackets, keeps kicking, turns in his chair, leans toward Gary, gnashing his teeth like a dog, growling for at least 10 seconds in front of everyone. Gary looks back, the growling tapers off, and Rupert returns to work without ever mentioning it again.
Brokers match traders and help get deals done: you say “I want to buy here,” they find a seller. In reality, they take traders out—restaurants, clubs, holidays, sports events—tailored to each person’s tastes. When Gary gets taken to celeb parties in LA and Vegas, it’s still just work; he’s performing “the Gary” they want. Many traders come from rich families, and this scene is just their normal social life. For Gary, it’s alien and he hates it.

The weird part: they take you to an England game, and the next day ask for a favor on a deal. Hidden quid pro quo. He’s uncomfortable, so he eventually refuses dinners and broker meets. He institutes “Nando’s only”: meet at Nando’s Canary Wharf, he pays for himself, they pay for themselves. As he becomes one of the biggest traders, everyone wants Nando’s; he ends up eating it daily, then cuts it off and becomes antisocial. Brokers—often from poorer backgrounds—quickly see he’s pretending to have fun so others can. They understand, and let him disengage.
Management is mostly those who couldn’t cut it as traders, climbing the greasy pole through internal politics. Gary calls it an absolute cesspool. A friend says of the manager’s manager—“the Slug”—if he were your intern, you wouldn’t hire him.

At 22, Gary becomes the Swiss franc trader—young for that seat. The way it happens is absurd: his boss (the Swiss franc trader) quits. A new boss arrives, nice but dopey. He introduces himself by sitting down, flipping through Sports Illustrated, showing pictures—“Do you like that?”—without saying hi or his name. Then stands and asks, “What’s your job on the desk then?” Gary, the desk junior, thinks surely he should know. In the awkward pause, Gary says he’s the Swiss franc trader—his old boss’s job. The new boss shrugs: “All right, OK. All right, fine.”

Gary loves his second boss—totally insane. Once the boss apologizes: “We can’t give you a salary increase.” Gary hadn’t asked. The previous year he was paid £400,000, and the boss seems genuinely worried if he can survive on it. Gary says, “Yeah, it’s really tough.” What else can you say?

Another time, a colleague throws a phone at his screens—LCDs don’t smash—so he picks up the phone, smashes it on the desk, and tries trading through the same broken phone, shouting quotes that don’t work. The boss asks what’s wrong; Gary says JB’s phone is broken. The boss picks up a phone and lobs it onto JB’s head. It calms him down instantly.

Almost nothing goes to HR. One case does: a trader steals money from another trader. Desk consensus is it shouldn’t have gone to HR; they should’ve handled it internally. The vibe is “pirate ship”: masculine, we sort it out ourselves, no HR. Management doesn’t ask how you make money—if you’re profitable, they prefer not to know. Lose money, and stress rains down. Worst is being banned from trading. That happens to Gary once. In 2010, age 23, he places a big bet with risk to Swiss interest rates. The Swiss central bank suddenly cuts rates to negative 4.5% using the very product he’s trading. He loses $8 million in a week. He believes it was the right bet; if allowed to keep the position, he would’ve recovered. He isn’t allowed; ends up $4 million in the red and has to fight his way back.
He starts on a $36K salary—good at the time, not bad even now. P&L is everything: daily, weekly, monthly, yearly—everyone’s P&L is calculated and circulated on a spreadsheet. Everyone sees the best and the worst, and that clarity shapes interactions, status, and identity. In a strange way, it feels beautifully fair—like a football pitch—where a kid from nowhere competes with multimillionaires and is “the guy” at 24.

Traders in his department get paid about 7% of their P&L, though he doesn’t know at first. Bonuses are mysterious—you can’t ask. After his first bonus in early 2010, he’s paid nearly £400,000 (about $700,000 then)—far more than expected. It breaks him open: so much money to be made; all we do now is trade. Then the $8 million weekly loss hits the next year. That hammers him into being better, more serious, harder working. He becomes a machine.

