Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
"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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Community Reviews
"INTRODUCTION WINDOWS ON THE WORLD"
7/10
Michael Lewis is a spectacular author so the intro completely sells the book and his engaging and quirky writing style. He writes better than anyone speaks. It’s so clean, direct and curious. Unfortunately he doesn’t really give us much info here. We learn than the stock market is a big mystery and that the black boxes doing the trades are secret and we can’t even guess what they are doing. Obviously completely selling me on the mystery, but at the same time unfortunately making this book look like a black box that has no chance at uncovering anything big. But, it’s Michael Lewis, you read it no matter what. It will be fun!
"CHAPTER 1 HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT"
8/10
Very fun chapter about a fiber line being put down between Chicago and New Jersey to make stock trades just milliseconds faster. And the guy doing it just started building it without even contacting potential buyers. At the end most trading companies wanted in. Their system is created around being able to trade the fastest. So they don’t need this and didn’t want this, but once it’s built they have to use it because otherwise they cannot continue leading the industry. This is why companies were very mad about this pointless extra expense while still signing the contract. Any faster line would also just require them to sign onto that even though they probably rather avoid this pointless extra expense
Very fun chapter as it’s about 1 goal and a secret one at that.
"CHAPTER 2 BRAD’S PROBLEM"
7,5/10
Very interesting chapter about stock traders cheating trading companies and investors out of money by in just milliseconds looking at what they bought and then increasing prices on stocks. The reason this is possible is because when you click buy on 10k stocks they will be bought from different people. So one buy may come in milliseconds before another buy. Hence why companies buying info about trades can create software that uses the info to buy the same stocks milliseconds before you actually buy them and then resell them to you or the market for a higher price. Your future huge buy will increase the prices so them buying the stocks comes with basically a 100% guarantee stock price rise. Even though you clicked buy already it takes milliseconds for the info to travel in parts.
This chapter is largely about a Canadian company trying to understand why stocks increase in price AFTER they click buy, but before they receive them milliseconds later.
"CHAPTER 3 RONAN’S PROBLEM"
7,5/10
Cool chapter about another guy who actually works on solving high frequency trade issues. He doesn’t know how extremely important his knowledge is. He’s hired by a company making a program called THOR that is supposed to buy the stocks everywhere at the same millisecond to not increase prices after you click buy. As explained the high frequency stock trade companies see what stocks you want to buy and can manipulate the market. For example, they can buy stocks themselves to raise the prices a millisecond before you buy your stocks. This largely came about because some stock traders in USA during the 2008 crisis refused to pick up their phones so that they wouldn't need to sell the stock of their customers and decrease prices. So the government forced stock trades to go electronic/automatic. Hence why later some companies took advantage of this new law and started reading trades before they fully happened and earning millions that way.
"CHAPTER 4 TRACKING THE PREDATOR"
8,5/10
Bit longer and less structured chapter with more characters and no clear goal or plan. I still feel I underrated the book and the message so far. This chapter makes it clear that this is a HUGE issue and can very well cause a crisis much bigger than the 2008 one. It's all confusing to me in this chapter, but the whole thing is confusing to all! It's supposed to be confusing because otherwise everyone would figure it out and not get tricked into losing money. Stock trades that are simple don't make a guaranteed profit above the market rate because it's stuff everyone already knows and invests in. While knowing trades before they happen is a guaranteed daily profit. You'll never lose money because you know exactly what is going to happen even before it happens. Companies in this industry can have daily profits for years on end without a single bad day. It's practically a single casino in a big city. If you don't make money it's because you are not trying to make money.
"CHAPTER 5 PUTTING A FACE ON HFT"
8/10
Very cool chapter. When Lewis in the intro mentioned some scummy Russian stealing company secrets from Goldman and Sachs I thought it was some Russian mafia supported by Putin. In reality the case is much more simple. Sergej took open source code from various places online and his company forced him to remove any open source copyright statement in the software and place a Goldman and Sachs copyright claim in the software instead. And even small improvements to the software could not be reposted online. So they just took open source without giving back. One day he got a new job so he downloaded some of the software from their servers and uploaded it online to have it available to him, never having opened the files. They got FBI to arrest him. It’s a big case in the media. He was stupid enough to not call a lawyer and instead answered all their questions and even signed a confession - as he was innocent and therefore thought he had nothing to fear. Huge mistake! Really stupid. FBI likes easy cases. They don’t get a case handed to them and then just let it go no matter how iffy the case is. It’s a slam dunk and an easy way to a promotion.
