** spoiler alert ** Good intro book if you're want to understand front running, rebate arbitrage and slow market arbitrage. Especially if you're coming from web3 space and know from history perspective what's had been before MEV on Ethereum and why it's real opportunity run arbitrage and front run others. >The speed of light in fiber allows a trader to send an order to New York from Chicago and back in 12 milliseconds. >The fastest route traders have been able to access moves at 14.65 milliseconds on what they refer to as The Gold Route. >The transformation of the stock market is such that what you see on your screen is an illusion due to changes that occur in milliseconds. >Someone out there was using the fact that stock market orders arrived at different times at different exchanges to front-run orders from one market to another. >He knew how information moved between different locations; it traveled in a zig-zag path from one telecom carrier to the next. During a call from New York to Florida, for instance, information moves through multiple pieces of equipment. >Sergey Aleynikov joined Goldman Sachs to solve three major issues. First, he was to create a means by which translated data from the 13 public exchanges could be viewed as though it was coming from a single stream. >Front running refers to a situation where a trader running on high-frequency equipment identifies your trading choices from one place and races you to the next place. >Rebate arbitrage was the second fraudulent trading activity they recognized. This activity involved using the increased complexity of Wall Street to make trades without providing the corresponding liquidity. >The third and worst trick they identified was “slow market arbitrage.” It occurred when a high-frequency trader was able to see changes in stock exchange rates on one machine and make transactions on another.

What I really loved about this book was the writing. The narrative was focused on Brad Katsuyama and how he along with others discovered the means through which High-Frequency Trading(HFT) firms were milking the stock market. I had heard of HFT and flash crashes especially the one involving Knight Capital Group but like most financial and economic events didn't probe deeper. After reading Flash Boys I have a slightly better understanding of what HFT firms primarily do by which I mean what their main advantage is over traditional traders. Although the book was focused on Brad and the founding of IEX there was still quite a lot of insights and information. What I found interesting is how one of Brad's partner investigated the history and found that this kind of greedy trading strategies have been in use for a long time. Like bugs in a piece of software code, they get patched until the fix is exploited to find more bugs. I have mixed feelings about HFT and probably need to read more. In a dark way I think it's nice that physicists, mathematicians and scientists are making tons of money even though the means are more than unfair. I'm looking forward to reading more books by Michael Lewis and also on the topic of HFT.

I love this book. It's a perfect balance of techie and thriller. I received this book after we hosted a "Break the Banks" hackathon right in front of the charging bull a stone throw from Wall Street. This book is a deep dive into the "problem" of high-frequency trading, and how the key players built IEX as a solution. It's a fascinating story and definitely worth a read if you're interested in technology or finance.

Well written although somewhat repetitive narrative about corrupt (yet legal) Wall Street trading practices.

As someone completely unfamiliar with High Frequency Trading (HFT) before reading this book, I found this book easy to digest. After reading it, I have an understanding of the gist of HFT strategies and how HFT firms take advantage of investors. It's even more clear to me now how incentivized banks are to screw the people they claim to represent, and how hard it is to change those incentives. Michael Lewis introduces a series of individuals chapter by chapter, as these individuals all come together to start and build the IEX stock exchange - an alternative exchange that uses information elucidated earlier in the book to create an exchange that defangs high frequency traders. While I found the narrative structure to be very compelling and fun to read, it is inherently limited in scope to the people Lewis is writing about. I still feel just in the dark about who is really to blame for HFT as I was before reading the book. I would have liked to see more of an "inside story." The individuals working for IEX are all cast as outsiders working together to solve the puzzle of HFT, rather than as clear authorities on the subject. I also found Lewis' portrayal of some of the characters to be over the top. He frames some of the individuals' paths to their employment at IEX as a patriotic "call of duty" post-9/11 that I found to be pretty excessive. Effective for story telling, sure, but less so for reporting on the facts. Overall, I found this book to be a fun, easy read and a nice introduction to the topic of HFT. However, if I really wanted more of the facts, I might look elsewhere.

Read in two all-too-quick sittings. The world needs more excellent non-fiction writers like this who can take complex stories and tell them so well. I agree wholeheartedly with his overarching thesis that our economic system should be not only more transparent, but easier to understand for the everyday citizen.

Great to understand high frequency trading and how within wall street the tendency is to chat the system rather than fixing it.

If you ever listened to the Radiolab episode about high frequency trading, you should give this a listen. Lewis goes into much more detail on the same subject, including the concept of "dark pools" which I was unaware of. It's crazy how differeny things are from when I learned about the stock market in high school, but this one does an entertaining job of explaining why.