Most traders, in his view, make most money from customers, not speculative risk, though they pretend it’s from bets for glamour. In 2011, he starts placing big bets. During the Japanese nuclear disaster, he makes a ton of money—not because he predicted a nuclear crisis, but because he was betting on economic weakness. The unexpected event drives the weak economy trade, and he wins. Others lose. People tell him it’s terrible to profit from disasters. He says: he made money from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami where 20,000 died; he didn’t cause it. Traders’ job is to bet on what happens and be right, and they’re heavily incentivized.

Payment is weird: big bonuses but deferred over four years. After he leaves, the EU caps bonuses as multiples of salary, so banks massively raise salaries and reduce bonuses—decreasing risk incentive and encouraging people to sit and collect pay.
Gary wins his job in a card game—The Trading Game. He’s a strong student in math and economics, with good grades. At LSE, you need a second‑year internship; people send dozens of CVs. Rich kids are prepped: they’ve founded clubs, play concert piano; Gary worked in a sofa shop and tried becoming a grime rapper. Another math student tells him Citibank is recruiting via a card game—enter it and you’ll win. He goes for it.

The game is a special deck—low and high cards—five players. Each gets a card and bets on the total of all cards. Low card means bet low; effectively you sell. Bid/offer structure mimics markets. Gary’s edge: he learned the rules beforehand. Others didn’t. Math/econ instinct is to compute expected totals and anchor around your card—if you have low, quote around 50; if high, around 70. That’s stupid: you reveal your card, and you let an arbitrageur buy at 50, sell at 70, and lock in 20 instantly. Gary does exactly that—bam, bam—wins round one easily.

In the national finals, he develops a new strategy: bully/manipulate the price. It works well. Then the final five—the big one. He draws a very low card; strategy is to bully the price up and sell high. He pushes it up and spends the whole game selling high. Mathematically, it’s nearly impossible to lose—high price vs. low card—until the reveal: the other cards are the seven highest possible. The chance by accident is something like one in 15 million. The game was rigged against him. The announcer declares him the winner anyway—his prior scores were so good they wanted to test whether he’d back himself when everything was against him, and he did. He wins even though the final score was negative. It tells you something about the people in this world. Those who came in via the card game tended to be very good traders. Meanwhile, CV cover letters pulse with classism—everyone has top grades but is judged by extracurricular polish, which excludes kids like Gary. Ironically, those kids might make the best traders.

He trades professionally at Citibank from 2008 to 2014, after LSE. Before 2008, everyone wants credit—the field that blows up the global economy but pays enormous money before it implodes. Gary goes into an unfashionable area because they let him start trading immediately—rare. Trading changes in the 2000–2010 decade: more mathematical; culture shifts from ex‑rugby lads to LSE/Harvard/physics grads. He thinks American Psycho is a good portrayal: the banker is a murderer and a clear jerk, yet LSE students memorize his lines—they love him because he’s handsome, rich, fit, with a beautiful girlfriend and expensive flat. No matter how much you say he’s awful, put that in front of 18–19‑year‑old boys and it will warp many.
Wake at 5:30, mandatory in by 7:30. Check emails on BlackBerry, dig through prices, breakfast, shower, cycle through East London, arrive around 7. The trading floor—massive—sits on the second floor of a Canary Wharf skyscraper. The money floors are low; they make the most money. Long rows of men behind walls of nine or twelve monitors in rectangular arrays, sitting back to back. Foreign exchange department is loud and laddish. Gary’s first day in a suit? “No suits, no ties.” (European banks like Credit Suisse/Deutsche prefer suits.)

