Okay, welcome back to Garys 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.

One, because I think trading is very

dangerous and probably best avoided for ordinary

people who are not professionals.

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.

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, both online and in print.

I won't comment on that, I'll leave that for

the trading Ballon d'Or this year to decide

who's the best trader in the world.

But, I was Citibank's most profitable

trader in 2011, 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,

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 media or politics.

Basically, trying to prevent

economic collapse from happening.

So I've become, 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, love trading.

I think it is a beautiful discipline.

I think it's really dangerous.

It's something that... It taught me in a

sense, everything I know about economics today.

So I wanted to talk about it a little bit,

educate you about it, and 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, 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,

in trading, in politics, 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?

So there's lots of different kinds of trading.

I was a professional trader for Citibank

from 2008 until 2014, and

I am now somebody who trades on my laptop,

using leverage essentially, essentially betting.

There's a few different kinds of trading.

I also wrote a book.

This is the book that I wrote, The Trading Game.

Still in the top 10, would you believe?

Seven, eight months later after it came out.

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.

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... 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 is imagine the weather forecast.

So every morning when I wake up, I pull open

this laptop... 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

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 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 is, 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.

You can think, if you prefer, you

can think of it in terms of sports, in terms

of football, 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 pounds.

The amount I should lose if

I'm wrong is also 100 pounds.

And this is, this is what you do, basically.

It's very, very simple, trading

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 a 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?

So 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 Conservatives

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 basically

gambling, but you're gambling on economic things.

So when I was a trader, I used to bet a lot

on... When I was a professional trader for

Citibank, I used to bet a lot on interest rates.

And this, again is quite similar.

So I can actually... I can pull it up now, actually.

We can have a look.

So at the moment 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 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 .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, really, trading is just gambling it... Just

in the same way that you could bet 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 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 counter-trend trader, and I was

looking for things which everybody thought was unlikely.

And my big trade, which made me

my big money when I was at Citibank,

was essentially betting that interest rates would

stay low for a long time after the 2008 crisis.

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 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 Citibank's most profitable trader

in the world, 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's ******, 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 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 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 still am very

interested in inequality and distribution.

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 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 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 consciousness, that line of thought,

which is understanding, asking some questions

about, "What's happening in COVID economically?

How is that going to affect distribution?

How is that going to affect different groups?"

And it's so easy to make money when you do that

because it is a massive driver of the

economy, and economists never talk about it.

And what I saw very quickly, and if you want

you can go back 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 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 if you're 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 monetise, precisely

because of the same two reasons, which are the

same two things I always think 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 recognised in the narrative?

In 2008, I recognised that the narrative wasn't

recognising 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 realise 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, and I also bought quite lot of stocks.

And those have done very, very well.

And 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

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 recognise 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 money.

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 abo- more about why 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 recognising 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 there is something badly wrong

that nobody's noticed, that is the kind of

thing you want to incentivise people to reward.

You know, if you're building a bridge, or let's

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 incentivise people to find that thing, right?

So trading does this phenomenal thing of

really incentivising and rewarding people

for recognising when everybody is wrong on a thing.

And I think there's a real beauty

to that and there's an importance to that.

Because most of our methods of analysis

in society, say, be it in politics or in

the media or in academia, they don't really

incentivise 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.

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.

So when I say, as a trader, you only really

need to recognise 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 side of trading, they

recognise 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 recognise 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.

So 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 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 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... you personally 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 has probably happened to any professional trader.

You think, "******, 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 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 you

might realise, "Uh, but what about this thing?

I haven't looked at that

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

my old trading mentor, in the book he's called, 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 realise that at the end of

the day, opinions that people are not willing

to support with their own, like, financial loss

are often, like, kind of bull****, basically.

And this is what I love about trading.

It force you to not chat bull****, 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.

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?" And it also rewards you for

recognising when other people are wrong.

And the last thing, which I love about it,

is that it recognises the people who are 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 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 wrong.

And, yeah, I love economics, obviously.

And I hired a junior who was, like, fresh

out of Bocconi in Italy, economics graduate,

and we would argue about economics all the time.

And 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 are 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, oh, you're wrong.

No, you're wrong.

Things are going to be fine.

Things aren't going to get worse." 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 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, and predicting terrible

things, and I know things are going to get worse.

And as a trader, you have 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.

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

recognise 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.

And this then brings me to the weaknesses of

trading, which is as much as you are able to be rewarded

and recognised 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.

There 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, I'm Citibank's number

one trader, and I've recognised your economy is

going to collapse, and would you like to do

something about it?" That phone doesn't exist.

What you can do if you want to fix the economy

is basically exactly what I have done, which

is, very, very shortly after becoming

Citibank's most profitable trader, in

2011, I started trying to quit the bank because

wanted to try and stop our society from collapsing.

And what I find super interesting is, as 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 recognised that, you

know, Gary is one of the best traders in the bank.

So you have this thing in trading at a bank called

P&L, profit and loss, and it's very visible.

