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Flash Boys Paperback – 23 Mar. 2015

by Michael Lewis (Author)

4.4 17,241 ratings

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'The greatest story of our age ... Be very afraid' John Arlidge, Sunday Times

Michael Lewis's epic bestseller tells the outrageous story of the multi-millionaires and whizz kids who scammed the banking system in the blink of an eye - and the whistleblowers who tried to stop them. It's hilarious, terrifying and it's all true.

'Thrilling, a masterclass' Robert McCrum, Observer, Books of the Year

'Jaw-dropping, astonishing ... Lewis has lit the touch paper' Liam Halligan, Spectator

'The kind of writer who creates his own weather system' John Lanchester, London Review of Books

'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

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From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

Michael Lewis's global bestselling books lift the lid on the biggest stories of our times. They include Flash Boys, a game-changing exposé of high-speed scamming; The Big Short, which was made into a hit Oscar-winning film; Liar's Poker, the book that defined the excesses of the 1980s; and, most recently, The Fifth Risk, revealing what happens when democracy unravels. Michael Lewis was born in New Orleans and educated at Princeton University and the London School of Economics.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin; 1st edition (23 Mar. 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0141981032
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0141981031
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 1.6 x 19.8 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 17,384 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 9 in Poker
- 21 in Corporate Finance
- 28 in Company Histories

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4.4 17,241 ratings

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Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of The Undoing Project, Liar's Poker, Flash Boys, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Home Game and The Big Short, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their three children.

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17,241 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They appreciate the clear explanations and insights into the stock market. The narrative is described as revealing, shocking, and real-life. Readers appreciate the well-developed characters and the explanation of high-frequency trading.

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Readability Readable Insight Narrative quality Character development Frequency of trading Corruption

301 customers mention ‘Readability’289 positive12 negative

Customers find the book engaging and entertaining. They describe the story as gripping, told in a novelistic way. The author does a good job of bringing the story to life.

"...author emerges as a personality imbued with morality, possessing a brilliant, incisive, and penetrating intellect which goes to the heart of the..." Read more

"...Overall, though, this is a well-written fascinating insight into one important aspect of the far from `squeaky-clean' world of share dealing." Read more

"...judge (so I'll have to leave Moneyball out) he's so far been unfailingly entertaining, but very consistent in getting the wrong end of the stick...." Read more

"...fact that it is based on real-life should not negate that it is a gripping read...." Read more

160 customers mention ‘Readable’127 positive33 negative

Customers find the book well-written for non-technical readers. It explains complex topics in a clear and concise way. The author's writing style is engaging and comprehensive, making complex subjects easy to understand for non-finance readers.

"The book is engaging in its writing style but sobering in its substance...." Read more

"...to any topic is the ability to describe characters and make complex subjects simple...." Read more

"...This book has answered that question. The explanation is in one sense simple, although complex at the same time...." Read more

"...which I attribute entirely to the way Michael Lewis tells the story - simply, clearly, and passionately...." Read more

146 customers mention ‘Insight’146 positive0 negative

Customers find the book informative and interesting. They say it provides a good insight into the stock market and the free market economy. The book is described as an easy, enjoyable read that provides a great overview of the topic.

"...imbued with morality, possessing a brilliant, incisive, and penetrating intellect which goes to the heart of the matter revealing things in all..." Read more

"...Flash Boys breaks this mould. It is a genuine contribution. I can pass judgement because my life has run parallel to his books...." Read more

"...being too simplistic - I disagree - I think he has brilliantly covered a very complex topic and raised many of the important ethical and moral issues..." Read more

"...This story is exciting, devastating, infuriating, illuminating, and inspiring. You will not regret reading this book...." Read more

67 customers mention ‘Narrative quality’47 positive20 negative

Customers find the narrative engaging and revealing. They describe it as a gripping real-life thriller that humanises and explains a complex tale. The morality subplot is also gripping for readers.

