How to be the best trader in the world

Okay, welcome back to Gary's Economics. Today, we are going to teach you how to be the best trader in the world.

Okay, so this is one of the most commonly asked questions on the channel, which is, "Gary, the world's going to [ __ ] We need you to help us. Please, please, please, can you teach us how to trade?" And generally, I've avoided the question for a couple of reasons.

Um, one, because I think trading is very dangerous and probably best avoided for ordinary people who are not professionals. Uh, and secondly, because this channel is about trying to explain how and why the economy is collapsing and to teach you what you can do to stop your economy from collapsing. Um, and I think that trading, whilst it can make money for the individual, is not going to solve this societal problem. So I have generally avoided it.

But if you have been following this channel for a while, you will know that discussing whether or not I am the best trader in the world is a very popular pastime for the British media, uh, both online and in print. Um, I won't comment on that. I'll leave that for the, um, the trading pundits this year to decide who is the best trader in the world. But, um, I was City Bank's most profitable trader in 2011. Uh, and I have made an awful lot of money trading since. I've got an extremely good track record.

And in the last few months, and especially weeks, I've been getting really, really frustrated by the differences, basically, in the world of economic analysis within trading and in the world that I am in now, which is, I guess you could call it activism or or media or politics, basically trying to prevent economic collapse from happening. So, I've become, I've been becoming super frustrated by the kind of contrast, contradictions between the world of trading and this world I'm in now, which I guess is the world of politics. And I thought I'd use that opportunity to finally answer this question of how do you be the best trader in the world. Really use this as a bit of an opportunity to talk about trading because I kind of, uh, love trading. Um, I think it is a beautiful discipline. I think it's, it's really dangerous. Um, it's something that, it taught me, in a sense, everything I know about economics, um, today. So I wanted to talk about it a little bit, educate you about it, give you what you want, in a sense, because I keep getting asked it again and again.

But I'm going to ask for something in return. So I'm going to teach you how to be the best trader in the world. Uh, and in return, I'm going to ask for two things. One, please be very, very careful if you ever try to do this. It's phenomenally dangerous. And secondly, I want you to think a little bit about what this means for the world we live in, for the country that you live in, for your society and your future, because I'm going to explain a little bit the way the world of economics works, um, in trading, in politics. Uh, and I think personally, it's phenomenally worrying. It's one of the reasons why I started this channel. So that's it. I'm going to teach you how to trade, and in return, I want you to think just a little bit about what it means for your society and the future of you and your family.

Okay. Number one, what is trading? Uh, so there's lots of different kinds of trading. I was a professional trader for City Bank from 2008 until 2000 until 2014. Um, and I am now somebody who, who trades on my laptop, um, using, using leverage, essentially, essentially betting. There's a few different kinds of trading. Um, uh, I also wrote a book. This is the book that I wrote, "The Trading Game." Still in the top 10, would you believe? Uh, seven, eight months later after it came out. Uh, and if you read this book, you'll see that there are lots of different kinds of traders and there are a few different kinds of ways to make money in trading. A lot of traders who work for big banks tend to make money because they have found clever ways to rip people off. Um, but the kind of trading which I am most interested in, and which I made my money on, is basically economic forecasting.

So I'm going to talk about, about a little bit about this kind of trading, economic forecasting as trading. How does it work? So basically, I think the simplest way to understand it is imagine the weather forecast. So every morning when I wake up, I pull open this laptop, uh, not, not immediately when I wake up, but at some point in the morning, and I'll pull open my trading platform and I'll look at all the different prices. And when I see that it is very similar, I think, to when somebody who is not a trader, maybe looks at the weather forecast, in the sense I don't just see a set of prices. When the prices move, what I see is, is changes in what traders are predicting about what is going to happen in the future, and you can bet on that, basically.

So trading is betting. It is gambling. So I think that the cleanest example is, let's say you looked at the weather forecast and it said that tomorrow there's a 50% chance of rain, and you, for whatever reason, because you're the world's best meteorologist, I don't know, know that actually there's it's almost certainly going to rain. It's like 95% likely to rain. You can bet on this. And if it's 50%, I've chosen 50% on purpose. 50% is like exactly 50/50. That means that the market will, because both sides are considered equally likely, you should be standing to win exactly as much as you stand to lose if you're wrong. Um, you can think, if you prefer, you can think of it in terms of sports, in terms of football, um, or in terms of betting.

So at the moment, the market thinks that there is a 50% chance that Reform will win the next election. So I can bet on that and I say, "No, they will definitely win." And if I'm right, I will double my money. I put £100 down because it's 50/50. The amount I should win if I'm right is £100. The amount I should lose if I'm wrong is also £100. And, and this is, this is what you do. Basically, it's, it's, it's very, very simple. Trading as, as economic forecasting, which is you are looking at what the market thinks, 50%, and you're basically saying, "I think it's going to be higher. I think it's going to be lower."