Morning rush from 8 to 10:30 or 11—customer flows—mad. By then he’s exhausted, grabs massive Nando’s, devours it. Afternoons chill: Citi offers 24‑hour pricing; handover to New York means London relaxes—reading papers, chatting. Evenings are quieter—check you’re making money; he often is—celebrate. Finish around 5. Early in his career he’s dragged to drinks and restaurants; he hates it. By age ~24, he cycles home, gym, cook dinner with his flatmate, watch football. He wakes at 5:30—nightlife doesn’t fit. Others somehow do both; he understands more later. Truthfully, there are three or four hours of hard work—he’s the Euro trader, the busiest seat. The real role: risk holder—make decisions, take risk, eat the hit if wrong.
He’s an interest rates trader: borrowing and lending money. The idea is simple—borrow at low rates, lend at high rates. On the STIRT (short‑term interest rates) desk, many loans are one‑day. Corporations, pension funds, hedge funds ask for loans starting in six months, and you price that. Broadly, central banks raise rates when economies are hot (or inflation overheats) and cut when weak. You judge strength of economies; inflation matters, but strength drives the core call.

Ten traders on his desk, each covers a different currency—split between rich world (Europe, Japan, North America, Australia, New Zealand) and emerging markets. He starts as desk junior (getting coffees), then New Zealand dollar trader, Swiss franc trader, euro trader, then yen trader. As a rates trader, you borrow and lend; some use dodgy methods. Gary tries to do it by predicting economic strength.

By 2011, as his profits soar, Citi has a big push to become the largest bank by traded volume. One‑day loans create massive volumes: borrowers must roll daily. Senior management asks him to maximize trades—he’s borrowing and lending across currencies, near a trillion dollars a day in total notional. Ridiculous, but that’s the ask.
At the end of his career, Gary tries to get fired. He was very successful for a short time and quits around 27. He’s dehumanized—he did it to himself—struggling to balance being “the best” with being a human and bearing some responsibility in a collapsing society. Traders don’t see it as their job to fix anything; politicians chase elections; academics write papers; media chases clicks; nobody is trying to fix the underlying problems.

His big success in 2011 comes from a grim realization: the economy won’t recover; inequality will deepen; the rich get richer; ordinary people get poorer; living standards will collapse; things will fall apart. He bets on that and becomes Citi’s most profitable trader. Everyone sees what he did; nobody asks, “Should we do something?” There’s no bell to ring. He notes: the best‑paid 10,000 economists in the world are traders.

When he tells his boss he wants to leave, the boss takes him to dinner and tells a story: a young Deutsche Bank trader wants to leave; the bank reviews trades and emails—finds just enough to take him to court—he rolls through court for years, gets bankrupted. The boss says, “I like you, you’re a good person, but sometimes bad things happen to good people. We can make life very difficult for you. You’re going to find out about that.” It’s gangster talk. He’s convinced: the same personality type does banking or drug dealing depending on the street they grew up on. If Rupert’s type grew up where Gary did, they’d be dealers. If the kids selling drugs in Ilford had Rupert’s schooling and LSE, they’d be traders.

He comes from a very poor background; the people hurt by the economy are exactly like his family and friends. It takes a long time before he considers doing anything about it. By then, he’s been kicked to Tokyo; his junior is a very posh, very rich, very smart Australian. Gary asks, “Should we do something?” The junior says, “About what?” Gary: “About a collapsing global economy.” Junior: “Yeah, we put that trade on. We bought the green eurodollars.” Gary: “Yes, but should we do something?” Junior: “I don’t understand.” Traders don’t enter to save the world; they assume others do—politicians, university economists, central bank economists, the media. Increasingly clear: it’s not traders’ job, but those whose job it is—won’t fix it.

Gary says he wants to leave and work for charity. Senior management strongly implies they’ll sue him. They have no reason; they’ll just find a way. That’s how high-level banking—and likely many industries—works: the law is an arm of power. If you anger them, they’ll find grounds. He suspects many people sued by banks aren’t the worst actors—they’ve just annoyed the wrong people.

