Flash Boys

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (2014) is another fascinating look into finance and the culture of Wall Street. Instead of focusing on the troublemakers, like in previous works such as Liar's Poker and The Big Short, he focuses on a group of outliers who want to create a fair market place. This is done in the usual Lewis fashion by searching out the individuals that were integral for this movement and telling their stories as well as by taking complex systems and breaking them down into digestible bits and explaining the process in layman terms. High Frequency Trading (HFT) is the source of an unfair trading platform and Brad Katsuyama and his team aim to level the playing field and create a stock exchange that will keep it level. But Lewis starts the book with the story of the fiber optic cable that is laid from Chicago to New Jersey that is created to give HFT millisecond advantages over other players in the market. However, there are several other stories that need to be addressed to take in the significance of what was happening in the Wall Street game and Lewis also follows the story of a HFT programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, who becomes a scapegoat for the system. It is a fascinating and well told story, which is what we have come to expect from the talented Lewis.