Let's shift these numbers about a little bit, right? Let's say the market thinks tomorrow that there is only a 10% chance of rain. So on 50/50, it was simple, right? Because it's 50/50, exactly equal. The amount you stand to win should be exactly the same as the amount you stand to lose. But now the market says, "Oh, it's only 10% chance of rain. That's like phenomenally unlikely." Well, it's, let's say it's pretty unlikely. But you still think it's almost certainly going to rain. Now, because the market thinks the chance of rain is nine times less than the chance of not rain, the amount that you stand to win should be nine times more than the amount that you stand to lose. Because what, what you are saying, the thing that you are saying is going to happen, everybody thinks, "Oh, that's never going to happen. It's phenomenally unlikely." You know, say you're betting on Manchester United winning the league or something even less likely, like the Conservatives winning the next election, right? If you're going to bet on something phenomenally unlikely like this, then the market will give you more. So if you bet £100 on it raining tomorrow when the market says only 10%, or the Conservative winning the election, which is actually also similar odds, about 10%, you should stand to win nine times more than you stand to lose. So if you risk £100, the amount that you should win is £900, nine times more.

So trading really is, is basically gambling, but you're gambling on, on economic things. Um, so when I was a trader, I used to bet a lot on, when I was a professional trader for, for City Bank, I used to bet a lot on interest rates. And this again is, is quite similar. So I can actually, I can pull it up now, actually. We can have a look. So at the moment, the, the Bank of England base rate in the UK is 4%. But we can bet on what the base rate will be in the future. So I can bet on what the base rate will be at the end of next year. And I can put it up now. And the financial markets think that the base rate will be 3.45%. And you can bet on that, basically. And it, it works in this kind of higher or lower kind of way. So if you, for some reason, knew that rates were going to stay at 4%, you could basically bet, like a certain, like a number of pounds per point, that it's going to be higher than 3.45%. So I say, "Okay, it's going to be higher than 3.45." I know rates are going to stay at four. I bet £100 per 0.01% and I'll make £100 times 55, which is the amount that I was right by, which is £5,500. And if rates go to zero, I lose much more.

So, so really trading is just gambling, just in the same way that you could bet on, on a football match. If you bet on something really unlikely, like Man United winning the league, you'll make a lot of money. If you bet on something really likely, like Liverpool winning the league, you'll make less money.

Now, let me tell you why I, why I like this. This kind of system of thinking about the economy rewards you for a couple of things which I think are good and are important. Number one, it rewards you in particular for being right when everybody is wrong. So I was like a, a counter-trend trader, and I, I was looking for things which everybody thought was unlikely. Um, and my big trade which made me my big money when I was at City Bank was essentially betting that interest rates would stay low for a long time after the 2008 crisis. Um, and I made that bet because I thought the economy would be weak for a long time after that crisis. And I believed that because I could see that ordinary people were struggling financially, whereas the rich were accumulating a lot of assets. And I knew that ordinary people are essentially, or, or were, it's becoming less true, ordinary people are the driver of the economy. So I bet on this thing in specifically 2011, when I was City Bank's most profitable trader in the world, um, that the economy would be really weak, that rates would stay zero. And the reason I made so much money on that was not because that happened, but it was particularly because at that time, at the beginning of 2011, nobody thought it was going to happen. So I'd correctly identified this thing, which was that the economy is [ __ ] Ordinary families are the economy is going to be weak. And when I put that trade on at the beginning of 2011, that's, that was a few years after the Lehman crisis. Inflation was starting to rise, and people had been waiting for a long time after the Lehman crisis for the economy to recover. And everybody, well, the vast majority of economists and traders thought the economy was going to recover. And the reason that I made so much money on that trade was not because rates stayed at zero, but because rates stayed at zero and everybody thought that rates were going to go up.

And I did a very similar thing at the beginning of COVID. So by, by the beginning of COVID, I'd been looking at trading for a long time. So I'd really fallen into this style of looking at trading, which is, try to understand specifically what it is that everybody is missing. So I had become, and and still am, very interested in inequality and distribution. Um, I think that in general, economists don't look at or think about inequality or distribution. So basically, I developed one simple way to very consistently make money in financial markets, which has worked very well for me for a long time now, which is super simple. Whenever anything big happens, understand what that is going to do to inequality and distribution, because most economists don't think very much, especially about inequality of wealth and distribution of wealth.

