Flash Boys

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393244660 ISBN 13: 9780393244663

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

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.

About the Author:

Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, and The Undoing Project. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and three children.

Review:

“Michael Lewis is a genius, and his book will give high-frequency trading a much-needed turn under the microscope.”
- Kevin Roose, New York Magazine

“If you read one business book this year, make it Flash Boys.”
- David Sirota, Salon

“Dazzling... guaranteed to make blood boil... riveting.”
- Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“A beautiful narrative, so well-written. You’ve got to get this.”
- Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

“Important to public debate about Wall Street... in exposing what one of his central characters calls the ‘Pandora’s box of ridiculousness’ that financial exchanges have become.”
- Philip Delves Broughton, The Wall Street Journal

“Michael Lewis knows how to tell a story.”
- Vanity Fair

“Remarkable... Michael Lewis has a spellbinding talent for finding emotional dramas in complex, highly technical subjects.”
- Financial Times

“Who knew high-frequency trading was such a sexy subject?”
- Bloomberg Business Week

“Michael Lewis is one of the premier chroniclers of our age.”
- Huffington Post

“Score one for the humans! Critics of high speed, computer-driven trading have a new champion.”
- CNN Money