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    Flash Boys
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    Flash Boys
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    Flash Boys
    Audiobook10 hours

    Flash Boys

    Written by Michael Lewis

    Narrated by Dylan Baker

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Michael Lewis, the Master of the Big Story, is back with Flash Boys

    If you thought Wall Street was about alpha males standing in trading pits hollering at each other, think again. That world is dead.

    Now, the world's money is traded by computer code, inside black boxes in heavily guarded buildings. Even the experts entrusted with your cash don't know what's happening to it. And the very few who do aren't about to tell - because they're making a killing.

    This is a market that's rigged, out of control and out of sight; a market in which the chief need is for speed; and in which traders would sell their grandmothers for a microsecond. Blink, and you'll miss it.

    In Flash Boys, Michael Lewis tells the explosive story of how one group of ingenious oddballs and misfits set out to expose what was going on. It's the story of what it's like to declare war on some of the richest and most powerful people in the world. It's about taking on an entire system. And it's about the madness that has taken hold of the financial markets today.

    You won't believe it until you've read it.

    'I read Michael Lewis for the same reasons I watch Tiger Woods. I'll never play like that. But it's good to be reminded every now and again what genius looks like' - Malcolm Gladwell

    'Probably the best current writer in America' - Tom Wolfe

    Michael Lewis was born in New Orleans and educated at Princeton University and the London School of Economics. He has written several books including the New York Times bestsellers Liar's Poker, widely considered the book that defined Wall Street during the 1980s, Boomerang and The Big Short, 'probably the single best piece of financial journalism ever written' (Reuters). Lewis is contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and also writes for Vanity Fair and Portfolio magazine.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin UK Audio
    Release dateMar 31, 2014
    ISBN9780141979854
    Unavailable
    Flash Boys
    Author

    Michael Lewis

    Michael Lewis is the host of the podcast Against the Rules. He has published many New York Times bestselling books, including Liar's Poker, The Fifth Risk, Flash Boys, and The Big Short. Movie versions of The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Blind Side were all nominated for Academy Awards. He grew up in New Orleans and remains deeply interested and involved in the city but now lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their children.

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    Reviews for Flash Boys

    4/5

    530 ratings39 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Solid 3.5 stars. As usual, Michael Lewis excels at taking an extremely complex and esoteric subject and making me feel like I understand it. But somehow this one didn't ring as true or as disinterested as some of his other books -- it felt like a book full of glowing accolades about the character of Brad Katsuyama, an employee of the Royal Bank of Canada who apparently left a multi-million dollar salary to create his own stock market (the IEX) for the sole purpose of being fairer to investors. Throughout the book, Katsuyama is portrayed as relentlessly selfless and unselfish; he's practically a Christlike figure. Because he never had a single flaw, I found the portrait unconvincing, and that ultimately led me to wonder what else Lewis might be whitewashing.
    • 4/5
      I'll start with my criticisms, which are mostly stylistic.It seems that Lewis decided to write a book about the story of Goldman Sachs programmer Aleynikov, accused of stealing code. When he realized that wasn't book length material, plus the latter was writing his own memoir, he pivoted to the story of the IEX exchange, founded to fight the ills of high-frequency trading (HFT) and lack of transparency on Wall Street. Lewis had to make a valiant effort to glue these two separate together, which added more padding. Even so, he had to add even more padding, because the IEX story also isn't book length. So he repeats his explanations of the evils of HFT over and over and over....Nonetheless, the book is short enough, the topic important enough, the people and story are interesting enough, and Lewis is a good enough writer to make this book well worth the read. Lot's of people (particularly from the finance industry) have all kinds of other criticisms, which I'm sure you will find in other reviews):1. Lewis over-simplifies or distorts in his explanation of HFT2. His need to portray the story as good vs evil further over simplifies a complex topic3. Wall Street serves a useful purpose and books like these will lead to more useless regulation of a vital industrySince I am neither an economist nor a Wall Street expert, I can't fully judge the validity of the first criticism. But there is enough evidence to show that the gist of Lewis' accusations are totally accurate. A truly free market, in the Adam Smith sense of that institution, requires a free flow of information to all participants. Wall Street banks in general, and HFT traders in particular, make every effort possible to restrict access to information and to game this proprietary information to generate unproductive rent. As to the second criticism, while the rent-seeking of the banks and HFT traders isn't necessarily "evil," it is certainly harmful to the overall productivity of the economy. Moreover, given that economies are inherently unstable, the added instability of HFT is NOT a good thing. This is the gist of the book's criticism of HFT. By contrast, IEX' aim is to create transparency in the markets, which every person who thinks capitalism is a good system should support unconditionally. That IEX and its founders are the heroes of the book, actually directly undermines the third criticism: Lewis is specifically advocating a market solution (IEX) to the problem, not more regulation (which he points out often makes the problem worse). While heavily critical of banks and the SEC, this book is hardly a Marxist tract.So ignore the criticisms of people who make money off our ignorance, and read this book!
    • 4/5
      This book explains the impact of high frequency trading and its distortion of the stock market by following the detective work of a small bank of geniuses brought together by the Royal Bank of Canada. While the description certainly made me more despairing than ever about the place of small investors in today's market, I was also thoroughly impressed by the lucid way in which author Michael Lewis explains what happened, why, and whether there's any possible cure. Eye opening for those interested. Also a good read.
    • 3/5
      Probably the most disappointing Michael Lewis yet. Rather, the only disappointing Michael Lewis yet. The con is explained in 20 pages and repeated over and over to make a book. Credit due for shedding light on the nefarious practices of HFT firms but this would have worked better as a long form article.
    • 4/5
      Interesting read in typical Michael Lewis style of slightly sensational reporting. There are clear good guys and bad guys. His conclusion seems very logical and reasonable, but I've read a number of articles after reading this book which paint his perspective as a biased one.
    • 4/5
      Writing this review in September 2016, the abusive practices of some big Wall Street banks and, it seems, many high frequency trading companies is no longer news. But it was to me. And I'm both appalled and outraged, if not completely surprised.My only quibble is that the story seems unfinished. Wish I could know that the abuse is over, the guilty are all in prison, and the regulators are doing their job.Many thanks to the author for opening my eyes! Thanks too to Brad for his courage and honesty.
    • 4/5
      Lewis writes very entertaining nonfic, I loved the Ronan character and laughed out loud a few times. But it does feel a bit like the first half of a really good book, which ok is still really good, but incomplete. Lewis says in the Acknowledgements that he spoke to HFT insiders off the record, but that's what's missing, pull back the curtain and let's take a good hard look inside an HFT shop that makes billions and never has a losing day in 5 years, with CIA-grade opsec that takes five badge swipes to get into. Overall great stuff, high-frequency trading is something I'll want to read more on.