So at the beginning of COVID, I asked myself the same question I always ask myself when, when anything big happens. What is this going to do to distribution? What is this going to do to distribution of wealth? What is it going to do to the different groups in society? And I think, so the first video I ever did on this channel was in June 2020. And if you, if you go back and look at it, and I think we'll put a link in the description, you will see that that video is precisely going through that line of, of consciousness, that line of thought, which is understanding, make, asking some questions about what's happening in COVID economically, how is that going to affect distribution, how's that going to affect different groups? And it's so easy to make money when you do that because, because it is a massive driver of the economy and economists never talk about it.

And what I saw very quickly, and if, if you want, you can go back and, and see that video. I used to talk about it loads on the channel, was that the government would give a huge amount of money out. Government debt would increase. Ordinary people would use that money to pay their rent, their mortgages, their, their bills, their food. It would end up getting accumulated by the rich people who own the assets that are involved in providing those services, such as owning the houses, owning the government debt, owning the corporations, owning the natural resources. Money always flows to them when you spend money. But what was interesting about COVID was because luxury spending was banned, these rich people weren't able to spend the money. And what you saw was this enormous flood of money from the government, through the poor, to the rich. And the way it was being generally portrayed in the media at the time was, there was a lot of focus on like, furloughed workers. Money is, or stimulus check in the US. Money is going to the poor. Money is going to the poor. Money is going to the poor. But what was never really discussed was the fact that the poor are spending that money because they're not getting their wages, and it's ending up being accumulated by rich people who can't spend it. And when we come out of COVID, what you will have is rich people sitting on these enormous bank balances. And that was so, so, so easy to monetize precisely because of the same two reasons, which are the same two things I always look about, which is what's happening to inequality and distribution, because that's the main economic driver and economists don't look at it. And what element of that is not being recognized in the narrative? In 2008, I recognized that the narrative wasn't recognizing that ordinary people, middle-class people, poor people were really struggling, and that meant that the economy would be weak for a long time. But in COVID, what people didn't realize is that the rich and the very rich were accumulating enormous amounts of money, and that that would lead to an inequality crisis, a cost of living crisis, an inflation crisis, and most obviously, an asset price, massive, massive asset price increase crisis. So I bet enormously on the gold price going up. I bought a huge amount of gold right at the beginning of COVID. Um, and I also bought quite a lot of stocks, and those have done very, very well. And it, it's just basically based on understanding always the same thing, which is economists don't look at inequality. Inequality is really, at this point, the main driver of big economic moves. So if you understand what's going to happen to inequality, you can understand very easily what's going to happen to the economy.

So the lesson of this basically answers the, the question in the title of this video, how to be the best trader in the world. All you really need to do to be a very, very good trader from an economic analysis perspective is understand specifically what is it that is very important that is not being understood by the majority of economists and traders. Because if you bet on something that's definitely going to happen, like, for example, you know, betting on Liverpool or Manchester City winning the league, or, you know, everybody knows it's not going to rain tomorrow and you say it's not going to rain tomorrow, you don't make any money. You make the money when you have correctly identified something that everybody is wrong about. And you only need to identify one of these things if people are consistently wrong about it. So all of the money I've ever made, and it's at this point, quite a lot on trading, is based on one simple understanding. Economists do not recognize the macroeconomic importance of growing wealth inequality, and whenever anything happens, I look at the wealth distribution, what's going to happen, because the economists are not looking at it, I will be able to predict things that will happen, such as the phenomenal weakness after 2008, or the inflation price, the inflation crisis, cost of living crisis after COVID. They will not be predicted. I can predict them. That's how you make your.

To be the best trader in the world, you simply need to identify something that is very important that the economists have missed.

So now I've spoken about that, I want to talk a little bit about more about why I, I, I never talk about this on the channel, but it's true. Why I kind of love trading. So there's this one element, which is it rewards you for recognizing things everybody else has missed. And I don't know if that's just part of my personality, but I think it's, I think it's very important for society, right? Like if, if there is something badly wrong that nobody's noticed, that is the kind of thing you want to incentivize people to reward. You know, if you're building a bridge or say you're building a rocket ship and everybody thinks it's going to fly, but there's one thing in there that's going to cause it to blow up, you want to incentivize people to find that thing, right? Trading does this phenomenal thing of really incentivizing and rewarding people for recognizing when everybody is wrong on a thing. And I think there's a, there's a real beauty to that and there's an importance to that, because most of our methods of analysis in society, say, in politics or in the media or in academia, they don't really incentivize or reward people who kind of fight against or push back against the groupthink. And trading does this, and I think that that is something that is really beautiful and something that is really useful for society. Um, unfortunately, it's not really often used for the good of society, which is something I'll get into later.