"CHAPTER 6 HOW TO TAKE BILLIONS FROM WALL STREET"
8/10
They are trying to set up a new morally upright trading company that will protect the investors from milliseconds trades. They are hiring weird nerds. Some of the stories are pretty cool as some of these super math nerds have bad social skills so it makes for some interesting anecdotes. The story does stretch a bit by now because the book plot is slowing down. We are in chapters where a company is being set up yet we don’t even know what will happen to this company. They may not even succeed at all. Still, it’s very interesting stuff with a lot of emotional statements about how unfair Wall Street is and how this new moral company will save inventors.
"CHAPTER 7 AN ARMY OF ONE"
7,5/10
High frequency trading is now seen from the perspective of the company these nerds made together. We now get more info about these trades as the company is getting them. There is a lot of fishy stuff going on. The chapter does feel a bit incomplete as it ends on a cliffhanger and we still don’t really know what will happen to this company that tries to protect investors from these stealing practises. The chapter does feel a bit long. We get yet another “9/11 made me see my life from the outside and leave Wall Street” story. Which frankly at this point feels like some sort of inside joke. Surely this is spin. These people first and foremost want to make a profit and be important. They are not working for nothing. They are all millionaires and wicked poweful. Of course they have inner lives, but these 9/11 stories are a bit weird by now. We know they always have a choice to quit. They can even quit and never work a single day again.
"CHAPTER 8 THE SPIDER AND THE FLY"
8/10
The end to the Sergej trial story. Weird that this story is split like this and the chapters about this are just found in various parts of the book. The trial is still not over actually. It started in 2009, but they have arrested him several times and retried it several times. He did lose his money and his wife left him taking the kids with her. This is pretty typical in cases where men lose their jobs and money. Especially nerd husbands with model wives will end up in such situations when they don’t have any money left. She didn't marry him for his charm.
The chapter is a bit melodramatic as it’s yet another story about how he finally “understands” life after being imprisoned so this imprisonment is "actually a great thing for him" and he is constantly smiling. This is like all those 9/11 stories about “finding out that life is not about money”... come one. I get the point here, but it’s not this simple. A single thing doesn’t change a person 180 degrees. And the way all these stories sound exactly the same makes me think that they are trying to imitate each other to fit in.
It’s also curious that Sergej is actually not part of the main story. He has nothing to do with the Canadian company or the later new company created by the people working for the Canadian company. He’s just some programmer who worked on high frequency software. Still I think his story perfectly fits the book as it is about the same industry.
"EPILOGUE RIDING THE WALL STREET TRAIL"
7/10
A bit about a totally new topic, again. This time we return to the signal speed transfers. Wall Street initially didn’t want to use high speed microwave signal towers. They are just high towers that all see each other in the landscape and send very small signals with extreme speed. They work fine for very little information flow, but Wall Street has figured out how to still have a secure market even with little information flow and lots of issues arriving if any one signal fails. They mostly just need to fix the trade before the main trade happens. Since they are just trading stocks they know will be traded in some milliseconds they have some time to correct their trades.
My final opinion on the book
At the end of the day I do feel like the book had one too many personal stories and small emotional opinions from traders on life and suffering or the unfairness of Wall Street. These are insiders complaining about the industry they are helping build. Topic wise you often were sorta in the dark and the big reveals were not fully revealing. Most of the trading still takes place inside black boxes. We kinda understand how these companies are "stealing" money, but not fully. So at the end of the day we largely have more personal stories than actual facts and info. I do feel like Lewis maybe didn't find the right balance in this book and the last chapter really illustrates this as we there are following some random new women who just happen to live close to a microwave tower. Lewis creates fun stories everywhere even with people who are not that fun or important.
