Author: Michael Lewis
High Frequency Traders (HFT) are the new punching bag on wall street. Michael does not spare any punches in telling the story of how HFTs insert themselves between the investors' market orders and profit handily by being middle-men in the trade. The big banks all turn a blind eye and the exchanges are happy to sell co-location to the HFTs and get their cut of the action.
I am a big fan of Michael’s story-telling abilities and really enjoyed his books like “Boomerang” and “The Big Short”. However, in “Flash Boys” I felt that he was desperately looking for a good story to tell and came up short. There are several attempts to tell a human story, starting with Dan Spivey’s building a low-latency high speed network to connect Chicago with New York, Brad Katsuyama’s singular mission to build a fair Stock Trading exchange or Sergey Aleynikov, the Russian programmer who worked for Goldman Sachs and was arrested in 2009 by the FBI on charges that were ultimately found to be baseless. All of these are peripherally connected to HFT, but do not come together to tell a tight-knit story.
High Frequency Traders (HFT) are the new punching bag on wall street. Michael does not spare any punches in telling the story of how HFTs insert themselves between the investors' market orders and profit handily by being middle-men in the trade. The big banks all turn a blind eye and the exchanges are happy to sell co-location to the HFTs and get their cut of the action.
I am a big fan of Michael’s story-telling abilities and really enjoyed his books like “Boomerang” and “The Big Short”. However, in “Flash Boys” I felt that he was desperately looking for a good story to tell and came up short. There are several attempts to tell a human story, starting with Dan Spivey’s building a low-latency high speed network to connect Chicago with New York, Brad Katsuyama’s singular mission to build a fair Stock Trading exchange or Sergey Aleynikov, the Russian programmer who worked for Goldman Sachs and was arrested in 2009 by the FBI on charges that were ultimately found to be baseless. All of these are peripherally connected to HFT, but do not come together to tell a tight-knit story.
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