But it does another thing as well, which is it rewards you for kind of putting your nuts on the line on a thing. So you can do this when I say, um, as a trader, you only really need to recognize one thing the economists are missing, and you just bet on that one thing. So, as a trader, you can make as many bets as you like, but you can choose what you're going to bet a lot of money on, and you can choose what you're going to bet a little bit of money on. So, the kind of traders that really, really do well, in my opinion, are the traders who, at least this is definitely my style of trading, they recognize the thing that they are really good at, the thing that they have a really good understanding on, and they bet all of their money on that thing. And I think it's a really good way to recognize and identify good people, to find people who are willing to make outrageous predictions that everybody says are wrong and bet enormous amounts of their own money on it. And I think this is such an important element of trading. And I was talking to Jack before we shot this about this. Um, so this, there's a, there's a line from one of my sort of trading mentors, which is, "Don't tell me your opinion, tell me your position." And what he means when he says this. So a position is what traders call the thing or the group of things that they have actually bet their money on. And there's this thing that happens when, when you're a trader, which is you're a young trader, and at some point you're going to put your first big bet on, and you, you go into the office and you put your big bet on, and then you go home, and then you sit down, and if you are wrong in this bet, you're going to, personally, you are going to lose £100,000. It's your first big trade. It's your first big bet. You sit down, and this has happened to me, and I think it's probably happened to any professional trader. You think, "Fuck, am I actually right on that thing?" Because if I'm wrong on that thing, I'm going to lose £100,000, and that's going to be [ __ ] And then you start thinking about that, that trade, that bet, that ultimately it is an opinion of yours. And you're going to start, you're going to really start really thinking, is that trade actually right? Am I actually right? Is that opinion actually right? And, and you might realize, what about this thing? I haven't looked at that thing. I haven't thought about that thing. What about this thing that that guy said? Could that be important? Could this be important? Maybe I need to research this thing. And I basically think once you've experienced betting a huge amount of your personal money on what is essentially just an opinion, you start to fundamentally think about opinions in a different way that you have never thought about before. You start to really, really sit and think, are my opinions actually right?

And this is what, um, my old trading mentor in the book is called, um, Billy meant, when he said, "I don't care about your opinion. I want to know your position." Which is basically, once you have been a trader and you have experienced the concept of putting yourself at risk, of facing enormous personal loss if your opinions are wrong, you start to really, really think long and hard about whether your opinions are right or wrong or not. And you kind of start to not really care about people expressing opinions who are not willing to bet their own money on it, because you kind of realize that at the end of the day, opinions that people are not willing to to support with their own, like, financial loss, are often like, kind of [ __ ] basically. And this is what I love about trading. It forces you to, to not chat [ __ ] to really, really interrogate yourself, to really, really ask yourself, am I actually right? Is that the right answer? To not just sort of chat [ __ ] whatever sort of [ __ ] works at the time. Um, it forces you to ask yourself, like, which of my opinions am I really, really, really confident on? Which ones am I really, really willing to bet my own money on? Which ones am I really willing to back myself on? Um, and it also rewards you for, for recognizing when other people are wrong. Um, and the last thing which I love about it is that it recognizes the people who were right.

So, as I've said, I was a kind of a counter-trend trader, which means I was always looking for times and moments when the narrative was wrong, when the consensus opinion was wrong, when everybody was wrong about a thing. And, um, when I put my big trade on in 2011, that the economy would never recover, that was my first big, like, counter-consensus trade. And lots of people thought I was, was wrong. And, um, yeah, I love economics, obviously. And, um, I, I hired a junior who was like, fresh out of Bologna in Italy, economics graduate. And we would argue about economics all the time. And I would, I would argue with a lot of richer, posher, better-connected people about the economy. And very often people would say that I was wrong because I was taking these counter-trend positions. They would say, "No, you know, the economy is, it's getting better. It's going to be fine. Things are going to be good. Things getting better." And as a trader then, and to be honest, even still now, because I do still trade now, when I'm in this kind of situation where everybody's saying to me again now, "You're wrong. No, you're wrong. Things are going to be fine. Things aren't going to get worse," um, the trader in me, like, really loves it because I know that the more people say I'm wrong, and the more people think I'm wrong, and the more people argue I'm wrong, the more money I'm going to make. And, and there's something about my personality that I really enjoy there. And it's this, in a way, it kind of helps because I have always made money betting on terrible things, um, and predicting terrible things, and, and I know things are going to get worse. And as a trader, you had this thing, which is, at least at the end of the day, I'm going to be right, they're going to be wrong. They're going to have to give me loads of money. And at the end of the day, everybody's going to look at the numbers, and they're going to see that I was right. Um, and it doesn't stop the world from collapsing. It doesn't stop the world from being [ __ ] But what it does do is it forces them to recognize at the end of the day that you were right and they were wrong. And that allows you to sort of at least get a little bit of respect for the fact that you correctly predicted this disaster. Um, and this then brings me to the, the weaknesses of trading, which is, as much as you are able to be rewarded and recognized for correctly identifying big problems in society, you can't do anything as a trader to fix them.

