I was led away from my PhD in theology and into working in the financial markets by a love of poker. Trading, it seemed to me, might be something like playing poker all day, for vast sums of money, without any risk of bankrupting myself. After a few years it turns out that I was more or less right, although I had underestimated the psychic cost of the intensity and repetitiveness of the work. This isn't to say that traders are reckless gamblers. Yet trading is more like an intricate game than anything else. Traders don't make anything or develop projects, they win or lose, day by day, minute by minute. Above all, what makes the analogy with gaming unavoidable is the element of personal competition at the heart of the job. For all the financial importance of their decisions and the implications for real economies and real lives, traders remain a group of individuals devoted all day to trying to outguess, outwit, out-think one another, entering on deals purely in the hope of catching their rivals out. It still astonishes me that financial markets are animated by such boyish, combative drives.

LRB 7 March 2002 | PDF Download