A book about real life on the trading floor that combines good storytelling with, well, real life. It's about time, says RICHARD GILLIS

THERE HAVE been some very good books written about the world of high finance over the last couple of years – House of Cards(William Cohan), Too Big to Fail(Andrew Ross Sorkin), The Big Short(Michael Lewis), Fool's Gold(Gillian Tett) to name my personal credit crunch literary top four – but on the whole the finance genre makes for dull reading for two very different reasons. There are those books that are like medicine; full of worthy attempts to educate us to the intricacies of credit default swaps and such like, but which fail in the fundamental trick of storytelling. The other is a sub strand that has emerged over the past few years which purports to tell tales of the cocaine and hooker lifestyles of the bankers who inhabit the city of London and Wall Street.

The Game, by Alex Buchanan, falls in to neither camp and is a breath of fresh air. This is a book that arrived unheralded, written by a 30-something former trader who carried around a dirty secret during his years in the city: he wanted to write. That's usually a precursor for purple prose and overblown similes, but what sets Buchanan's book apart is its simplicity. I haven't read any book on the city that has told me as much about what happens there on a day to day basis, answering questions that others have derided as being beneath them. These include, what do all these people do? And, what is it like working in an investment bank on the days when Lehman Brothers doesn't collapse?

“I wanted to write a book for the people who have never worked in the city to find out what the reality is, but that could also be enjoyed by people who do work there,” says Buchanan. His timing, in writing about the city at such a tumultuous moment in its history was, he says, “a complete fluke”. “I started writing it a month after the Lehman Brothers collapse and didn’t get a publishing contract until early July last year. The bulk of the book was written in August and September 2009, which was helpful in that I could set it against the background of the credit crunch. Luckily there’s been nothing concrete in terms of reform so the relevance of the book still holds true.”

Elements of The Gamehark back to Michael Lewis' 1989 bestseller, Liar's Poker, such as the way the small details of life on the trading floor are revealed: "In terms of pettiness the average trading floor is no different from the average classroom. Substitute the teacher for the head of equities and the pupils for the brokers or traders and it's a close run thing."

Buchanan says he wanted to make people sit up and take notice but wouldn't put a knife in his own back, as he may need to return to the city for a job. He cites Cityboy, an expose of the hookers and drugs written by Geraint Anderson as an example of what he didn't want to do. Anderson was an investment banker who broke the city's "code of silence", as a newspaper columnist, blogger and in a book.

“He doesn’t reveal the characters actual names but reading between the lines its pretty clear to anyone who knows the city who he is talking about. But he’s making a break from the industry and is not intending to go back, whereas I’m financially not in a position to do that,” says Buchanan.

This reluctance to dish the dirt is evident in the way he bristles when the accusations of skullduggery and greed are levelled at his former colleagues. In fact, says Buchanan, he was surprised that his own response to the process left him with a fond feeling toward the banks and bankers.

“It’s irritating when bankers are tarred with one big brush in the press: there are just as many who are trying to do their best and do the right thing, I’m convinced there are just as many saints as there are sinners.”

The Game's strength lies in its ability to take the reader into the arcane and frenetic world of the trading floor. For the young trader, the trading room was "hugely exciting", confronted as he was by the "sheer number of people, so much so that you spend a great deal of time trying to work out what they all do in relation to each other. If you like noise and banter then you'd love working there. The early mornings are an important part of the day, and you must learn to attune your life to the rhythm of the day. It's very much a frontloaded day because you're reacting to the news flow."

The sheer volume of this information from the media and analysts is, he says, bewildering and those who survive do so by learning to process it. “Then it slows down, as all those who need to know are informed of market movements and other information. The comparative calm of the afternoon then gives way to another crescendo in the last half-hour of the market, when people try to get their trades through.

“Every day something happens and every day there are oceans of people giving their opinions on what can happen next. The problem is that most . . . opinions are complete rubbish. Secondly they are never held accountable professionally for their mistakes.”

These highly paid soothsayers are “trying to look into a massive crystal ball and work out the future,” says Buchanan. Analysts, brokers, traders and even investors spend their day trying to second-guess what is going to happen further down the line. “If a doctor or a lawyer gives their opinion, action can be taken if their views are found to be fraudulent or plain wrong. In the city that isn’t the case.”

The roles people play have shifted over recent years, as globalisation and the impact of technology makes itself felt across the sector. “When I first started I was told that ‘you don’t want to become a stockbroker, you should become a sales trader’. The argument was that the client had greater access to information via the internet and so would want to get rid of the middleman and go direct to the coalface that is the market. But this wasn’t borne out at all, because brokers became just as important because the client needs a reassuring hand on the shoulder as things become more complex.

“They still need the comfort blanket of the brokers who in turn have redefined their role, to become the administrators par excellence, filling the gaps left by the traders.”

The business media has come under scrutiny for their sometimes cosy relationship with the big banks in the run up to September 2008, with critics suggesting that rather than questioning them they became their unofficial mouthpiece.

On the contrary, says Buchanan, who was surprised at how much notice is taken of the press. “I was offered a job at Bloomberg as a market reporter, but the job was so very similar to what I was doing at the bank, I thought, ‘why not just take the money?’

“Journalists provide information which is then moved out to other people in the chain, from broker to client, so the relationship is quite symbiotic in that sense.

“The city uses the press to disseminate information and it’s amazing how well informed the best business journalists can be. When we saw share picks in the papers we knew that it’s usually because the journalist had sat down with their favourite fund manager over lunch the previous afternoon and asked him what does he fancy on the market at the moment.”