      I loved the cliffhanger ergodic bit at the end where Lewis leaves it up to you to Google the FCC license number off a microwave tower.
    • 5/5
      A lot of books are written. This one is just plain worth reading. If only to gain the slightest insight into the phenomenal greed at the heart of capitalism. Mind you, I am not saying there is something so much better out there, at least they don't organize the elimination (literally) of their enemies. And yet amidst the utter squalor of these financial leeches he finds his heroes and you come away with a small bit of hope. Brad Katsuyama, Sergey Aleynikov, Ryan Ronan, these are literally the heroes and if they didn't win at least they weren't crushed. Especially Sergey, bravo my man!
    • 5/5
      This is a very fascinating book, it not only applies to the stock market. Who knows what other industries this sort of thing happens in. Forex in my opinion and probably a lot of everyday things we take for granted.

      GFC has got nothing on the potential for this.
    • 5/5
      A good understanding of HFT. Various sections are quite repetitive and some areas are still open, the story not having reached a conclusion.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this book a lot. I like how Michael Lewis can make a non-fiction book read like a Grisham thriller, though I did find it a bit repetitive in the middle. The one aspect of the story I was left wondering was who were the initial HFT who figured out how to game the system before the Wall Street banks got involved? Were they already obscenely wealthy Wall Street elites? Were they "new" guys? Or were they programmers who had been consistently taken advantage?
    • 3/5
      The days of men in the bear pit screaming prices at each other are long gone in the stock markets, now days it is all controlled by computers. These are so valuable that they are hidden well away and guarded by heavily armed men, and not even the experts know exactly what happens in these dark pools.

      Those that do know won’t tell either, as they are making an absolute fortune.

      This market, that we have been assured is open and fair, is rigged. And the key that unlocks the money chest now is speed. These days when you place and order for shares it is transmitted to an exchange so you can carry out the transactions. Whilst this is really fast, there are guys called high frequency traders who see your order, and with their super fast networks buy the shares first before offering them to you for a few pennies more. They have almost no risk as they have a guaranteed buyer. All because their connection is that few seconds faster.

      One man, Brad Katsuyama, sees this happening and decides to do something to try and make the markets fair once again. With and eclectic bunch of financial oddballs and misfits, he sets up his own exchange, IDX, that is not only transparent, but also has a declared set of rules. Lewis writes about the fight that he went through to become accepted in Wall Street, how banks still refused to trade with them, even when explicitly told to do so by their customers as they couldn’t take a cut from their high frequency traders.