And this is one of the questions I get asked a lot when I do interviews, which is, people say to me, "Gary, do you think it was wrong that you bet on society collapsing and you made so much money?" And in a sense, that's kind of a funny question because it kind of assumes that there was like an alternative. Like there's not, so there's not a phone on the trading floor that you can go to and, you know, ring up the Prime Minister or the President and say, "Hey, listen. Um, I'm City Bank's number one trader and I've recognized your economy is going to collapse and, and would you like to do something about it?" Um, that, that phone doesn't exist. Um, what you can do if you want to to fix the economy is basically exactly what I have done, which is, um, very, very shortly after becoming City Bank's most profitable trader, um, in 2011, I started trying to quit the bank because I wanted to try and stop our society from collapsing. And, um, what I find super interesting is a trader because I had this very, very good long-term track record of being right, I was very well esteemed and very well respected, and I would get any resources that I want, and I could talk to anybody that I want, and it was kind of generally recognized that, you know, Gary is one of the best traders in the bank. So you have this thing in trading, a bank called P&L, profit and loss. Um, and it's very visible. Spreadsheet goes around, everybody can see everybody else's profit and loss. So everybody knows who the best traders are. And because I was number one in 2011, I was like, kind of a bit famous at City Bank for being, like, I was very young in 2011. I turned 25 at the end of the year. Everybody was sort of like, "This guy is like one of the hot young traders." Um, and I got paid a lot of money and I got given a lot of recognition. And I, when I came out of trading, I was kind of a little bit naive. I kind of thought that, you know, if I can get paid £2 million a year working for a bank, if I can be one of the best traders in the world, one of the biggest banks in the world, surely government and, and media and think tanks will want to listen to me. But the truth is, um, really, they, they haven't listened so much. And I've, I've been out in the world of public-facing economics for, I actually quit City Bank in 2014. That's when I finally got out, and I've been speaking very publicly since the beginning of 2020. And I've really struggled to, to get people to listen, really.

And, and this is the, the big frustration I find with being somebody who was a trader and is now in the world of trying to actually do something about the economy, which is when you're a trader, when I was a trader and I was a counter-trend trader, people disagree with you a lot, and it's fantastic because you're going to make tons of money, and at the end of the year, everybody's going to say, "Gary was right." But now, in this world of, like, public-facing economics, that basically doesn't happen. So, um, my first video on, um, this channel in 2020, I, I, you know, you should go back and watch it because it's very good. Basically, it was June 2020, the beginning of COVID, when everybody was still saying, you know, "We're going to have a really massive economic recovery after COVID, pent-up demand, roaring 20s." And I correctly predicted the cost of living crisis, the inflation crisis, the austerity crisis, the, that there would be a massive increase in asset prices, house prices. At the time, the Guardian was predicting a house price collapse. Everybody was predicting a massive economic boom. Um, but my predictions were super correct. Um, and, and it's basically for the same reason it's always been, because I understand the importance of inequality. And as somebody who was a trader, you, you have this instinct, which is like, "Oh my God, I'm going to make so much money." And, and I did make a load of money, but, you know, at the end of the year, everybody is going to see that my predictions are right, everybody else's predictions were wrong, and then maybe I'm going to be able to get a little bit of recognition, and maybe we're going to be able to solve this massive economic crisis. But the truth is, um, it didn't work out that way. Um, I made these phenomenal economic predictions, and I made a lot of excellent trades, and I made a lot of money, and the cost of living crisis happened, and the inequality crisis happened, and the, um, the austerity crisis happened and is happening. Um, asset prices went through the roof. All of these things happened, and I was kind of screaming to government that we need to do something about it. And I got a little bit of coverage in the media, but this, this crazy thing happened where basically nobody, or almost nobody, in the public sector cared.

And I think this is, is the point that I want to make with you. Um, we've created an economy where people who are very, very, very, very good at understanding the economic collapse can get paid millions of pounds a year, working for any bank in a city in Canary Wharf, in your country's financial district. But I have been out here speaking publicly about these things now for very little money, usually for free. And I have not been able to speak to or advise any British government for free. That is the thing which you, I want you to understand. Um, I could get paid millions of pounds a year working for pretty much any bank in the world, and I cannot advise the government for free. So why is that? And I think the reason for that is primarily because we have split economics into two worlds, where we view trading as like practical economics, and we don't view it as proper economics, which is kind of academic economics. Um, and in this public policy world, government, academia, universities, think tanks, they want a, a different kind of economist who has gone through a more academic route, and they don't view trading as economic analysis.

