Name: Flash Boys
Rating: 4.020833333333333 (120 reviews)
ISBN: 9781410471543

Michael M. 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

Michael Lewis

Greg Talbot

A bellweather book that the treacherous currents from reckless traders is continuing after the U.S. depression in 2008. Michael Lewis takes a very interesting story of how Brad Katsuyama puts together the puzzle of market changes that systematically occured in the high-frequency trading. He goes on his journey, learning about Wall Street culture, educating Banks and investors about how traders are manipulating the market and eventually opening up his own trade. Demonstrating how the tech savy traders, ones whose background came from programming or engineering, allowed them to manipulate market loop holes was really facinating. You get the sense that finance and technology are meeting in a way that is unpredecented, but there are few who can navigate both aisles of thought. Also I liked how Lewis builds up this problem. We explains how the cabling arms race began, and the creative minds that parsed down those microseconds to get real-time advantages. The idea that the traders were prey to other traders is really fascinating. Really great story. A bit portentous, as Lewis adds these layers to the characters and heightens the emotion in a maudlin way. I don't doubt that the event of 9/11 affected many of these men's lives. It's just Lewis finds a motivation for characters, but never explores it a cricial lens. I don't doubt Katsuyama's motives or intentions, but the characterization can be a little flimsy without more voices in the narrative. Would like more content, but as Lewis points out himself, there were many difficulties in getting people to open up on this topic. Revealing, fascinating, thought-provoking and sort of scary. My ideas about the HFT world were challenged in a meaningful way. Lewis opens his book with a quote from television drama "The Wire". So i'll end my review with another Wire quote that speaks to the continued changes in high finance - "“Game’s the Same. Just Got More Fierce.”

The Times, Observer, Financial Times, New Statesman and Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year 2014Michael Lewis, the Master of the Big Story, is back with Flash BoysIf you thought Wall Street was about alpha males standing in trading pits hollering at each other, think again. That world is dead.Now, the world's money is traded by computer code, inside black boxes in heavily guarded buildings. Even the experts entrusted with your cash don't know what's happening to it. And the very few who do aren't about to tell - because they're making a killing.This is a market that's rigged, out of control and out of sight; a market in which the chief need is for speed; and in which traders would sell their grandmothers for a microsecond. Blink, and you'll miss it.In Flash Boys, Michael Lewis tells the explosive story of how one group of ingenious oddballs and misfits set out to expose what was going on. It's the story of what it's like to declare war on some of the richest and most powerful people in the world. It's about taking on an entire system. And it's about the madness that has taken hold of the financial markets today.You won't believe it until you've read it.'I read Michael Lewis for the same reasons I watch Tiger Woods. I'll never play like that. But it's good to be reminded every now and again what genius looks like' - Malcolm Gladwell'Probably the best current writer in America' - Tom WolfeMichael Lewis was born in New Orleans and educated at Princeton University and the London School of Economics. He has written several books including the New York Times bestsellers Liar's Poker, widely considered the book that defined Wall Street during the 1980s, Boomerang and The Big Short, 'probably the single best piece of financial journalism ever written' (Reuters). Lewis is contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and also writes for Vanity Fair and Portfolio magazine.

Rohit Arondekar

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.

Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post-financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, and more controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, they come to this realization separately; but after they discover one another, the flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets. This they do by creating an exchange in which high-frequency trading--source of the most intractable problems--will have no advantage whatsoever.

The characters in Flash Boys are fabulous, each completely different from what you think of when you think "Wall Street guy." Several have walked away from jobs in the financial sector that paid them millions of dollars a year. From their new vantage point they investigate the big banks, the world's stock exchanges, and high-frequency trading firms as they have never been investigated, and expose the many strange new ways that Wall Street generates profits.

The light that Lewis shines into the darkest corners of the financial world may not be good for your blood pressure, because if you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you. But in the end, Flash Boys is an uplifting read. Here are people who have somehow preserved a moral sense in an environment where you don't get paid for that; they have perceived an institutionalized injustice and are willing to go to war to fix it.

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.

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.

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

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.

Flash Boys A Wall Street Revolt

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