      Lewis does have a way of getting complex financial shenanigans across, and in this book he has a good go at it. But there is masses of technical jargon in here, and that does get in the way of the story of Katsuyama’s fight to have an open and equal market once again. It was worth reading though, just to see how rigged and corrupt the world financial markets are.
    • 5/5
      How well intentioned regulations, coming after the 2008 financial meltdown, caused a scam on Wall Street where people paid million to game the system and make millions with little at stake. What happened screwed regular investors and cost millions of dollars to them.
    • 4/5
      All I can say is Michael Lewis has a lot of talent in making what is a rather dry subject into an exciting page turner. This book just flowed! It also renewed by disgust in what our country and the modern world economy has become.
    • 4/5
      52 Books 52 Weeks (Week 15 for 2014)

      Fascinating look at hyper trading in the stock market. How it was accomplished quietly behind the scenes.
    • 5/5
      this book has been in the news constantly this week and it has been extremely interesting reading the biased responses from all involved parties.
      Everyone who owns stock at any level should read this book!
    • 4/5
      Prior to this book, my knowledge about HFT (High Frequency Trading) was limited to a few technical articles I read in Communications of ACM magazine a few years ago, and they were all focused mostly on the technological aspects of it. As a software engineer and mathematician, I remember myself being fascinated by the effort spent on optimizing software and hardware systems dedicated to high speed trading. I also vaguely remember from those articles, how it became important to be physically close to the data centers of the stock exchanges. But for me, that was all there is to it, financial world, being financial world as usual. My attitude was, in a sense, closer to the type of programmers described in the book, the ones who were fascinated by solving technical challenges, yet didn't know or care about the bigger picture, didn't know what kind of business they were serving, how their technological systems were reshaping the financial markets as we know it.I had no idea how deep and systemic the whole institution of HFT went before reading this book, and now I have a much better idea about this fast paced world, where regulation after regulation, the loopholes are discovered, and very intelligent people go to greatests lengths to milk the existing structure to the extent permitted by laws of physics. Whether this serves the greater good, is a highly contested question as the book demonstrates remarkably well. Most of the times, the book is a page-turner, it almost reads like a high quality, adrenaline and technology filled science fiction by Neal Stephenson (except where it becomes so wordy and dumbed-down, e.g. when it gives the definitions of 'millisecond', 'microsecond', making me wonder whether the book's target audience includes primary school students, too).Readers with a similar background will probably be disappointed by a visible lack of technical details when the technological aspects of HFT are described in the book; I for one, can't be sure whether this is caused by concerns such as "let's not scare the average US reader", or something totally different, such as "let's not get into much technical and accurate details, otherwise we might get sued by some financial giants in no time" (if it's the latter, then I'd be more understanding). I have no idea how actual investors, fund managers, traders, and bank managers would think after reading book, it would enrich my experience of the book for sure.I've also appreciated the very brief references to the two types of programmers: one who doesn't have much clue how his work contributes to the overal business, the bottom line, and therefore gets a very good, but not so great salary versus the programmer who knows how that software is critical to the bottom line, and therefore gets paid many times his peer. And how business people, finance executives in this case, did their best to keep their technology experts in the dark with regards to such aspects of the business. What I did not appreciate was the stereotypical descriptions of "socially awkward geniuses, nerds, geeks, programmers" because, seriously, it is 2016, and it started to get boring: the lonely genius who's into coding, avoiding people, happy with managing software wizardry, and all that stuff. The world needs a more nuanced look at such people, with a lot less clichés.Long story short, if you want to have a clue about how modern HFT got started, how it was able to exploit aspects of stock exchanges, how big banks contributed to this, how the 'fairness' of the market was a shaky concept, you owe yourself to read this book, and learn more about the subject. You will also have the opportunity to learn about a few interesting people, who would make great movie characters, in their quest to right some wrongs, and create a fair market, struggling against the biggest and sharpest players in the financial world.
    • 3/5
      Ever since the financial crash of 2008, I've tried to read any books that would help me understand what happened and explain why and how a largely unregulated financial industry could crash our economies again if we let things carry on. The problem is that I find even the best written books (and that certainly includes those by Michael Lewis such as The Big Short) hard to get my head round. I just about understand how subprime mortgages and other bad debts were bundled together in packages by companies like Goldman Sachs, then sold on to other companies after which Goldman takes out insurance against them failing to be repaid - a win win situation for the bankers while ordinary debtors and investors have their lives destroyed.