"...as a personality imbued with morality, possessing a brilliant, incisive, and penetrating intellect which goes to the heart of the matter revealing..." Read more

"...It has a second subplot that is also a morality story, which I found totally gripping...." Read more

"...It is a pity that this book is so transparently factually inaccurate, but if read as a novle it is highly entertaining, and something that I would..." Read more

"...a very complex topic and raised many of the important ethical and moral issues...." Read more

26 customers mention ‘Character development’26 positive0 negative

Customers enjoy the book's character development. They find it insightful and engaging, weaving real-life stories through the lives of amazing individuals. The characters are well-developed, recognizable, and say a lot about human nature. The stories revolve around people and are simple yet comprehensive.

"...me intellectually taxing - while its author emerges as a personality imbued with morality, possessing a brilliant, incisive, and penetrating..." Read more

"...Flash Boys" is AWESOME. It has a plot, it has fully-developed heros and villains, it has a subplot that you suspect got lost but comes back with a..." Read more

"...The story line and development - though based on real people, actually has a lot of character development and makes you yell out to back to 'RBC-nice..." Read more

"...world of Wall Street look no further than this harrowing and uplifting true story about a few individuals, who did not go looking for trouble, but..." Read more

14 customers mention ‘Frequency of trading’10 positive4 negative

Customers find the book provides an understandable run-through of high-frequency trading and the issues around dark pools. They find it interesting and say it's a must-read for share traders. The book explains algorithmic trading and some of the issues without needing a great knowledge of trading.

"...It's about high-frequency trading, after all, so some appreciation of the micro-structure of markets is necessary...." Read more

"...The highly technical nature of computerised trading and the importance of nano second speeds required to gain an edge is fascinating...." Read more

"...The book is not about High Frequency Trading per se - it's mostly the canvas upon which the story of a particular fibre cable and a sympathetic..." Read more

"Really well told and understandable run through trading via high frequency traders and the issues around dark pools...." Read more

9 customers mention ‘Corruption’5 positive4 negative

Customers have different views on the book's coverage of corruption in the financial system. Some find it an eye-opener, providing a factual representation of the flaws in the financial system and expose of share dealing. Others describe it as a shocking illumination of the corruption and greed in our financial system, revealing how pension funds were being ripped off by HFT.

"...one is very readable, explaining the concepts and the corruption behind high frequency trading in terms easily understood by the non-expert...." Read more

"It revealed the corruption in the US stock market, how the pension funds were being ripped off by HFT." Read more

"...superbly written book, giving a no nonsense and factual representation of the financial system flaws we have today...." Read more

"This book is brilliant but it is a truly shocking illumination of the corruption and greed in our financial system." Read more

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Serghiou Const
Engaging in style but sobering in substance
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 May 2014
Verified Purchase
The book is engaging in its writing style but sobering in its substance.

I wish, however, to remark that despite the informality of its style, the book is conceptually dense and nuanced - and at least for me intellectually taxing - while its author emerges as a personality imbued with morality, possessing a brilliant, incisive, and penetrating intellect which goes to the heart of the matter revealing things in all their sinister clarity and importantly impeccably documented. If the characters of the actors in the book appear somewhat overdrawn, this is to stress their remarkable traits. The hero, Brad Katsumaya, emerges both as a paragon of morality and brilliance.

When I consider the substance of the book words like sobering, chilling, and Kafkaesque come to mind while when I think what High Frequency Traders (HFT) and dark pools have done to Wall Street Exchanges and Finance, the first word that crosses my mind is travesty.

Regarding the substance of the book, for the benefit of brevity and clarity, I shall in the ensuing simplify and confine myself to the gist of the matter.

The specific mode for market manipulation and extracting money from investors which is the focus of discussion in the book is 'front-running' while the people practicing it and profiting from it are called ' High Frequency Traders'; an ancillary tool are 'dark pools' which are private stock exchanges, run by the big brokers, which are not required to reveal to the public what happened inside them.