But… the info you do gain from this book is crucial to understanding the new high speed trading. It could have been more technical and maybe 2 chapters shorter with 4 fewer main characters, but there is a lot of interesting stuff here. The Sergej story is a good illustration of how Lewis writes. He finds a personal story he feels is interesting and hurries to write it down in a near perfect fashion. Yet many of his stories are unfinished. They are about current people and not historical events. He wrote another book about Trump's White House just months after Trump took office. That one was also a good book but clearly not a full story. Here Sergej is an unfinished story even though 95% of the story is complete. And then Lewis's next book is about Covid-19. Again, I'll read it for sure, but clearly it's not the final ideas and findings on the topic.
I rate this book 4,5. While it's a mindblow as it's a look into a new world with a million in depth examples it's never really a technical illustration of the full industry. It's always a personalized and emotional story explaining things. This of course makes it amazing as a best seller, but for a reader looking for complete info it's not ideal. You do grow a bit tired of the Wall Street men stories. While they are all curious people as they are rich, clever, young and powerful they do all feel very similar to each other at the end. It's still the same world with similar personalities no matter what specific building these Wall Street men were in when 9/11 happened. Some of them must also just be lying about them having personally witnessed 9/11 and about how they were impressed by the ghetto people handing out water. We saw Trump lie about it - and he's the prototypical Wall Street salesman with a golden toilet and plenty of lies. It's a fine thing to spin into a creative life story. So it's a personal book about people who are maybe not that personal, but are rather focused on profit no matter how much they talk about changing the world and saving the little man. They all seemingly randomly ended up in Wall Street while saying that they are "totally not fitting in and hate the corruption". Right… you just stumbled into a $400k job that you knew nothing about instead of becoming a teacher. Again, it's what needs to be said. No one is going to tell you that he loves the corruption in Wall Street and wanted a job there to increase corruption and profit. We are humans, we tell big stories about ourselves. None of these stories are completely true, but they all are about honor, morals, being correct, changing the world and being successful while starting in the back of the line. Cool stories.
Because of these white collar technical jobs the book still ends up feeling a bit empty. It's a technical place where information is hidden. Some moral change is going on with the new company yet at the end it just feels like another trading company appeared without changing much. It's just more money being made in a new way. While the book is amazing writing I don't have a need to reread it. The chapters and points are interesting, but the hollow depth of info and lack of clear plot doesn't really make me want to seek out the info again to understand it. Yet the technical trading details were amazing. There is just only so much you can do to make Wall Street exciting.
7/10
Michael Lewis is a spectacular author so the intro completely sells the book and his engaging and quirky writing style. He writes better than anyone speaks. It’s so clean, direct and curious. Unfortunately he doesn’t really give us much info here. We learn than the stock market is a big mystery and that the black boxes doing the trades are secret and we can’t even guess what they are doing. Obviously completely selling me on the mystery, but at the same time unfortunately making this book look like a black box that has no chance at uncovering anything big. But, it’s Michael Lewis, you read it no matter what. It will be fun!
"CHAPTER 1 HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT"
8/10
Very fun chapter about a fiber line being put down between Chicago and New Jersey to make stock trades just milliseconds faster. And the guy doing it just started building it without even contacting potential buyers. At the end most trading companies wanted in. Their system is created around being able to trade the fastest. So they don’t need this and didn’t want this, but once it’s built they have to use it because otherwise they cannot continue leading the industry. This is why companies were very mad about this pointless extra expense while still signing the contract. Any faster line would also just require them to sign onto that even though they probably rather avoid this pointless extra expense
Very fun chapter as it’s about 1 goal and a secret one at that.
"CHAPTER 2 BRAD’S PROBLEM"
7,5/10
Very interesting chapter about stock traders cheating trading companies and investors out of money by in just milliseconds looking at what they bought and then increasing prices on stocks. The reason this is possible is because when you click buy on 10k stocks they will be bought from different people. So one buy may come in milliseconds before another buy. Hence why companies buying info about trades can create software that uses the info to buy the same stocks milliseconds before you actually buy them and then resell them to you or the market for a higher price. Your future huge buy will increase the prices so them buying the stocks comes with basically a 100% guarantee stock price rise. Even though you clicked buy already it takes milliseconds for the info to travel in parts.
This chapter is largely about a Canadian company trying to understand why stocks increase in price AFTER they click buy, but before they receive them milliseconds later.