Spreadsheet goes round, 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 Citibank

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." 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 for one the

biggest banks in the world, surely government and,

and the media and think tanks will want to listen to me.

But the truth is,

really they haven't listened so much.

And I've been out in the world of

public-facing economics for... I actually quit Citibank

in 2014, is when I finally got out, and I've been

speaking very publicly since the beginning of 2020.

And I've really struggled

to get people to listen, really.

And this is 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, my first video on this channel in

2020, 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.

But my predictions were super correct.

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 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's 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, it didn't work out that way.

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,

the austerity crisis happened and is happening.

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 crazy thing happened where basically

nobody or almost nobody in the public sector cared.

And I think this is the

point that I want to make with you.

We've created an economy where people who are

very, very, very, very good at understanding the

economy will collapse can get paid millions of pounds

a year working for any bank in the 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.

And that is the thing which

you... I want you to understand.

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.

And in this public policy world, government,

academia, universities, think tanks, they

want 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.

It's very hard to get into.

It's, you know, it's full of very, very rich people.

And when I was there, I did maths 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

being the best economist, doing the best economic

analysis, aggressively competing, working 100-hour

weeks, waking up at 5:00 AM to be the besteconomist.

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 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 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 you by third division economists

pretending to be Premier League economists.

And that is where we are, to be honest.

And I was hesitant actually

about putting that line in the video, because

I think part of the reason maybe why I've found it

difficult 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 politics and central bank.

And you need to recognise... And the media,

of course, you need to recognise these guys were

at uni with people like me, and they saw most of

their smartest friends go and get these jobs 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, and 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 problem, and you have a field out there like

trading, which is very, very good at aggressively

rewarding people 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 so much easier to bet on things and

make money on things than have any actual influence.

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 you might talk to

because everybody has this ******* number on their

head, this profit and loss number on their head.

And everybody at, for example, Citibank, 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 could very easily recognise, 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 made to be 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 Citibank 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 can't... 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.

Whereas, in this world of, like, public-facing

economics, the, 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 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...

I should probably add quickly before I explain

the plan I developed, 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're wrong, give them the data, give them the

evidence, and we could kinda have a discussion about it.

So I went to do a master's at Oxford, 2017 to 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 normalise very quickly.

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, was

categorically, provably wrong, and I was amazed by that.

So I sent him the data and I said, "Look, we can

see, actually, you've been wrong for 10 years.

Do you want to talk about it?" And the guy was just

not in the slightest bit interested, basically.

So this is the situation we're in, really.

Academia doesn't really care

about being consistently wrong.

Just after the recent Labour government was elected,

I was able to find myself in a room with,

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 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,

he knew who I was because this was not that

long ago, and his instant reply was

to talk to me about his sort of plan for how they

were going to deal with that from a comms perspective,

which was very frustrating for a policy advisor.

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 the media,

and I honestly think most of these guys are

not really trying to be right, unfortunately.

And that's not in a sense their fault.

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 incentivised 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 that... 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.

That's the way that YouTube works.

These guys working in public service are

not really incentivised 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 that I made in 2020.

Go back 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 was Citibank's

best trader in the world,

which is, I'm ******* good

at this and I actually have a good understanding.

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 public.

I needed to build that plan out, so I needed to

figure out how to bring the audience to the YouTube,

which is really why I wrote the book.

And that was phenomenally successful.

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 formally best trader in the world for

Citibank, 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.

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 it's insane and it's frustrating, 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, if you want something, I'll tell you it, 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 five years.

So every single person who has sent me the message,

"Can you please teach me, how to be the best trader

in the world?" has failed to realise that that is

exactly what I've been doing for the last five years.

If you want to understand the economy better

than the economists, 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 will that do to our future?

So that's it, how to be

the best trader in the world.

Leaving it on that note is a little bit depressing.

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.

And that is depressing.

But I've 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.

I don't think I've spoken

about this on the channel before.

People sometimes ask me,

"What are you hopeful about?

What are you hopeful about?" And a few

years ago, just when Rishi Sunak had been

recently... Was he, was he just made Chancellor?

Was he just made Prime Minister?

I got sent to a little military town

in North Yorkshire called Colburn,

which is Rishi Sunak's constituency.

And the plan was for me to go there, to go to a

food bank, 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 that idea because I thought

it was a little bit like poverty p**n, but

I went along with it because 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 supply collection center.

So people were sending in, you know, tinned

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 ****** my plan really, because the

food bank wasn't being used as a food bank, so

it wasn't full of these poverty p**n food bank

users, the poorest people in the area.

But, you know, 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 in 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 boxes to help.

And when I see what's happening today, I spoke

in last week's video about going to the recent

protests outside the hotels and seeing people on

different side of the road shouting at each other,

sometimes I worry 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 Colburn in North Yorkshire,

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, not work.

Make things better.

Support the channel, tell your friends, tell your mum.

Thank you.