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Flash Boys – A Wall Street Revolt Paperback – 13 March 2015

by Michael Lewis (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 17,009 ratings
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"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.

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  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    W. W. Norton & Company
  4. Publication date
    13 March 2015
  5. Dimensions
    13.97 x 2.54 x 21.08 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    0393351599
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0393351590
  8. See all details
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  1. 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.
    Highlighted by 3,744 Kindle readers
  2. Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice.
    Highlighted by 2,969 Kindle readers
  3. “When something becomes obvious to you,” he said, “you immediately think surely someone else is doing this.”
    Highlighted by 987 Kindle readers
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Product description

Review

Flash Boys richly deserves to be the first chapter in a new discussion of market rules and abuses... Lewis raises troubling and necessary questions.-- "The American Conservative"

[Lewis's] ability to find compelling characters and tell a great story through their eyes is unparalleled. He can untangle complex subjects like few others. His prose sparkles.--Joe Nocera "New York Times"

[Lewis] is a top-flight storyteller.--Lev Grossman "Time"

A beautiful narrative, so well-written. You've got to get this.--Jon Stewart "The Daily Show"

A fast-paced tale backed by gutsy reporting.--Tina Jordan "Entertainment Weekly"

A tour de force that will grab and hold your attention like the best of thrillers.--Jon Talton "Seattle Times"

As always, Lewis simplifies the complex--and makes it fascinating.-- "People"

Entirely engaging... Illuminates a part of Wall Street that has generally done business in the shadows.-- "New York Review of Books"

If you read one business book this year, make it Flash Boys.--David Sirota "Salon"

Important to public debate about Wall Street... in exposing what one of his central characters calls the 'Pandora's box of ridiculousness' that financial exchanges have become.--Philip Delves Broughton "Wall Street Journal"

Lewis simply tells the truth.--Will Deener "Dallas News"

Lewis writes about the resilience of underdogs, even in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. He's doing essential work, and anything that embarrasses fat cats and encourages reform is a flash in the right direction.--Julie Hinds "Detroit Free Press"

Lewis, as always, is exceedingly good at describing the complexities and absurdities of the subculture he portrays here... A deeply entertaining book, and one that illuminates how much our world has changed in less than a decade.--Hector Tobar "Los Angeles Times"

Michael Lewis does it again . . . fascinating.--Steven Pearlstein "Washington Post"

Michael Lewis has another hit on his hands.--Zachary Warmbrodt and Dave Clarke "Politico"

Michael Lewis is a genius, and his book will give high-frequency trading a much-needed turn under the microscope.--Kevin Roose "New York Magazine"

Michael Lewis is one of the premier chroniclers of our age.-- "Huffington Post"

Michael Lewis knows how to tell a story.-- "Vanity Fair"

Reads like a thriller . . . Lewis is the kind of writer who creates his own weather system.--John Lanchester "London Review of Books"

Recommended... Entertaining.-- "San Francisco Chronicle"

Remarkable... Michael Lewis has a spellbinding talent for finding emotional dramas in complex, highly technical subjects.-- "Financial Times"

Score one for the humans! Critics of high speed, computer-driven trading have a new champion.-- "CNN Money"

When it comes to narrative skill, a reporter's curiosity and an uncanny instinct for the pulse of the zeitgeist, Lewis is a triple threat.--James B. Stewart "New York Times"

Who knew high-frequency trading was such a sexy subject?-- "Bloomberg Business Week"

About the Author

Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (13 March 2015)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393351599
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393351590
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 2.54 x 21.08 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 17,009 ratings

About the author

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Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of The Undoing Project, Liar's Poker, Flash Boys, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Home Game and The Big Short, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their three children.