"CHAPTER 3 RONAN’S PROBLEM"
7,5/10
Cool chapter about another guy who actually works on solving high frequency trade issues. He doesn’t know how extremely important his knowledge is. He’s hired by a company making a program called THOR that is supposed to buy the stocks everywhere at the same millisecond to not increase prices after you click buy. As explained the high frequency stock trade companies see what stocks you want to buy and can manipulate the market. For example, they can buy stocks themselves to raise the prices a millisecond before you buy your stocks. This largely came about because some stock traders in USA during the 2008 crisis refused to pick up their phones so that they wouldn't need to sell the stock of their customers and decrease prices. So the government forced stock trades to go electronic/automatic. Hence why later some companies took advantage of this new law and started reading trades before they fully happened and earning millions that way.
"CHAPTER 4 TRACKING THE PREDATOR"
8,5/10
Bit longer and less structured chapter with more characters and no clear goal or plan. I still feel I underrated the book and the message so far. This chapter makes it clear that this is a HUGE issue and can very well cause a crisis much bigger than the 2008 one. It's all confusing to me in this chapter, but the whole thing is confusing to all! It's supposed to be confusing because otherwise everyone would figure it out and not get tricked into losing money. Stock trades that are simple don't make a guaranteed profit above the market rate because it's stuff everyone already knows and invests in. While knowing trades before they happen is a guaranteed daily profit. You'll never lose money because you know exactly what is going to happen even before it happens. Companies in this industry can have daily profits for years on end without a single bad day. It's practically a single casino in a big city. If you don't make money it's because you are not trying to make money.
"CHAPTER 5 PUTTING A FACE ON HFT"
8/10
Very cool chapter. When Lewis in the intro mentioned some scummy Russian stealing company secrets from Goldman and Sachs I thought it was some Russian mafia supported by Putin. In reality the case is much more simple. Sergej took open source code from various places online and his company forced him to remove any open source copyright statement in the software and place a Goldman and Sachs copyright claim in the software instead. And even small improvements to the software could not be reposted online. So they just took open source without giving back. One day he got a new job so he downloaded some of the software from their servers and uploaded it online to have it available to him, never having opened the files. They got FBI to arrest him. It’s a big case in the media. He was stupid enough to not call a lawyer and instead answered all their questions and even signed a confession - as he was innocent and therefore thought he had nothing to fear. Huge mistake! Really stupid. FBI likes easy cases. They don’t get a case handed to them and then just let it go no matter how iffy the case is. It’s a slam dunk and an easy way to a promotion.
"CHAPTER 6 HOW TO TAKE BILLIONS FROM WALL STREET"
8/10
They are trying to set up a new morally upright trading company that will protect the investors from milliseconds trades. They are hiring weird nerds. Some of the stories are pretty cool as some of these super math nerds have bad social skills so it makes for some interesting anecdotes. The story does stretch a bit by now because the book plot is slowing down. We are in chapters where a company is being set up yet we don’t even know what will happen to this company. They may not even succeed at all. Still, it’s very interesting stuff with a lot of emotional statements about how unfair Wall Street is and how this new moral company will save inventors.
"CHAPTER 7 AN ARMY OF ONE"
7,5/10
High frequency trading is now seen from the perspective of the company these nerds made together. We now get more info about these trades as the company is getting them. There is a lot of fishy stuff going on. The chapter does feel a bit incomplete as it ends on a cliffhanger and we still don’t really know what will happen to this company that tries to protect investors from these stealing practises. The chapter does feel a bit long. We get yet another “9/11 made me see my life from the outside and leave Wall Street” story. Which frankly at this point feels like some sort of inside joke. Surely this is spin. These people first and foremost want to make a profit and be important. They are not working for nothing. They are all millionaires and wicked poweful. Of course they have inner lives, but these 9/11 stories are a bit weird by now. We know they always have a choice to quit. They can even quit and never work a single day again.
"CHAPTER 8 THE SPIDER AND THE FLY"
8/10
The end to the Sergej trial story. Weird that this story is split like this and the chapters about this are just found in various parts of the book. The trial is still not over actually. It started in 2009, but they have arrested him several times and retried it several times. He did lose his money and his wife left him taking the kids with her. This is pretty typical in cases where men lose their jobs and money. Especially nerd husbands with model wives will end up in such situations when they don’t have any money left. She didn't marry him for his charm.
