Flash Boys

A Wall Street Revolt

By: Michael Lewis

Narrated by: Dylan Baker

Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

2015 Audie Award Finalist for Non-Fiction

From the number-one New York Times best-selling author of Liar's Poker and "one of the country's most popular business journalists" (The New York Times) Michael Lewis, comes an engaging new book about Wall Street.

Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of Boomerang, The Big Short, The Blind Side, Moneyball, and many others, returns to the financial world to give listeners a ringside seat as the biggest news story in years prepares to hit Wall Street.

©2014 Michael Lewis (P)2014 Simon & Schuster

If you want a book that will get you angry...

... and also leave you with some hope at the end. Real heroes solving a mystery that affects millions of people, villains clearly present but barely visible through the fog they've scattered, and a lot of complacency and complexity making a bad situation worse. Great story, told (and read) well.

Prepare to get mad.

Before reading Flash Boys, I was only marginally aware of High Frequency Trading and had only a vague notion of what it was. Michael Lewis sheds a lot of light on how it works and who it benefits (hint: not you) and apparently, I wasn’t the only one who was in the dark. HFT is usually portrayed as being a net win for the markets because it provides liquidity. That turns out to be far from the truth. Not only is the liquidity provided by HFT a false liquidity that benefits no one, it turns out it’s just a way to take advantage of having faster access to market data to essentially skim from “normal” market activity. It’s guys with faster connections and privileged access to market data taking your money when you trade while providing you zero benefit whatsoever in return.

You pretty much have to have faith that based on his reputation, Lewis is getting his facts straight since it obviously behooves the HFT traders to obfuscate what they’re doing. If he’s getting it right though, then there’s a lot of crap going down that should shake your faith in the good intentions of majority of stock brokers. Fortunately there is a hint of optimism throughout the book and signs that things are changing, but the situation he describes so well is very much still happening today.

Interesting look at HFT

Michael Lewis has a spellbinding book with drama in a complex highly technical subject of high frequency computerized trading (HFT) in United States stock markets. This is a highly complex field that few understand; Lewis tries to explain it in terms we all can understand. This is a non-fiction book but the author made no effort to be unbiased. According to Lewis the HFT was encouraged by a regulation passed in 2005, which aimed to open large exchanges such as NYSE and NASDAQ to stiffer competition. Instead in Lewis’s view point the stock markets now are rigged by traders who go to astonishing lengths to gain a millisecond edge over their rivals. As an innocent investor presses a button to buy shares, the HFT trader leaps invisibly into the electronic market to profit from the order and thousands of other, siphoning off billions of dollars a year. The author turn it into a human narrative by telling the rise of HFT through the eyes of Brad Katsuyama a former Royal bank of Canada trader who came to Wall Street and was shocked by what he found. The story tells how he found his own exchange (IEX) that is designed to outwit the HFT abuser. If Lewis is right the regulators have failed and allowed a huge financial scandal to take place under their nose and they also have encouraged the deregulation the stock market. One of the subplots is about the role of Russian computer programmers including Sergey Aleynikov an employee of Goldman Sacks who was arrested by the FBI after leaving the bank in 2009 and charged with stealing computer code. Lewis attempts to explain why Aleynikov is not guilty even thought the jury found him guilty. Many of the Wall Street HFT elite are Russian. American’s lack of mathematical skills opened the field to the Russian mathematical and computer professionals I found this to be an absorbing fast paced story and I sure hope that Lewis has exaggerated the problem to make a good story. Dylan Baker did a good job narrating the book.

Lewis Hits Another Home Run

Would you consider the audio edition of Flash Boys to be better than the print version?

Yes

Who was your favorite character and why?

Brad is Superman coming to the rescue of the little guy.

What about Dylan Baker’s performance did you like?

Clear strong voice.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Towards the end when he was talking about how Goldman Sachs got on Board.

Any additional comments?

Awesome Book!

Good book. Not as good as Lewis’s other stuff.

Good story, well told, good narration, but not as good as Lewis’s other books. Not back but I’d start with boomerang.

As interesting as it was true

Very good narration and a very interesting non fiction topic from the genius of Michael Lewis

Can't convince people with all cursing

The F bombs were highly unnecessary. It could actually have been a decent book with a little more class and hold back the slang.

Michael Lewis is always good and this is one of hi

Other than Michael's frequent use of profanity, another great financial story told as only Michael Lewis does. Interesting end, definitely worth the listen.

Please read or listen and let your blood boil

Would you consider the audio edition of Flash Boys to be better than the print version?

I love the audio version. I am not a reader. I listen when I walk to and back form work. The narrator was awesome he puts in all the passion in the dialogue and you can imagine every character very well.

What did you like best about this story?

This book made my blood boil. This is just insane, the lawless markets the corrupt law makers, greedy bankers and the worst of all the leeches AKA the high frequency traders. How is it all possible? Why don't people pay attention? Oh well I am not an am American and I don't have a penny in the stock market for now. I hope things change

Which scene was your favorite?

This books reads like a fact finding mission and you want to be on in so bad. Every bit of this book is so engaging, especially the parts where the guys try to setup the exchange and also the part when the fastest cable is laid from Chicago to New York.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes, I really wanted to but could not. Every time I stopped I always looked forward to continuing it.

I work in the finance industry…

… and this confirmed everything I suspected about high-frequency trading. It also makes a good case for why what we (company, not necessarily the whole industry) do is actually a useful service, as opposed to just shuffling money around. (We do medium-latency market-making—not in the US and not with their multitudes of competing exchanges, so no front-running—and we don't speculate, so this also put to rest any lingering doubts I had on the ethics of what we do. We're also RBC-nice.)

Everything is explained well for a lay audience IMO, without taking (m)any factual liberties. The storytelling aspect (and pacing) of the book (and narrator) is also felt pretty engaging. (Although I'm not sure I'm well-qualified to judge as this is only my second audiobook.)