      Much of this book is even harder to understand, dealing as it does with nerdy High Frequency Traders who rip off ordinary investors by creating computer systems that trade faster than everybody else (we're talking milliseconds) thereby scalping vast sums of money off these deals. In books like this, I tend to latch on to sections, or anecdotes, which seem to sum up what's going on in simple terms. Here, it was the point where Brad, the hero of the book, tries to set up his own stock exchange that will protect investors from being ripped off by HFTs. When he meets big banks and investment companies seeking financial backing, they ask him why he is doing it. When he answers that it's because he wants to bring justice and fairness to the industry, they are immediately suspicious and won't back him. So he changes his story. Instead, he tells them he's doing it because he thinks it will make him lots of money. Now they are supportive. A perfect illustration of he basic moral - self-serving greed is all!
    • 3/5
      This book focuses on the contemporary financial trading practices of high frequency traders or "flash traders" seeking to gain advantage in fractions of seconds by having more direct cable connections to the markets. This is emphasized by an effort to lay a cable from to New York to Chicago through the mountains of Pennsylvania as directly as possible. Many financial intermediaries are taking advantage of the high frequency trading to basically rip-off their customers and by proxy making the whole financial system susceptible to collapse. The heroes of the book are the quirky iconoclasts who create the Investors Exchanges (IEX) to counteract this effect. Lewis can get bogged down in technical details and traders' talk at times, but mostly keeps things moving along to be entertaining and informative
    • 4/5
      I continue to be fascinated by the market events surrounding the subprime mortgage crisis - mostly because I feel it's important to know the details, in the face of having difficulty grasping them, despite my efforts. My own comprehension inability motivates me to understand it better. I believe no one has done a better job of chronicling Wall Street's shenanigans and foibles - while making it interesting - than Michael Lewis. He's written - and I've read - many books on the leadup itself, the culture in general, and doomsday. I was curious to know about what's been happening inside the market in the aftermath, so I dispatched him to do the research, to which he agreed, and produced this gem. It begins with a mystery to be unraveled, and continues with a fascinating dissection of truly interesting personalities, driven by the thirst to know, rather than by the reaping of profit. That's what makes this book a winner. Enveloped in the details is this demanding thirst to understand, with which I identify. The details of how the market works were lost on me often, but the Flash Boys obsessiveness with unwrapping the enigma held me rapt. For a flourish, Lewis ends the book by showing that there is yet another mystery that needs unraveling. I've never salivated so much for a sequel.
    • 5/5
      When I was in college I was a bit fascinated by fancy wines. On a trip back home, I was browsing around in a wine store and noticed a bottle of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, 1968, for a very reasonable price, perhaps $12 or in that zone. I then visited another shop run by the same people, and got to chatting with the guy behind the counter. He said that it would be impossible to buy a Lafite-Rothschild for anything below maybe $100. I said, hey, no, you have a bottle for sale in your other store for only $12!I then went back home and told my Dad the whole story. He practically screamed at me: "You told them the price at the other store???" Despite the risk, we got back in the car and raced to the first store. Ach, that bottle had been marked up to $40! But we bought it anyway with great anticipation. We opened it up for dinner that night. Ah, it turns out that the vintage tables for Bordeaux wines are reasonably accurate and definitely worth consulting! We learned what a "disastrous" vintage is all about. Vinegar!But I also got to learn about front-running and market dynamics!Michael Lewis has given us a great page-turner here and a very informative and important one, too. Lesson one is that market structure matters. Every market has a structure, a set of rules and mechanisms by which buyers and sellers find each other and negotiate prices. There is the mythology of a free market, as if there were a real price that existed apart from these rules and mechanisms, and the job of the market is to discover this real price. But that is just mythology. The price is created through the rules and mechanisms of the market. The mythology has a use, though, to deflect attention from the importance of the rules - because the rule makers would rather leave hidden the great power their role gives them. Lesson two is how the exploitation of rule-making power has played out in the stock market over the last decade or so. This information is very well hidden, and Lewis lets us know that the evidence he has gathered is very fragmentary. This book is just a snapshot, one little scene in the history of finance. But it is surely a rather typical scene. It's a great way to get a glimpse of how the world works. Well, not the world, but a very important slice of it.
    • 5/5
      Makes a compelling case for the waste of resources in zero-sum games and manipulation of parts of the finance sector. Great read like most of Lewis' books, but much is hard to evaluate, and I feel that there is still much that I do not know.
    • 3/5
      Best reserved for those who have a good command of the intricacies of finance and computers.
    • 5/5
      Fascinating and clearly told story.
    • 3/5
