Anyone reading/read “The Trading Game", by Gary Stevenson, former Citi STIR trader?

Just finished it today. It was a good read and overall I like how Gary comes across but below I will list things I have an issue with in case an impressionable kid reads the book and takes it as gospel. 

• Gary claims in multiple interviews that he was the most profitable trader at Citi in 2011 or 2012. In the book he mentions his PNL was 35mm which while a super decent PNL especially for a trader in his (mid!) 20s is unlikely to be the highest annual PNL in a large bank like Citi. In the book he says that he was the highest earning trader in FX which is more believable but the fact that he bends the truth in his self-promotion irks me quite a lot. Also in the book he claims his mate Bill made the largest 2008 PNL in Citi at around $100 mm when Andy Hall famously made a $98 mm BONUS in 08 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/business/10citi.html#:~:text=Mr.,Feinberg. so his PNL must've been in the high 9 figures at least. Funnily Andy Hall is from a classic Oxford -> MBA pipeline that Gary despises and claims can't produce original traders.
• He portrays people around him as either dicks or morons when on multiple occasions throughout the book they try to be helpful to him and seem to genuinely care about his wellbeing. He shows some self-awareness about it but generally this kind of attitude is super off-putting regardless of how much better your PNL is compared to the other guys on your desk. Don't do this kids! Treat people like you'd want to be treated unless they try to actively fuck you. This is most likely a function of the depression he was suffering from at the time so he gets a pass. 
• The trades that made him money are mostly carry trades - if long term rates are very different from short term rates you can bet that short term rates won't change much by trading against the long term rates and most of the time you will make some money. If the future is more like the present than what's implied by market prices (which aren't a pure forecast and include a lot of risk premium and distributional considerations) you make money. When it goes wrong it goes very wrong though so you need to be careful with picking your battles and having some fundamental reasoning behind them. He does have ok economic reasoning behind some of these trades so he wasn't a pure carry monkey but he exaggerates things a lot. In 2011 (when he is betting on rates going lower) eurdollar futures were pricing in a decent recovery and taking the other side was a smart bet. But he claims they were pricing in a strong recovery when the eurodollar futures he was looking at (greens) were still higher (i.e. implying rates lower) than any time since the 80s! This is not pricing a healthy recovery and going back to a pre-GFC roaring economy. He says that the implied strong recovery is due to everyone following the same economic models that predicted things will go back to normal as they were missing the effect of economic inequality. But market prices were pricing not going back to the status quo! Also the future distribution of rates wasn't a direct map to expected economic conditions back in 2011 when rates were so close to the zero lower bound. Even in a potential future of a double dip recession, rates couldn't have gone much lower due to zero lower bound so if rates were absolutely stuck to zero betting on them increasing wouldn't have cost much if a shit economy stays shit but on the off chance that the economy recovered a bit more you'd get very positive PNL. It would've been almost free money in expectation so it's normal for the market to price them higher and take away the mostly free money. Also why would he claim that economists couldn't see the pain of the common man with unemployment in 2011 being higher than it was at any point from the mid-80s until the GFC?!? Obviously any economist who looked at unemplyment in 2011 (i.e. any economist) would know a huge chunk of the population had no spending power. So either his model was wrong and wasn't accounting for risk premium and distribution asymmetry or he had the right model but it was too nuanced to build a compelling populist narrative around. Anyway, I think it's a good trade but the reasoning behind it misses lots of important things and it's kind of the basis of a lot of his chat about inequality. He keeps going on about having made tens of millions by knowing what the economists get wrong and how this gives him the credibility about being an economics talking head when all he did was a cleverly timed roll trade. 

All of that said it's probably the best finance-person-tells-all book since Liar's Poker as the guy actually spends a lot of time on the finance and doesn't just chat about parties and drugs like most other similar books. I hope he is in a good place mentally and that he keeps on popularising economics and finance but I'd be happier if he starts offering some slightly more nuanced takes. If people want to read more about inequality and how it negatively affects growth I'd suggest reading Trade Wars Are Class Wars by Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein which goes deeper than what Gary offers on his YouTube channel and offers similar conclusions with less extreme politicising.