He spends 18 months wandering Tokyo, studying Japanese, learning to draw—made to sit in the corner of the office, drawing Beatles, reflecting. It’s oddly nice—time to think. He plays the final internal game well despite being in terrible mental health; puts the bank in a position where they likely thought a rough kid making lots of money must have something dodgy. In reality, he was simply betting on global collapse every year. Eventually two things happen: he starts sending daily “mad emails” to the CEO and global head of HR; one guy gets fired; then Gary is let out. He never knows whether his emails caused enough trouble or the firing changed the calculus—but he’s free, not trapped in a skyscraper.

It’s all a big power game. You can get away with anything so long as it’s not in the bank’s interest to go after you. If you’re very rich and powerful, you can get away with a lot.
He doesn’t hate rich people—he is rich. He doesn’t blame them—he’s an economist who made millions predicting the future with a strong track record. The rich will get richer and eat the middle class alive—not because they’re evil, but because of compound interest. If you’re worth $100 million, you earn $5 million passive per year, and you use it to buy the assets ordinary families need. That’s the direction of travel. The middle class will be lost.

He recalls The Big Short: traders dance after profiting from collapse; Brad Pitt’s character says stop—your win means people lose homes, commit suicide, families break down. Gary feels that deeply—he made money on similar dynamics.

His free‑market rate is $2 million a year. For three years, he works in media and on YouTube for free, telling people exactly what will happen during COVID. His early 2020 videos and articles turn out exactly right. Nobody listens. It’s hard—he’s used to trading nearly a trillion dollars a day, waking with energy to smash through money flows. After quitting, income goes to zero; he feels unproductive, wasting time. He sees NHS psychiatry; the therapist has him fill a timetable and says he’s extremely busy. But he’s used to the hothouse where 120% is baseline; anything less feels like nothing.

At the beginning of COVID, he picks up trading again—there’s money on the table. He still does a bit; it sits in investments. His current work is educational—explaining the importance of inequality. Often unpaid; it funds his life. He hopes one day it will provide enough financial security to start a family.

Guardian economics articles reach rich readers. He wants to reach new people. So he moves to YouTube, makes videos; nobody watches. Despite degrees from LSE and Oxford, and being a multimillionaire ex‑trader, people say he’s not an economist. Someone calls after reading an article: “Have you thought about writing a book?” He hadn’t. Then he realizes: it’s a great story—expelled from school, wins job in a card game, becomes the world’s top trader by betting on societal collapse, bank tries to stop him leaving. If he tells it well, maybe people will believe his confidence that things are going down the toilet—and if enough people know, maybe it can be stopped.

He’s not allowed to answer whether he signed an NDA—legal reasons. He can’t discuss whether he signed one or not. He’s a producer on Authorized Account.

End Credits: If you enjoyed this, please subscribe and comment with more topics to cover.
– Outsider to insider: Poor kid vaulted into VIP rooms, learning that excess is currency and hospitality is leverage.
– Fairness vs. brutality: P&L spreadsheets feel meritocratic; the threat of legal power reveals the darker architecture.
– Winning by weakness: His biggest profits come from betting on economic fragility and inequality—not heroics.
– Compounding reality: Wealth compounding becomes the central force hollowing the middle class.
– Exit under pressure: Leaving requires surviving the bank’s implicit willingness to weaponize law and process.
– Mission afterward: He trades less, teaches more, fights to make inequality legible—even when ignored.

– The culture blends laddish excess, quiet quid pro quo, and a pirate‑ship disdain for HR—as long as profits flow.
– Success at the highest levels often means betting on weakness—on the mechanisms that make ordinary lives harder.
– Law can be an arm of power; exiting isn’t just resignation paperwork, it’s a negotiation with risk.
– Compound interest, not morality, drives the world’s trajectory—pushing wealth upward and squeezing the middle.
– Telling the story matters: when enough people understand the mechanics, there’s a chance to change the direction.