The mode and pattern of front running is revealed when a trader interacts 'simultaneously' with different exchanges: when bids and offers for shares sent to the exchanges arrived at precisely the same moment,the markets acted as they should. If they arrived a millisecond apart, the market vanished, and all bets were off. Brad Katsumaya knew that he was being 'front-run' - that some other trader, was in effect, noticing his demand for stock on one exchange and laying it on others in anticipation of selling it to him at a higher price. Brad identified a suspect: 'High-Frequency Traders'. And indeed that is what precisely happened, a small clan of insiders with the resources to create speed were now allowed to preview the market and trade on what they had seen. They were ripping off the retirement savings of the entire country through systematic fraud and people did not even realize it.

The initial response of Katsumaya when still employed with the Royal Bank of Canada was to construct Thor which had built in delays so that orders could arrive at different exchanges at the same time (the window of opportunity was 465 microseconds).

It was possible to obtain an estimate of the windfall for financial intermediaries which was somewhere between $10 billion and $22 billion a year.

Subsequently Katsumaya resigned from RBC and with a team of experts built a fair and transparent exchange, IEX, which proved a success. The first to back it was Goldman Sachs which changed its former policies due to its long term interests. Among the considerations was the instability into the system when its primary goal was no longer stability but speed. Another the billions by financial intermediaries. It has to be appreciated that that the profits of the HFT was 85% with only 15% gained by the banks.

I regret that I have to conclude the review in a pessimistic tone considering that since the late 1800s the entire history of Wall Street was the story of scandal. Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice. No matter what the regulators did, some other intermediary found a way to react, so there would be another form of front-running.

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Brian R. Martin
The murky world of share dealing.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 April 2014
Verified Purchase
The average small investor when buying or selling shares via their home computer assumes that the bargain will be struck at a price somewhere in the range quoted on his screen. More surprisingly, so did major brokers, despite evidence to the contrary. It became clear to some investors that their dealing intentions were somehow known to a third party before their order was fulfilled, and although the price difference on a single share was minute, on large transactions the total sum was very substantial. This book tells the story of how this `mystery' was unraveled by a broker called Brad Katsuyama from the sleepy Royal Bank of Canada.

He had noticed this effect in his own trades and after much investigation placing test transactions and talking to backroom computer specialists in the finance industry, he deuced that the `culprits' were a new breed of traders known as high frequency traders (HFTs), who had arisen following the computerization of share dealing. Often working in very small companies, they had invested heavily in laying dedicated optical fibre networks and high-speed routers so that they could receive data quicker than other dealers, banks, and investors. They also developed techniques of making numerous very small offers to probe the intentions of investors. They even paid the owners of stock exchanges for the privilege of placing their routers inside the buildings where the exchanges had their matching equipment, in order to reduce the access times by a few microseconds. These enabled them to `front run' other investors, a bit like knowing who had won a horse race before accepting or placing a bet at on off-course betting shop, except what they were doing was legal and even encouraged by the exchanges, who stood to profit in fees and other charges. The losers were the investors, and ultimately, given that our pensions and much else is bound up in stocks and shares, that means all of us.

Brad and his associates set out to beat the HFTs by establishing a new fair exchange that through a combination of clever software and hardware would ensure that no dealers could access data significantly sooner than others. In so doing he also believed that this would reduce the inherent volatility of the existing computerized systems and the major role of HFTs. To do this he recruited a remarkable collection of computer geeks from many different backgrounds who were more interested in the challenges than what they could earn. They were a difficult bunch to work with and the author describes these characters very well. It was an uphill struggle to raise the money to establish the exchange, which was called IEX, and to persuade brokers to use it, when they stood to lose money in the short term. The turning point came when he persuaded two people at Goldman Sachs, the bank we love to hate, to channel large deals through IEX, and thereafter other major players followed. It was very strange that Goldman Sach led the way because they had vigorously pursued one of their programmers, even having him jailed, when he left the company, on the grounds that he had stolen software, despite the fact that much of it was open source coding and none of it could be used on other systems.

