Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

Flash Boys: A Wall Street RevoltFlash 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.

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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 03/31/2014
ISBN: 9780393244663
Pages: 274
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.40w x 1.10d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 04/14/2014
Entertainment Weekly 04/11/2014 pg. 70
People Weekly 04/21/2014 pg. 55
New York Times Book Review 04/20/2014 pg. 12
New York Times Book Review 04/27/2014 pg. 30
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2014
New York Review of Books 07/10/2014 pg. 37
Choice 10/01/2014 pg. 310
LJ Best Books of Year 12/01/2014 pg. 662
Kirkus Best Nonfiction 12/01/2014 pg. 33