Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt [NOOK Book]

( 18 )

Overview

Four years after his #1 bestseller The Big Short, Michael Lewis returns to Wall Street to report on a high-tech predator stalking the equity markets.

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 ...

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Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

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More About This Book

Overview

Four years after his #1 bestseller The Big Short, Michael Lewis returns to Wall Street to report on a high-tech predator stalking the equity markets.

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.

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Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

The Big Short; Boomerang; Liar's Poker; Moneyball: For a full quarter century, Michael Lewis has been crafting one scintillating business bestseller after another. As Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times notes, "No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Mr. Lewis. Rumors are around rustling on the internet about what new Wall Street secrets the famed author is about to spill. Destined to be a number one bestseller everywhere.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin
…dazzling…Because Mr. Lewis is at the helm finding clear, simple metaphors for even the most impenetrable financial minutiae, this tawdry tale should make sense to anyone. And so should its shock value. Flash Boys is guaranteed to make blood boil.
Publishers Weekly
★ 04/14/2014
In his latest captivating expedition into the marketplace jungle, Lewis (Moneyball) explores how the rise of computerized stock exchanges and their attendant scams started a battle for the soul of Wall Street. He probes the subterfuges of high frequency traders who, assisted by banks and brokerages happy to sell out customers, use blindingly fast data links to gain inside information on investors' trades and then exploit them on today's entirely digital stock markets. At the center of his novelistic narrative is a New York mosaic: Brad Katsuyama, a Canadian-born trader with a conscience; Ronan, a hot-headed Irish telecom expert; and a Dostoevskian cast of Slavic programmers veering between existential angst and saintly resignation. This cast bands together to expose the market manipulations and then start their own honest stock exchange. Lewis does his usual superb job of explicating the inexplicable in his lucid, absorbing account of the crossroads of high-tech data transfer and byzantine market strategies, where milliseconds of signaling speed yield billions in profits. He also presents a rich sociology of Wall Street's assholes-vs.-geeks culture clash between greedy, blustering financial honchos and the flickers of rationalism and humanity in the tech people they need to run their markets. The result is an engrossing true-life morality play that unmasks the devil in the details of high finance. Agent: Al Zuckerman, Writer's House. (Apr.)
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780393244670
  • Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
  • Publication date: 3/31/2014
  • Sold by: Barnes & Noble
  • Format: eBook
  • Pages: 304
  • Sales rank: 113
  • File size: 493 KB

Meet the Author

Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, The Money Culture, The New New Thing, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Panic, Home Game, The Big Short, and Boomerang, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and three children.

Biography

Twenty-four year-old Princeton graduate Michael Lewis had recently received his master's degree from the London School of Economics when Salomon Brothers hired him as a bond salesman in 1985. He moved to New York for training and witnessed firsthand the cutthroat, scruple-free culture that was Wall Street in the 1980s. Several months later, armed only with what he'd learned in training, Lewis returned to London and spent the next three years dispensing investment advice to Salomon's well-heeled clientele. He earned hundreds of thousands of dollars and survived a 1987 hostile takeover attempt at the firm. Nonetheless, he grew disillusioned with his job and left Salomon to write an account of his experiences in the industry. Published in 1989, Liar's Poker remains one of the best written and most perceptive chronicles of investment banking and the appalling excesses of an era.

Since then, Lewis has found great success as a financial journalist and bestselling author. His nonfiction ranges over a variety of topics, including U.S./Japanese business relations (Pacific Rift), the 1996 presidential campaign (Trail Fever), Silicon Valley (The New New Thing), and the Internet boom (Next: The Future Just Happened). He investigated the economics of professional sports in Moneyball (2003) and The Blind Side (2006); and, in 2008, he edited Panic, an anthology of essays about the major financial crises of 1990s and early "oughts."

Good To Know

Michael Lewis attended Isidore Newman School in his native New Orleans, LA -- a private college prep school that counts among its more distinguished alumni historian Walter Isaacson, children's book author Mo Willems, singer Harry Connick, Jr., and famous pro-football siblings Peyton and Eli Manning.
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    1. Date of Birth:
      Sat Oct 15 00:00:00 EDT 1960
    2. Place of Birth:
      New Orleans, LA
    1. Education:
      Princeton University, B.A. in Art History, 1982; London School of Economics, 1985

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4
( 18 )
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Sort by: Showing all of 18 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted Mon Apr 07 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    Very enjoyable and I feel smarter for having read it.  I wouldn'

    Very enjoyable and I feel smarter for having read it. 
    I wouldn't be afraid of the technical stuff. Most folks can understand the speed of light and that,  IMO, is the heart of the technical discussion.
    I enjoyed reading the names of the firms involved and how they might have been bashed in one chapter and redeemed later.  
       

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted Fri Apr 11 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    This book is informative and a great analysis.

    This book is informative and a great analysis.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted Sat Apr 05 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    Flash Boys is a very good book.  Reading it will cause you to th

    Flash Boys is a very good book.  Reading it will cause you to think of many things.  Anyone who owns stock or has a 401K with stock
    in it would profit from reading this book. There is a great deal of information coupled with an engaging story.  

    Most of us don't even begin to understand what impacts our investments and how Wall Street makes money.  Some of the information
    is extremely technical both in describing financial transactions and in explaining the technical aspects of software creation and control.
    I am still not sure I understand it all, but I understand more than I did before I read it.

    At its heart, it is a story of how a complex system (the stock exchanges) can be gamed.  In this case, it results is high speed trading
    on the stock market that only a few brokers and banks can use at the little guys expense.
    The result is a system that, like casinos, is rigged in the "House's" favor.  The story follows a banker who figured out the "game" and
    his attempts to address it.  Some of the book is very dry, but I still wanted to understand and learn more.

    Not a lite read...but I did enjoy it and will be interest to watch what happens to the High Speed Trading firms and systems.  Will IEX
    change things?  What I am sure of is that the gamers will find another hole in some system.  
     

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Fri Apr 04 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    Just Like Online Shooter Games

    This is a great book and an amazing story. Anyone who's ever played Call of Duty or Battlefield (or any online MMO for that matter) could've looked at what was happening on your computer screen and seen that someone was playing "in the future". In the game Call of Duty, when you're shooting someone and they turn around and kill you, they are referred to be playing "in the future". Those were my thoughts reading the first couple chapters of the book.

    1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Tue Apr 22 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    the book was a great read

    the book was a great read

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Sun Apr 20 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    If it was not the truth I would call one of the best thrillers e

    If it was not the truth I would call one of the best thrillers ever written. Sadly it is the truth and it needs to be investigated and stopped. Knowing what others want to buy or sell should be considered insider trading and punished accordingly, speed or not speed.Otherwise buying and selling stocks is more like a lottery or casino.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Sun Apr 20 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    Apollo 

    Apollo 

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Tue Apr 15 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    I Also Recommend:

    Hector's Juice

    Better than The Wolf of Wall Street! Also read Hector's Juice!!

    Better than The Wolf of Wall Street! Also read Hector's Juice!!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Mon Apr 07 00:00:00 EDT 2014

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    Posted Fri Apr 11 00:00:00 EDT 2014

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    Posted Wed Apr 09 00:00:00 EDT 2014

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