So we need to talk quickly about the question, is trading economic analysis? So, I did my undergrad a long time ago now at the London School of Economics, which is one of the most famous and most prestigious economics universities in the world. Probably the most famous economic specialist university in the world. Um, it's very hard to get into. Um, it's, you know, it's full of very, very rich people. And when I was there, I did math and economics. And I want you to understand a little bit about what is happening in that space, which is when I was there, the vast majority of the best students wanted to be traders, and it was very, very difficult to become a trader, but it was extraordinarily competitive, and most of the best students were able to become traders. And that is probably true for most economics universities across the world. Then when you get onto the trading floor, what you find is tons of people absolutely obsessed with, with being the best economist, doing the best economic analysis, aggressively competing, working 100-hour weeks, waking up at 5:00 a.m. to be the best economist. The best-paid 10,000 economists in the world are all traders. Every single one of them. But you are not going to hear their voices on the news, and they are not going to be advising your government, and they are not going to be in the political parties that run your country. They're not working for your newspapers. You don't see them on TV. You don't see them on the internet.

So what we have is this situation where the vast majority of the best young economists are desperately trying to become traders. Then the best-resourced and the hardest-working economists are pretty much all traders. And yet you are watching a kind of, in a sense, like a, a TV show about economics, which is the media, the politicians, the central banks, and they're telling you they are the best economists in the world, but they are not including any of the best-paid 10,000 economists in the world. It's a little bit like, you, you are watching a football game and you are being told, like, "This is the Champions League final, the best football game," and yet none of the 10,000 best-paid footballers in the world are playing in this game. Basically, you are being governed by and being spoken to by third-division economists pretending to be Premier League economists. And that is where we are, to be honest.

And, um, I, I, I was hesitant actually about about putting that line in the video because I think part of the reason maybe why I've found it difficult to, to, to get influence in the world that I'm in now, the world of politics and media and academia, is because I say things like that that are not nice to hear for the economists in things like government and, and, and politics and central bank and, and you need to recognize, and the media, of course. You need to recognize these guys were at uni with people like me, and they saw most of their smartest friends go and get these jobs in the, in the banks and get paid much more than them. And they kind of don't like it when people like me come out and say, "All right, guys. Now I've made a ton of money. I'm going to tell you how to do your jobs." And they don't like it. And then they don't listen to me.

But then that raises the question, what do you do? What do you do? If you are somebody who is very, very, very good at being right on things and has identified a, a problem, and you have a field out there like trading, which is very, very good at aggressively rewarding people who are, who are right about things, and then you have another field out there, which is politics, which kind of doesn't really care if you have a track record about being right about things. What do you do? How do you actually fix your country? It's, it's, it's so much easier to bet on things and make money on things than have any actual influence. And, and this is basically what has been frustrating me in the last couple of years. Well, especially the last couple of months and weeks. And that is when you're a trader, if you are a very good trader, it's very easy to make yourself visible, and it's very easy to find the best people, and it's very easy to know who might talk to you, because everybody has this number on their head, this profit and loss number on their head. And everybody at, for example, City Bank knows who are the most profitable traders on this trading floor. And if there's a guy over there in another department, he's very profitable, I can go and speak to him, and he's going to listen to me because he knows that I'm very profitable. And there might be some people that are just kind of chatting [ __ ] or they found a way to like rip somebody off or steal some money. But you can very easily recognize who are the guys that we should maybe listen to, who are the guys that we should maybe discuss with. And you can very easily make yourself visible as one of those guys who should be maybe listened to. And this is why somebody like me from a very poor background, without any connections or friends, was able to become kind of a legendary trader within City Bank at the age of 24, because trading is a space which allows people with very good understanding to make themselves very visible very quickly. And I think we, kind, we don't have a lot of space in our society that are like that anymore. I think the only other place that I can think of, obviously, which kind of allows very good people to become very visible at a very young age, is basically football or soccer for our American viewers. That's the only place where, because if you're really good, you can be visible very quickly. Um, whereas in this world of, like, public-facing economics, the big struggle which I've had in the last few years is, okay, I know I'm right. I know I'm very good at this. I know I can make a ton of money on it, but I actually want to try to stop my society from collapsing. How do I get that visibility? How do I get that visibility? And it's, it's been a real struggle. It's been a real frustration.

