For years, Chris Cathey lived in a world where risk could be measured, monitored and managed.
As a trader, he learned to read markets, assess probabilities and make decisions under pressure. Risk was part of the job. Some positions worked. Others did not. Losses could be limited, strategies could be adjusted and exposure could be reduced.
But life does not always offer the same protections.
In Bulls, Bears and Pigs: Trading, Grief and Reinvention, Cathey looks back on a remarkable journey that took him from a working-class upbringing in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Cambridge University and eventually onto the trading floors of Goldman Sachs. His career placed him in an environment driven by speed, judgment, competition and uncertainty.
Then came a kind of risk no financial model could prepare him for.
A Life Built Around Probability
Cathey’s relationship with risk began long before his professional career. Growing up, he was exposed to betting, odds and probability through family members, experiences that helped shape the way he later approached trading.
After studying Natural Sciences at Cambridge and completing a PhD in Chemistry, he moved into finance and joined Goldman Sachs. What followed was a thirteen-year career in trading, where he learned that success often depended on understanding not only markets, but people.
The trading floor was demanding. Decisions had consequences. Mistakes needed to be acknowledged quickly. Discipline mattered.
That mindset worked in finance.
It could not protect him from grief.
The Loss That Changed Everything
Cathey’s wife, Claire, died from breast cancer, leaving him to raise their four children as a single father.
Suddenly, the language of risk meant something entirely different.
There was no position to close, no exposure to reduce and no strategy that could reverse what had happened. The tools that had helped him navigate financial uncertainty could not remove personal pain.
This is where Bulls, Bears and Pigs moves beyond the boundaries of a traditional trading memoir.
The book becomes a story about love, responsibility, grief and the difficult work of rebuilding life when the future you expected disappears.
When Priorities Are Repriced
Financial markets constantly reprice assets as new information arrives. In a very different way, major life events can reprice our priorities.
Career success, money, reputation and ambition can feel enormously important until something happens that changes the scale completely.
For Cathey, loss brought family into sharper focus. He eventually returned to Newcastle and concentrated on raising his children and creating a new direction for his life.
That reinvention is central to the memoir.
It is not presented as a simple transformation or an easy recovery. Instead, it emerges from experience: a recognition that life after loss must still be lived, even when it looks nothing like the life that came before.
A Memoir About More Than Markets
Readers interested in finance will find an insider’s perspective on trading culture, risk-taking, major market events and the intense world of investment banking.
But readers do not need a background in finance to connect with this story.
At its heart, Bulls, Bears and Pigs asks a universal question: What do you do when everything you thought you understood about risk stops being enough?
Chris Cathey spent years learning how to manage uncertainty.
Then life taught him that some risks cannot be hedged.
They can only be faced.
Discover the full story in Bulls, Bears and Pigs: Trading, Grief and Reinvention by Chris Cathey.
Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX34WRSD/