The book is well written, but a bit heavy on technical details and there is considerable repetition about the techniques used by HFTs. It also ends without a clear statement about the current situation. Has IEX has really broken the power of HFT, or are they still a significant force, `ripping off' the rest of us? There is also an intriguing brief mention in the final few pages of data transmission using microwaves, which is even faster than existing fibre optics, but this is not followed up. Overall, though, this is a well-written fascinating insight into one important aspect of the far from `squeaky-clean' world of share dealing.

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Kindleのお客様
Excelente
Reviewed in Mexico on 30 March 2024
Verified Purchase
Muy buen libro.

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Rafael Loureiro
Amazing storytelling
Reviewed in Brazil on 1 April 2021
Verified Purchase
Even for the ones who don’t know much about the stock market, the book is really easy to read, with a simple pick of words for everyone understand what’s going on. Really recommend if you like stock market stories and a good story at all

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Akshim
Hit the "buy now" button ASAP.
Reviewed in India on 27 March 2021
Verified Purchase
Such an incredible read it was. The gripping and enthralling story. And the biggest bow goes to the people who wanted transparency in the stock market orders as well as Michael Lewis - For literally just digging up the facts and the events as they happened in such an incredible manner. The research Michael has done for this book is simply breathtaking. This book is not just a casual read, it is a learning. I, personally, did not know anything about the HFTs (primarily because of the new regulations by the market regulators now-a-days) and the dark pools that the companies and the stock exchanges had/have created. Just a mind blowing book. The only tinie tiny minor downside is the penguin publications. The book quality and the page quality could've been better (if some other publishing house would've done it). But who cares because you literally have to think of some excuse to put this book down. Done with this, next two Michael Lewis targets - The big short and liar's poker. Reviews coming soon for them.
Conclusion - Well as "Inventors" of the IEX stock exchange would say : Pick up the f*****g book.

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Yena Apithy
You will not be disappointed
Reviewed in Japan on 8 September 2022
Verified Purchase
As Michael tells stories the way onlyhe does it, the narrative takes you from the backdoors of rooms full of servers managed by IT geeks to the trading floors of hedge funds and HFT managed by this new breed of traders, geeky, smart, playing with flash crashes and a lot of money.
Nice insights a lessons for life for wall Streeter and non wall Streeters alike. Enjoy.
It's always about the people and Michael knows how to bring each character at the forefront of the action and the STORY.

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Inna Tysoe
Eye-opening
Reviewed in the United States on 24 October 2016
Verified Purchase
If you have been watching economic news this week, you will have heard that the British pound collapsed in a “flash crash.” Most news stories leave it at that. (I suspect that’s because they don’t know what a flash crash really is.) Put simply (and in Flash Boys Michael Lewis explains this recurring phenomenon quite simply) a flash crash is how high frequency traders use computers, multiple exchanges and time to abuse the rules. Now that I’ve summarized that, let me back up a second and deconstruct the sentence. First, what are the rules? In 2007, after brokers were found to have been abusing customers’ trust once too often, the government came out with what’s called Reg NMS. This regulation (and here I am just going to quote Michael Lewis directly because I don’t think I can say it any better than he did). Reg NMS mandated that brokers buy shares at the best price. “To define best price, Reg NMS relied on the concept of the National Best Bid and Offer. If an investor wished to buy 10,000 shares of Microsoft, and 100 shares were offered on the BATS exchange at $30 a share, while the full 10,000 listed on the other twelve exchanges were offered at $30.01, his broker was required to purchase the 100 shares at Bats before moving on to other exchanges.”