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Top reviews from Australia

Mister Mistral
5.0 out of 5 stars Required reading for EVERYONE.
Reviewed in Australia on 9 June 2016
Verified Purchase
A story that had to be told about the legal theft of YOUR money that continues to occur as this is written. As usual, the culprits hire an army of spin doctors to obscure the truth as the thievery continues, with the big end of town on Wall Street complicit in the scam, denying responsibility while investors are taken for a ride to the tune of $billions. Disgraceful that the people who feature in this narrative who've tried to expose and fix this situation have not had higher visibility in mainstream media or in the US Congress.
2 people found this helpful
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Michelle
4.0 out of 5 stars Great Read
Reviewed in Australia on 2 September 2018
Verified Purchase
My rating is based on a personal interest in the machinations of the financial markets. The drama is often like The Real Housewives of Any City but without the screeching. Michael Lewis as always, makes a droll and difficult subject easy to understand.

It is incredible to even consider that the numbers we see, as indications of prices could not possibly be a true reflection of the market and can change in a milliseconds? Who knew that a millisecond could be so profitable? Most of all, it is clear that where a buck can be made, there will always be those who will try to game the system.

Any story of a group of disrupters always makes for an interesting read. Along the way, you get to learn some interesting things about stock markets in the age of technology.
3 people found this helpful
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DonX
5.0 out of 5 stars A clear picture of HFT, exchanges, and market
Reviewed in Australia on 18 November 2014
Verified Purchase
It's an eye opener, now I understand the way HFT works and why if affects the return of other investors. While I don't necessarily agree with Michael's arguments that HFT firms are to blame, and hedge funds and mutual funds are innocent victims, the whole picture is becoming a lot clearer after reading this book.
One person found this helpful
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S.M.
5.0 out of 5 stars astounding
Reviewed in Australia on 3 April 2014
Verified Purchase
I'm a technologist who formerly worked in international futures markets when they changed from manual pits to purely electronic, so not all of this was unknown to me, but the scale of the issue is simply breathtaking. If you're a technology person, or a finance person, or simply interested in where your pension fund money has disappeared to, read this tale.
2 people found this helpful
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Ian Thompson
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, but the end feels rushed.
Reviewed in Australia on 28 May 2014
Verified Purchase
I like Michael Lewis' writing style and his power of description, but even his eloquence is sometimes stumped by the complexity of the issues surrounding High Frequency Trading. That aside, this is a rip-roaring read about Wall Street's latest invention to strip money out of the economy and pensioner's savings without doing any actual work or providing any value in return.

As one of the protagonists of the Flash Boy's story discovers, Wall Street has always been rigged, it's only the "how" that changes. This is the story of the modern day "how", and the people on the "outside" who discovered what was going on, and their quest to correct it.

Parts of the book will make your blood boil, others will have you slack jawed at the audacity,hubris and ambition exhibited by the players in this game. But mostly you will be concerned that the world's largest capital markets are being systematically broken for the benefit of a few, the ramifications of which is much larger than the plunder of a few tens of billions of dollars.
6 people found this helpful
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Nick Warne
5.0 out of 5 stars I Wish Michael Lewis Could Write Faster
Reviewed in Australia on 15 June 2015
Verified Purchase
...which of course he can't.

Since I was captivated by Liars' Poker back in the eighties, I've read every one of his books. This one has been as great as the rest.

