Michael Lewis

Argues that post-crisis Wall Street continues to be controlled by large banks and explains how a small, diverse group of Wall Street men have banded together to reform the financial markets.

A Wall Street Revolt

Flash Boys

Ryan

Fantastic story! The history is shocking and it really teaches you a thing or two about the stock market.

Chris Raastad

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.

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

Cindy Lieberman

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

Maggie Delano

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.

#1 New York Times Bestseller — With a new Afterword "Guaranteed to make blood boil." —Janet Maslin, New York Times In Michael Lewis's game-changing bestseller, a small group of Wall Street iconoclasts realize that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders. They band together—some of them walking away from seven-figure salaries—to investigate, expose, and reform the insidious new ways that Wall Street generates profits. If you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you.

Chris Aldrich

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.

Omar Fernandez

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

Adam

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.

Flash Boys A Wall Street Revolt

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