This meant that anyone with a computer can see where a purchase is going to be made and for how much. So if you have a faster connection (and several exchanges where you can sell a few shares of a stock, you can already see how you can make money.) Sure, you won’t make a lot of money from any one trade. Maybe less than half a cent here and half a cent there. But that adds up. I know this from first-hand experience. The other day at work, I was trying to calculate what would the cost be of a service was excluded from a package of services. And my calculation kept being almost a billion off. I did it and re-did and re-did it every which way I could think of. I even pulled down my stats book to see if my math was off. Nothing. I got up and went for a cup of coffee just to take a break from this ridiculous problem and when I sat down again, I saw it. It was a rounding error. To be exact it was a rounding error in the one/thousandth decimal place. But I was dealing with billions of dollars and that rounding error made quite a difference. So yes, parts of pennies add up. But wait, there’s more.

The way the best price is computed is when an exchange computes all the bids and offers on a particular stock. This computation is done by a government computer and if you know one thing about government, you will know that it takes years to upgrade computers. That means that if you have your own, faster computer you can “front-run” the official best price and sell and buy 100s of shares at the “real” best price. Sure it will be a “rounding error” but as I said before, those rounding errors matter. So a rule that was intended to create equity and transparency in the market in fact institutionalized inequality between the traders who had access to the super-fast computers and those who did not. Only the former would make money from these rounding errors.

But wait, there is yet more. To make full use of Reg NMS you also need many different exchanges or dark pools and dark cables. And guess what, both exist. Dark cables are cables that are optimized for speed of transaction. Sure it’s a millisecond difference or even less but in that time you can get a lot of rounding errors. Dark pools are, in essence, proprietary exchanges. They exist to make it easier for institutional investors (like the folks to whom you entrust your pension and mortgage, for example) to trade in large blocks. So, for example if you have one million shares of Microsoft you want to sell (or buy) but don’t want your identity known, you would rather sell/buy those shares away from the glaring eye of the public transaction. Here’s the problem, if your are a high frequency trader, you (by definition) have a super-fast computer and access to dark cables. That means you can “ping” the many, many dark pools that have been set up. By some estimates, 40% of all trading is now done inside dark pools. And that in turn means you can know, well before the government-issued slow computers have finished calculating the best price what the real selling price is. That’s one heck of a rounding error in your pocket.

And finally, to make all this work, you need volatility. All volatility means is that the price of something moves up and down a lot. And obviously if it does that, there is a lot more room for a high-frequency trader to essentially insert him/herself in the middle of that trade. Basically here’s the way it works. You want to buy those 10,000 shares of Microsoft for $30. There’s a dark pool that will sell 100 of them to you for that price. I, as a high-frequency trader, ping that dark pool, know what the price you’re willing to buy for is and all the other prices out there and where you will buy from next. So I go and buy the next batch of Microsoft shares that are selling (as you will recall at $30.01). Now, your broker, by law, has to come and buy the shares from me. Except I sell the shares now at $30.1001. And right there, in less than the blink of an eye I have made almost $10. And that’s from a mere 9,900 shares—a small trade. So what high-frequency traders do in effect is charge a tax for trading. And that tax (like most taxes) makes economic activity, in this case people’s willingness to trade to decrease. It also means that flash crashes, caused when a front-running computer algorithm gets too clever by half, are inevitable.

In Flash Boys, Lewis explains all of this a little at a time. In some ways, the book reads like a great detective story. And like a great detective story, it is eminently readable because at its heart is a kind of hero: Brad Katsuyama. Brad sets out to hire a lot of computer programmers to beat the system. First he introduced Thor. This was a platform that enabled you to trade more slowly and then a brand new exchange called IEX (an exchange—and yes, it got the license to be an actual exchange) that did the same thing. The idea behind Thor and IEX seems counter-intuitive but in a high-frequency world it works. If you trade many thousands of shares per trade, then it makes sense that your order should arrive at all the exchanges/dark pools at the same time. That way no-one can ping/front-run you. You will not, in other words, be paying a tax on your trade. So to get the high-frequency traders out of the loop, you need to trade just slowly enough that your orders arrive at all exchanges at the same time.

This is the story of how Brad and the motley crew he gathered around him came up with that idea, the push-back they initially got from the industry and how they eventually sold the industry, including Goldman Sachs, on the concept. It is a story well worth reading. I highly recommend it.

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