Now, what am I going to do until the next?
One person found this helpful
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Citizen-Gladiator
3.0 out of 5 stars This let me know there was a problem. It ...
Reviewed in Australia on 2 November 2015
Verified Purchase
This let me know there was a problem. It is to do with split second computer fraud. But I did not come away with a clear understanding of exactly what the cleverest fraudsters in the room really did.
One person found this helpful
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Ron Cruickshank
5.0 out of 5 stars What a fantastic book!
Reviewed in Australia on 16 October 2015
Verified Purchase
I challenge anyone to read Flash Boys and a) not be enthralled and b) not come away thinking that yet again the Financial system is allowed to screw over the average hard working American.
One person found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Kindleのお客様
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente
Reviewed in Mexico on 30 March 2024
Verified Purchase
Muy buen libro.
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Rafael Loureiro
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing storytelling
Reviewed in Brazil on 1 April 2021
Verified Purchase
Even for the ones who don’t know much about the stock market, the book is really easy to read, with a simple pick of words for everyone understand what’s going on. Really recommend if you like stock market stories and a good story at all
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Akshim
5.0 out of 5 stars Hit the "buy now" button ASAP.
Reviewed in India on 27 March 2021
Verified Purchase
Such an incredible read it was. The gripping and enthralling story. And the biggest bow goes to the people who wanted transparency in the stock market orders as well as Michael Lewis - For literally just digging up the facts and the events as they happened in such an incredible manner. The research Michael has done for this book is simply breathtaking. This book is not just a casual read, it is a learning. I, personally, did not know anything about the HFTs (primarily because of the new regulations by the market regulators now-a-days) and the dark pools that the companies and the stock exchanges had/have created. Just a mind blowing book. The only tinie tiny minor downside is the penguin publications. The book quality and the page quality could've been better (if some other publishing house would've done it). But who cares because you literally have to think of some excuse to put this book down. Done with this, next two Michael Lewis targets - The big short and liar's poker. Reviews coming soon for them.
Conclusion - Well as "Inventors" of the IEX stock exchange would say : Pick up the f*****g book.
2 people found this helpful
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Abacus
5.0 out of 5 stars Great insights into the opaque world of High Frequency Trading
Reviewed in the United States on 21 June 2017
Verified Purchase
This is a classic Michael Lewis book. It reads quickly. The topic is fascinating. The content is extremely insightful as the true technicalities of High Frequency Trading are either not covered or not understood even by the investment related media.

Michael Lewis book follows three intertwined narratives.

First, he opens the black box on what is high frequency trading (HFT). How it works, how it extracts rent profits from investors in the stock markets. There are currently over 50 stock market exchanges: 13 are public, and the rest are dark pools. The more market exchanges there are, the more arbitrage and front running opportunities there are for high frequency traders (HFTs) to exploit.

Second, it narrates the history of the Investors Exchange (IEX) founded by a righteous quant type bunch who decided to start a stock market exchange that would eliminate all the HFT rent seeking strategies so to deliver a fairer market price to institutional investors trading on their platform.

And, third it follows the strange life and career of the Russian computer programmer Sergey Aleynikov. He worked for two years for Goldman Sachs from 2007 to 2009 to render their computer trading systems faster and more competitive within the high speed world of HFT. He left Goldman Sachs with his computer codes that Goldman Sachs deemed proprietary. Goldman Sachs had him arrested by the FBI in 2009, and ever since he has been either engaged in trials prosecuted by Goldman Sachs or in jail.

This third narrative also covers the ambiguous and evolving engagement of Goldman Sachs in HFT. At first, it attempts to become an engaged competitive high frequency trader itself. And, that is when it hired Aleynikov to improve its trading computers’ speed. Later, it will realize that chasing the HFTs in a speed competition is a losing proposition. And, it will become the only major Wall Street investment bank to fully support the Investors Exchange (IEX) to counter and neutralize the nefarious impact of HFTs.

Going back to the first narrative, High Frequency Trading extracts rent profits from institutional investors (and their retail investors) in three ways.

The first way is by beating the investor to the stock market gateway and quickly buying and reselling the stock to the investor at a small profit. They call it “electronic front-running.” To do that, you need to be fast. That is where the nano second trading speed comes in. The “co-location” of the HFTs servers next to the ones of the exchanges plays a major role by reducing the electronic distance travelled and maximizing trading speed.

The second way is by exploiting a complex system of kickback and rebates on trades implemented by the various exchanges themselves. They call it “rebate arbitrage.”

The third way appears similar to electronic front-running, except that the HFTs exploit minute price discrepancies between the various exchanges before the exchanges themselves have had a chance of correcting those. They call it “slow market arbitrage”. Apparently, of the three rent seeking strategies this is the most lucrative one for the HFTs.

The above strategies are implemented within a market universe that is alien to individual investors and most institutional investors. This market universe has interesting characteristics. Its foundational one is an unfathomable stock trading speed measured in the 1/10000 of a second. Such speed relies on extra fast fiber optic networks and computer servers located extremely closely to the servers of the stock exchange themselves. Another characteristic is the HFTs purchasing customer order flows from the Wall Street brokerage houses. The latter now make more money from selling those customer order flows to HFTs than from trading itself. In essence, Wall Street sells proprietary customer order information to the HFTs, so the HFTs can front run these same customers (their stock orders). And, somehow SEC laws have still not caught up to this apparent infraction of the integrity of the stock markets. That’s even though the mentioned HFTs rent seeking strategies are at least a decade old.