And I developed this plan basically, which was, I saw, and I think it's crazy that I had to do this. Um, I should probably add quickly before I explain the plan I developed. I, I first of all, I went back to university and I thought that I would be able to say to the economists, you know, show them the way that they were wrong, give them the data, give them the evidence, and we could kind of have a discussion about it. So I went to do a masters at Oxford, 2017-2019. And at that time, I was, you know, just recently one of the most profitable interest rate traders in the world. We had a lecture about interest rates. I went to the professor and I said, "Hey, you know, do you want to talk about why we've been so wrong on interest rates for so long?" At that time, we had been, you know, in every western country in the world, pretty much. We'd spent 10 years predicting that rates would come up very quickly, which means the economy would normalize very quickly. Um, and we'd been wrong for 10 years. And the professor said to me, "Oh, no. We always knew rates would stay zero forever." Which, um, was categorically provably wrong. And I was amazed by that. So I sent the data and I said, "Look, we can see actually you've been wrong for 10 years. Trying to talk about it." And the guy was just not, in the slightest bit interested, basically. Um, so this is the situation we're in, really. Um, academia doesn't really care about being wrong. Just after the recent Labour government was elected, I was able to to find myself in a room with, um, a senior Labour policy advisor, who I won't name. And I said the same thing to him. I was like, "Hey, look, you know, you've just won the election. You know, what are you going to do about inequality? Because if you don't do anything about inequality, then living standards will keep falling, and you will be very unpopular very, very quickly." And, um, he knew who I was because this was not that long ago, and he, his instinct reply was to, to talk to me about his sort of plan for how they were going to deal with that from a comms perspective, which is very frustrating for a policy advisor. Um, but I think that kind of shows you what is happening here, which is in trading, we've created this space where young people, mainly young men, compete very, very aggressively to be right, to be right, to be right, to be right, to be right. And it allows us to relatively easily identify people who have good understanding and who are right. But they are then not allowed at all to have a public voice. And then you have this world of public-facing economists in things like governments and universities and think tanks and, um, the media. And I honestly think most of these guys are not really trying to be right, unfortunately. And, and that's not, in a sense, their fault. It's, they are playing a different game, really. So if you are a trader, you're paid to be right. You're rewarded to be right. You're incentivized to be right. But if you are an advisor to government, your main thing is winning elections, right? And if you want to win elections, you need to think about your comms strategy. So I don't think it's really a surprise that Labour policy advisors are mainly thinking about comms strategy. And if you are a university professor in economics, that is an phenomenally competitive job, but you are not paid to understand why we're wrong on interest rates. These guys have to write lots of really, really difficult, complicated mathematical papers. There's this thing called publish or perish. You have to write more and more complicated mathematical papers. So the, the economics professors, unfortunately, they are also not really trying to be right. You know, if you work as an economist in the media, realistically, obviously, these guys are trying to get clicks, right? That's the way the media works. You know, that's the way that YouTube works. Um, these guys working in public service are not really incentivized to be right. And I think that is why they don't really care when somebody like me comes along and says, "Well, I've got a very good track record of being right. Do you want to listen?"

So I had to develop a plan for how do we use this ability to be consistently right to get ourselves some voice and some power essentially in politics. And my plan that started in sort of 2020, really. I thought there was a gap in YouTube. I thought political power was going to shift to YouTube. And I thought that the public, the great thing about YouTube is I can keep doing this thing which I do, which I have done in this video. I can say, "Go back and look at the predictions I made in 2020. Go back and and watch the videos I made in 2020." And I think that gives me a lot of credibility because you can see I'm not just some guy who's trying to like get clicks on YouTube. I'm a guy who has a very long track record of being right. And, and the reason why my videos in 2020 have correct predictions is the same reason I'm City Bank's best trader in the world, which is I'm good at this and I actually have a good understanding. Um, and I think YouTube, in going directly to the people, maybe gives us a way, well, I was hoping would give us a bit of a way to get leverage over the, over the public. I needed to build that plan out. So I needed to figure out how to bring the audience to the YouTube, which is, which is really why I wrote the book, and that was phenomenally successful. Um, and now we get, you know, half a million, a million views on every video. And I was kind of thinking, hoping now that I am not only formerly best trader in the world for City Bank, but also have a very good track record of predicting online, and am also the biggest politics show in the country, bigger than Question Time, maybe now the politicians will listen to me. But the truth is.

Unfortunately, it seems that they still won't. Um, and now you have a political party that is supposed to be the center-left political party so stubbornly refusing to do anything about inequality and taxation of the rich that not only will they collapse the economy, they will also lose disastrously to a new far-right political party in the next election. And they still won't listen and um it's insane and it's frustrating um and it forces us to ask the question what can we do?

