It's All Rigged Folks!The seemingly democratic 'market' is a class system and the name of the game is speed. There is a hierarchy of speed in place and the haves are looting the have-nots.Taleb made a name for himself ridiculing the markets, the experts and the traders - attributing whatever money these blokes made to dumb luck. Nobody can game the market, he said. We all liked that. Yes, they might make money, but they sure as hell do not deserve to be smug doing so. Plus, at least we can also

On Reading & RatingFor my money (which, since I'm neither a Wall Street tycoon, nor a Russian coding genius, isn't a whole heck of a lot) this isn't Michael Lewis' best work. My reading experience was a mix of fascination and frustration. Why the latter? Lewis covers (and condemns) a whole bunch of different things. Agreement aside, as a human who reads books, this lack of distinction is what resulted in the bulk of my star-docking (I'd give it a 2.5/5 if half-stars were street legal aro...

Honestly investment and stock exchange is something that bores me to death so I was putting off having to read this one for a while and today I forced myself to get it over with. I was surprised to find that the book was really interesting though, I had no clue about High Frequency Traders or dark pools or even the arrest of Sergey Aleynikov which is honestly absurd. I think the information was accessible and easy to understand but I don't think it would be interesting to anyone who didn't have

“Shining a light creates shadows” ― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys There was a temptation to write my review before I had finished reading. To get there first before other reviewers. This race to be first, however, sometimes requires a pause, a reflection, about what speed, transparency, fairness actually requires from individuals and companies. The world of finance is often opaque. Between executing a trade with your broker and another individual accepting that trade through their broker there is a

Michael Lewis explains how the stock market became such an incomprehensibly unfair system as a natural byproduct of human greed and animosity.At one brief point in history, we viewed investing as a way to make the world better off for everybody involved. But then Wall Street's greed took over, starving for instant gratification, and turned investing into a zero-sum game: the only way they see a win is if ordinary, hard working, productive members of society lose.In Flash Boys, the financial syst...

In all honesty I picked this up as Wall Street and the stock market are something I have an intetest in but little acual knowledge of. Whilst definitely an interesting read and providing the right amount of shock factor, I felt like I was just skimming some areas without digesting any of the information. Maybe this is to do with my own limited understanding, but it felt like the core story was dragged and repeated to reach the subsuquent length. This overtelling led to any feeling of shock at th...

Is there such a thing as an honest man on Wall Street? Insofar as greed and self-interest is a part of human nature and something that we all succumb to from time to time, Michael Lewis, in his book “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt”, seems to think that the answer is “yes”.In his latest critique on Wall Street culture, Lewis highlights the almost-accidental heroism of a handful of Wall Street insiders who uncover an insidious new trend in Wall Street that makes it easier for banks to steal lots...

Love Michael Lewis and his narrative style, but think the hyperbole and indignation have gone a little overboard here. I am no fan of HFT and they are definitely a thorn in my professional side, but the HFT problem is just noise. The heros/victims in the book are mostly firms that used to take 4-6 cents per share as commissions, and make even more for positioning trades, who now take 1-2 cents per share and maybe give up half a cent to the HFT shops. The argument goes something like "it isn't fa...

The new book by Michael Lewis criticizing high-frequency trading has created quite a stir. I’m imaging what a PR response might look like, though not an entirely serious one. It’s structured in FAQ format, but the questions aren’t really frequently asked so much as ones I’d like to answer. The ideal audience would be the inquiring readers of Flash Boys open to a counterbalance.Q: Who is this Michael Lewis guy and why has this book been making such a splash?Lewis is an influential writer with a t...

I was a back office spreadsheet jockey performing daily reconciliations on non-dollar swaps for a merchant bank in London in the late 1990's. They employed me because I had a background in corporate accounts but mostly because I looked good in a skirt and knew how to put a bet on a horse at lunchtime. To start with it was fun. The volume and value of transactions was unlike any job I'd had before but eventually I became uncomfortable because I was starting to fall behind. When I explained the si...

I'm a longtime reader & fan of Michael Lewis, but with this book he jumps the shark. While reading this book I found myself at first laughing with Lewis and then laughing at Lewis. In the end I threw the book away, annoyed & saddened by Lewis's inability to accurately report the history & function of HFT. Instead of listing my complaints I'd direct readers to better analyses, like these from Manoj Narang, Cliff Asness, Matt Levine, Matthew Phillips and Michael Peltz. Lewis would do well to heed

Michael Lewis returns to his familiar stomping grounds of Wall Street to report to the rest of the world that, shock, stockbrokers are as corrupt as ever, even after the 2008 crash! Flash Boys looks at the phenomenon of high frequency trading and its complex corruption. The image of brokers wearing blazers shouting on trading floors is long defunct with brokers these days staring at computer screens in locked rooms, the trades happening on screens in microseconds. The new dichotomy is that whoev...

Michael Lewis has given us another great read, leaving us pondering big issues about the latest wall street scam and the point of society. In today’s world, the information he shares about high-frequency trading (HFT) on Wall Street feels dated before it arrives on the page…before we read it…before we can act on it. At first I was aghast that information about the, in effect, skimming or taxing of trades on the [any] stock market was old—this stuff was recognized in 2010! Why are we just learnin...

I gave this a decent go - about 25% of it - but I just couldn't get past the fact it's just way too slow and much too boring. It's also very technical, in terms of explaining how high-frequency trading in the US equity market was rigged. And though the author takes time to try to explain it, the explanation is so protracted and woven into discussions between various brainiacs that I lost the will long before I fully understood what was going on.Not for me I'm afraid, I gave up on this one.

Really well-done non-fiction that reads like a fictional thriller. Michael Lewis humanizes his expose of high-frequency trading and the state of the U.S. stock market by focusing on a few key characters and their stories. There is a lot of financial information to grasp here, but Lewis is an absolute master at sensible analogies that transform extremely complex transactions into ones that are easy to comprehend.Very disheartening on one hand - human nature at its worst - and at the same time upl...