So, next time when you think your brokerage house is acting in your best interest, think again. It is acting in the best interest of the HFTs and itself by making money on selling your order information to the HFTs. And, we are talking millions if not billions of dollars in total annual revenues for the Wall Street brokerage houses.

Going back to the second narrative, to correct for all those markets flaws exploited by the HFTs, Brad Katsuyama, a former trader at Royal Bank of Canada, will create a “fair” exchange: the Investors Exchange (IEX) in 2012. This exchange takes specific infrastructure measures to entirely eliminate all the exploitative advantages of HFTs including: 1) ensuring market pricing data arrives at external points of presence simultaneously; 2) slightly delaying market pricing data to all customers (no co-location, HFTs servers are not allowed proximate to the IEX servers); and 3) IEX refuses to pay for order flow and does not offer related trade rebates of any kind. The majority of Wall Street banks and HFTs will do everything possible to kill this emerging “clean” exchange in its infancy. This is because they collectively extract yearly rent-profit in the $billions on the back of retail and institutional investors. However, as mentioned one of the main player will break rank as Goldman Sachs ultimately decides to support IEX by routing a good portion of its trades to IEX. Goldman Sachs understands that what IEX is doing to restoring integrity in the equity markets is critical. And, as a result IEX survives. Nevertheless, it is not entirely encouraging when evaluating how much impact IEX has in restoring the integrity of the US equities markets since it captures less than 3% of its volume to this day. In other words, over 97% of such market trading volume still is done under the exploitative rent-seeking system abused by the HFTs (electronic front running, etc.) and the other Wall Street banks (making more money from selling their customer order flows than actual trading).

The third narrative about Sergey Aleynikov and Goldman Sachs evolving position regarding HFT is very interesting because of its ambiguity. Aleynikov used mainly open source software to develop his codes to improve Goldman Sachs computer speed. When he accepts an offer to join Teza Technologies (who offered to triple his compensation from $400k to $1.2 million), he decides to copy and take his computer code on a USB drive. At such point, Goldman Sachs aggressively pursues him (gets him arrested by the FBI, tried, and jailed). At the time, Goldman Sachs considered the mentioned computer codes to be proprietary and critical to its competitive position within the HFT environment.

Michael Lewis will engage with many industry insiders (HFTs, computer programmers, etc.) and solicit their opinion on whether Aleynikov was truly guilty of stealing proprietary company codes or not. Almost unanimously this crowd of insiders advance that Aleynikov was innocent. And, that his practice of copying his own open source based codes when he moved to another employer is absolutely standard within the computer programming community. Aleynikov also indicated that he had no use for Goldman’s proprietary codes as they were very cumbersome catered to Goldman’s antiquated legacy computer systems. When Michael Lewis talked to outsiders like institutional investors, they were far less lenient. And, they typically considered that Aleynikov was clearly guilty of stealing proprietary codes.

As indicated, Goldman Sachs at first vigorously pursues Aleynikov in order to protect its position in terms of trading speed within the world of HFT. Much later, when it decides to give up on the speed competition and decides to do just the opposite by supporting IEX, Goldman Sachs does not pursue Aleynikov as adamantly anymore. But, by then the legal system takes a life of its own. As a result, some of the related lawsuits are still going on to this day. Aleynikov is nearly bankrupt and has an online legal defense fund to raise money to mount his defense and reclaim his innocence.
40 people found this helpful
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Yena Apithy
5.0 out of 5 stars You will not be disappointed
Reviewed in Japan on 8 September 2022
Verified Purchase
As Michael tells stories the way onlyhe does it, the narrative takes you from the backdoors of rooms full of servers managed by IT geeks to the trading floors of hedge funds and HFT managed by this new breed of traders, geeky, smart, playing with flash crashes and a lot of money.
Nice insights a lessons for life for wall Streeter and non wall Streeters alike. Enjoy.
It's always about the people and Michael knows how to bring each character at the forefront of the action and the STORY.
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