Michael Lewis' Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt - An Insightful Look at the Financial Industry

Amazon Customer: This is problably one of the wildest stories I have ever read about the financial markets.
Amazing to know this insight information, so you better understand why its virtually impossible to beat the big boys in trading.

Netherlands on Nov 26, 2023

Niels: Dafür ist Michael Lewis ohnehin bekannt. Einige Passagen waren für mich etwas langatmig aber ich bin mit dem Metier vertraut, so ist es für alle gut verständlich.

Germany on Nov 17, 2023

Rahul barangeRahul barange: Good quality book

India on Nov 01, 2023

Mauricio: Good

Mexico on Aug 13, 2023

Abacus: 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...

United States on Jun 21, 2017

Todd B. Marshall: This book is an interesting "story" ... but it leaves me very suspicious. If I were sitting in the meeting where it was first proposed that HFT be tried I would have been able to immediately describe how it could be (and should be) neutered as a tactic ... at virtually zero cost.

HFT requires two things: (1) timing predictability and (2) being able to "cut in line". Both of those needs are easily made impossible. Thus, a process can be designed that makes both impossible. And just like the whole HFT process requires quick adaptation, the process could have easily imposed a fix as an adaptation. Further, IEX could have designed their process with such an adaptation even if the others didn't. Their strategy would have remained the same: Attract business by being fair to everyone ... i.e. treating everyone the same ... i.e. unpredictable and sufficiently long latency ... not just in the order time stamping, but throughout the system responsiveness. Investing is not something about changing trading decisions within mili-seconds of committing to them. It is, by definition, a much longer term decision. Thus, any latency making all players equal would have no effect on the...

United States on Jan 30, 2017

Athan: Over the past 24 years, Michael Lewis has enjoyed five-star success writing four-star, three-star and occasionally two-star books of the fly-on-the wall variety.

Flash Boys breaks this mould. It is a genuine contribution.

I can pass judgement because my life has run parallel to his books. I read "Liars' Poker" as a college junior in 1990 and used it as a manual to get a job at Salomon Brothers. Six years there was parlayed into a career mostly in finance, but by the time he was writing the "New New Thing" I was already a co-founder and CEO of a disruptive business called book2eat.com. When "Boomerang" came out I was trading Greek government bonds. And now "Flash Boys" is coming out I've just accepted a job to do electronic trading.

In all his efforts that I can judge (so I'll have to leave Moneyball out) he's so far been unfailingly entertaining, but very consistent in getting the wrong end of the stick. Let's take it one by one:

The subject of "Liars' Poker," Salomon Brothers, not only pioneered the use of financial mathematics in the pricing of plain securities like bonds, not only invented all vanilla derivatives such as swaps, it also invented live...

United Kingdom on May 15, 2014