      Very compelling stuff! You can read the technical side of this book on several different levels. I learned a lot about the concepts...but at the most complex levels, I often found myself getting lost. However, I could gain an intuitive understanding of the issues. The author should be commended for writing in such a way that keeps the 'layman' engaged in the story. Now, I know that I must "leave stock-trading t'o the professionals'...
    • 5/5
      This is yet another terrifically readable -- more accurately compulsively readable -- book by Michael Lewis on a yet another corrupt aspect of our corrupt financial system. That sounds dreary and judgmental, but the book isn't in the least dreary. It is an engrossing story of how a few investors noticed odd patterns in the pricing of the stocks they bought, tried to find out what caused those patterns, discovered an elaborate and almost entirely invisible system whereby one set of Wall Streeters ripped off another, and set out to change the system. The characters, I thought, were extraordinarily interesting. Some reviews call them dull, but as a long time Wall Streeter I find people who are motivated by something other than personal gain wildly exotic, and very interesting. The writing, as usual, sparkles, and as usual makes clear that which is almost impossibly complex. It is a very enjoyable read, and a very instructive one.It may not be dreary, but it is judgmental -- so judgmental that some reviewers accuse Lewis of a one sided approach. That may well be: I'm not an expert in HFT (very few people are) so I can't really judge. But even if it is one sided, there are times when a one sided approach is justified. HFT is just one of the many distortions in our current financial system, and by no means the most egregious. It does distort markets, and does skim off a bit from many investors trades, but the cost of HFT to the system as a whole is measured in factions of a percent. The cost of other recent financial innovations, in contrast -- collateralized debt obligations, for example -- ran into the trillions of dollars, and is still running hard. What makes HFT important is the fact that it is an examplar of how the few rip off the many. And it is an examplar that has emerged primarily after 2007-2008 crisis, suggesting that the game goes on as before.Can anything be done about this? One of Lewis' key points is that HFT emerged as a result of a regulation intended to make trading fairer and more transparent. There is absolutely nothing new in this. Ever since money existed, smart people have been figuring out how to extract money from the system, and governments have been trailing in their wakes, trying to put in rules to prevent them from doing so. But the fact that human nature leads to financial corruption, and that regulators will always be a step or two behind the financiers, doesn't mean that corruption should be accepted, and efforts to regulate abandoned. Financial manouvers like HFT cost all of us, ultimately, for the benefit of a very true. Regulation, and criminalization, are needed. Lewis' book has already prompted government enquiries, and for that reason alone it is a success.
    • 5/5
      Michael Lewis has a literary knack for taking a completely incomprehensible topic, the inner-workings of the 21st century stock market for example, and explaining it in a way such that I now have a better understanding of how much I still don't know. This was true for when I read The Big Short (2010) and it's true again for Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt.
    • 3/5
      I admit to being a Michael Lewis fanboy. I consider him one of the best business writers. He has a knack for using characters as a lens to explain an issue.The issue in Flash Boys is high frequency trading. Or high speed trading. Or electronic trading. It's a bit of a confusing mix. Uncharacteristically, Lewis seems to stumble a bit around what the problem is. I think that is in part because the problem is complicated in a technical, legal and financial directions. Many of the people involved don't fully understand it. Those that do fully understand it don't want to explain it. They are too busy making money exploiting the issue.Based on the speed you receive information, you can trade on that information and make money if you find out faster and trade faster than others. That has been true since markets existed.For stock exchanges, the days of floor pits and individuals yelling buy and sell orders are long gone. It all happens in server stacked on top of each other with an algorithm matching buy orders and sell orders. There are multiple exchanges where trades can take place. That's good for competition and innovation.But those exchanges are located in different places. Not necessarily far apart, but milliseconds or microseconds apart. Just far enough that watching trades happen in one exchange can give a strong indication about what will happen in another exchange a bit further away. High speed traders exploit that information and make money. Lots of money if they are fast enough.Lewis explores the issue in great detail and provides a good understanding. He uses Brad Katsuyama, a trader at the Royal Bank of Canada, as the focal point of his story.The most disappointing part of the book is that it ends without resolution. The problems with high speed trading are still in the system and its hurting investors not involved in high speed trading.
    • 4/5
      Another very enjoyable narrative on a true story by the master of this genre - Michael Lewis. He has a very unique way of making the very technical and "geekish" absolutely approachable - and entertaining.As compared to "Moneyball" and "The Blind Side", "Flash Boys" comes up a bit short on interesting and compelling characters, but that could simply be the difference between the world of sports and the world of finance.
    • 3/5
      Extremely engaging and well written, it raises a number of important issues, but it also has a bad habit of dividing the world up into good and bad in a manner that makes the story a better read but is ultimately unconvincing.