The chapter is a bit melodramatic as it’s yet another story about how he finally “understands” life after being imprisoned so this imprisonment is "actually a great thing for him" and he is constantly smiling. This is like all those 9/11 stories about “finding out that life is not about money”... come one. I get the point here, but it’s not this simple. A single thing doesn’t change a person 180 degrees. And the way all these stories sound exactly the same makes me think that they are trying to imitate each other to fit in.
It’s also curious that Sergej is actually not part of the main story. He has nothing to do with the Canadian company or the later new company created by the people working for the Canadian company. He’s just some programmer who worked on high frequency software. Still I think his story perfectly fits the book as it is about the same industry.
"EPILOGUE RIDING THE WALL STREET TRAIL"
7/10
A bit about a totally new topic, again. This time we return to the signal speed transfers. Wall Street initially didn’t want to use high speed microwave signal towers. They are just high towers that all see each other in the landscape and send very small signals with extreme speed. They work fine for very little information flow, but Wall Street has figured out how to still have a secure market even with little information flow and lots of issues arriving if any one signal fails. They mostly just need to fix the trade before the main trade happens. Since they are just trading stocks they know will be traded in some milliseconds they have some time to correct their trades.
My final opinion on the book
At the end of the day I do feel like the book had one too many personal stories and small emotional opinions from traders on life and suffering or the unfairness of Wall Street. These are insiders complaining about the industry they are helping build. Topic wise you often were sorta in the dark and the big reveals were not fully revealing. Most of the trading still takes place inside black boxes. We kinda understand how these companies are "stealing" money, but not fully. So at the end of the day we largely have more personal stories than actual facts and info. I do feel like Lewis maybe didn't find the right balance in this book and the last chapter really illustrates this as we there are following some random new women who just happen to live close to a microwave tower. Lewis creates fun stories everywhere even with people who are not that fun or important.
But… the info you do gain from this book is crucial to understanding the new high speed trading. It could have been more technical and maybe 2 chapters shorter with 4 fewer main characters, but there is a lot of interesting stuff here. The Sergej story is a good illustration of how Lewis writes. He finds a personal story he feels is interesting and hurries to write it down in a near perfect fashion. Yet many of his stories are unfinished. They are about current people and not historical events. He wrote another book about Trump's White House just months after Trump took office. That one was also a good book but clearly not a full story. Here Sergej is an unfinished story even though 95% of the story is complete. And then Lewis's next book is about Covid-19. Again, I'll read it for sure, but clearly it's not the final ideas and findings on the topic.
I rate this book 4,5. While it's a mindblow as it's a look into a new world with a million in depth examples it's never really a technical illustration of the full industry. It's always a personalized and emotional story explaining things. This of course makes it amazing as a best seller, but for a reader looking for complete info it's not ideal. You do grow a bit tired of the Wall Street men stories. While they are all curious people as they are rich, clever, young and powerful they do all feel very similar to each other at the end. It's still the same world with similar personalities no matter what specific building these Wall Street men were in when 9/11 happened. Some of them must also just be lying about them having personally witnessed 9/11 and about how they were impressed by the ghetto people handing out water. We saw Trump lie about it - and he's the prototypical Wall Street salesman with a golden toilet and plenty of lies. It's a fine thing to spin into a creative life story. So it's a personal book about people who are maybe not that personal, but are rather focused on profit no matter how much they talk about changing the world and saving the little man. They all seemingly randomly ended up in Wall Street while saying that they are "totally not fitting in and hate the corruption". Right… you just stumbled into a $400k job that you knew nothing about instead of becoming a teacher. Again, it's what needs to be said. No one is going to tell you that he loves the corruption in Wall Street and wanted a job there to increase corruption and profit. We are humans, we tell big stories about ourselves. None of these stories are completely true, but they all are about honor, morals, being correct, changing the world and being successful while starting in the back of the line. Cool stories.
Because of these white collar technical jobs the book still ends up feeling a bit empty. It's a technical place where information is hidden. Some moral change is going on with the new company yet at the end it just feels like another trading company appeared without changing much. It's just more money being made in a new way. While the book is amazing writing I don't have a need to reread it. The chapters and points are interesting, but the hollow depth of info and lack of clear plot doesn't really make me want to seek out the info again to understand it. Yet the technical trading details were amazing. There is just only so much you can do to make Wall Street exciting.
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