Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

by Professor Michael Lewis

Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post-financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, and more controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, they come to this realization separately; but after they discover one another, the flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets. This they do by creating an exchange in which high-frequency trading-source of the most intractable problems-will have no advantage whatsoever.

The characters in Flash Boys are fabulous, each completely different from what you think of when you think "Wall Street guy." Several have walked away from jobs in the financial sector that paid them millions of dollars a year. From their new vantage point they investigate the big banks, the world's stock exchanges, and high-frequency trading firms as they have never been investigated, and expose the many strange new ways that Wall Street generates profits.

The light that Lewis shines into the darkest corners of the financial world may not be good for your blood pressure, because if you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you. But in the end, Flash Boys is an uplifting read. Here are people who have somehow preserved a moral sense in an environment where you don't get paid for that; they have perceived an institutionalized injustice and are willing to go to war to fix it.

• ISBN10: 0393244679
• ISBN13: 9780393244670
• Publish Date: 31 March 2014
• Publish Status: Active
• Imprint: W. W. Norton & Company
• Format: eBook
• Language: English

Reviews

[adamfortuna]

If you ever listened to the Radiolab episode about high frequency trading, you should give this a listen. Lewis goes into much more detail on the same subject, including the concept of "dark pools" which I was unaware of. It's crazy how differeny things are from when I learned about the stock market in high school, but this one does an entertaining job of explaining why.

[dpfaef]

Once again the financial sector is called out for their manipulation of the system.

[remo]

Nuevo libro de Michael Lewis [ML], que ha levantado algunas olas en los EE.UU. En él relata (principalmente) la historia de Brad Katsuyama, un trader de RBC (Royal Bank of Canada) que detecta algo raro en los mercados de acciones americanos (las acciones que intenta comprar o vender parecen desvanecerse en el momento que pulsa su botón de compra/venta, por lo que toda operación le cuesta más dinero del que preveía) y empieza a tirar del hilo hasta llegar a descubrir un estado de las cosas que, aun siendo legal, pone en clara desventaja a cualquier operador de acciones frente a las empresas de trading de alta frecuencia (HFT, High Frequency Trading). El libro, como todo lo de ML, está muy bien escrito, es claro, conciso, interesante e informativo. Tras su aparición incluso la SEC (Securities Exchange Comission) americana, el equivalente de nuestra CNMV, ha iniciado una investigación, que como todas las demás servirá para poco.

La aventura que narra el libro es impresionante, y a poco interés que tenga el lector en los mercados financieros se convierte en un thriller apasionante, con la diferencia de que narra hechos reales. Muy interesante.