Okay, so that is it. That is where we are. If you want to be the best trader in the world, all you need to do is understand something that nobody else in the world or the vast majority of economists don't understand about the economy. And uh if you want something, I'll tell you it. It's the exact thing I've made pretty much all my money on. Growing inequality of wealth is destroying the economy and pretty much everything that happens can be predicted by understanding what will happen with growing inequality of wealth. The irony of this is this is exactly the message that I've been sending you in pretty much every video for the last 5 years. So, every single person who has has sent me the message, can you please teach me um how to be the best trader in the world has failed to realize that that is exactly what I've been doing for the last 5 years. If you want to understand the economy better than the economist, you can do that very very simply by understanding that growing inequality of wealth is a massive economic driver. And that's true if you want to be a good trader and it's true if you want to be in government.

But the quid pro quo was that I asked you to think about what this system will do to our society. So we have a system which very aggressively takes all of our best young economic minds, sends them to skyscrapers to bet on the end of the world and doesn't allow them to speak publicly. And when one of those traders comes out of the skyscrapers and tries to tell the academics, the media, the politicians that their society is going to collapse for free despite being worth a couple of million pounds a year according to the banks, the governments don't listen. What will that do to our society? What would that do to our future?

So that's it. How to be uh the best trader in the world. Um leaving it on that note is a little bit depressing. Um, and the truth is I've been a little bit depressed the last couple of months because we've achieved so much here on this channel. And it is so obvious that the governments need something new. And I think it should be unbelievably painfully obvious that what they need is us. And yet they look like they are going to basically commit suicide, die on the hill of not taxing the rich. Um, and that is depressing. But I've uh told myself that in this new series, we're not going to end the video on any depressing notes. So, I want to finish by giving a little bit of a message of hope.

Um I don't think I've spoken about this on the channel before. People sometimes ask me what what are you hopeful about? What are you hopeful about? And um a few years ago, just when Rishi Sunak had had been recently, was he was he just made chancellor? Was he just made prime minister? I got sent to um a little military town in uh North Yorkshire called Coburn, which is Rishi Sunak's constituency. And the plan was for me to go there to go to a food bank um and talk to some food bank users about how they feel about their new about their MP being the richest MP in the history of the country. And I didn't love the idea because I thought it was a little bit like poverty porn. But I went along with it cuz I thought, you know, we might get some views, whatever. I wasn't that famous at the time. And when I went there, what I found was the food bank was not being used as a food bank. And the reason for that was that it was the weekend after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And the food bank had been rapidly turned into a kind of um supply collection center. So people were sending in, you know, tin food and warm clothes and medicines and stuff for babies and stuff like that. And the food bank was full of people like sorting this stuff out, packing it into boxes. And they were going to put the boxes into a van. And these people from North Yorkshire were going to drive themselves the van all the way to Ukraine to deliver these supplies. And it kind of ruined my plan really because the food bank wasn't used as a food bank. So, it wasn't full of these poverty poor food bank users, the poorest people in the in the area. But, you know, I what else can you do? I helped them like pack stuff into boxes and I got talking to them. And what I found out when I was talking to them was that they were the food bank users. The people that were there on the first week of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, packing stuff into boxes, making donations to drive to Ukraine were food bank users. people who in normal times struggle to feed their kids. And yet when something bad happened to a bunch of people from a different country with a different language thousands of miles away, their first instinct was to go down to the food bank and pack stuff into the boxes to help.

And um when I see what's happening today, I spoke in last week's video about going to the recent protest outside the hotels and seeing people on different side of the road shouting at each other. Sometimes I worry that that that vision, two separate groups of people standing on opposite sides of the road shouting names at each other is kind of a metaphor for our future as a country. And when I feel that way, I try to remember back to this day that I went to Coburn in North Yorkshire um in in a very poor, very deprived area and seeing the poorest people in our country packing stuff into boxes to help people thousands of miles away. Because I suspect that some of those people might be some of the same people going to these protests. What that tells me is that this country, and I'm sure it's true in your country too, is not full of bad people. These people want a positive vision for the future. If we provide that, they will support us. And I want to do a shout out here to all of the economists who might be watching in the Labour Party, in the Democratic party, in whatever political party all over the world, in the universities, in the think tanks, in the media. I might have given the impression that I don't think you guys are the smartest people in the world. You have an important part to play. You have an important part to play. I'm here. I'm ready to build it. If we create a story that will save ordinary people from poverty, ordinary people across the world are ready to get behind it.

So that's it. How do you be the best trader in the world? You bet on the end of the world. But maybe we should stop the end of the world. Tax wealth might work. Make things better. Support the channel. Tell your friends. Tell your mom. Thank you.