Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

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.

Michal Lewis is a national treasure. He is able to take complex things and make them accessible to people like your mom - if you want to be condescending to your mother. In a way, he is one of the best nonfiction writers in English working today. I'd put him up there with Bill Bryson. But you know that already. This is a Michael Lewis book. You know: the guy who wrote Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, and that other book you like. What Lewis does is take a look at an issue, but he does this thing where instead of boring you with a lot of details, he tells the story of a person (For real - this book has no index, no endnotes) and the problem they face and the cool things they do. The person isn't really usually that far removed from what we imagine ourselves to be, but perhaps a better version than the self we really are. In Flash Boys, that person is Brad Katsuyama. Katsuyama was a worker on the exchange for the Royal Bank of Canada. He noticed that there were issues with trading. Namely that the trades that his traders were trying to make basically disappeared in front of him when they tried to execute them. This lead the reader to go on a journey led by Lewis as the reader follows along with Katsuyama as everyone learns what the issue was and why those trades were disappearing. Mainly the story is computers, software, and companies using their smarts to insert themselves in the middle of a trade. Eventually Brad and the reader learn all about this and is disenchanted with the system as it exists so he sets out to change this. His mission is to create a new exchange that disarms the smart "High Frequency Trading" and levels the playing field for everyone. It's a good story, and Lewis tells it well. My issue with it is that with the structure of the story, where it focuses on Katsuyama and his team, is that it is one-sided. The implicit message is that they are the good guys and the HFT guys are the bad guys. If you don't know much about the world that Lewis describes then you take it for granted that he is right. The last third of the book becomes an advertisement for the exchange that was started. It has started a lot of conversations amongst finance and economic people about the value of HFT, but that is nowhere in the book. Does it help price discovery; does it provide liquidity; does it make trading more efficient ? Or is HFT just predatory; is it pure rent as Lewis quotes someone "The market is all about algos and routers. It's hard to figure this stuff out. There's no book you can read ." (209)? I don't know, but thankfully this book is bringing those issues. Ultimately, I have to hoist a footnote that Lewis writes that sums up the whole book for me: "'Glitch' belongs in the same category as `liquidity' or for that matter, `high frequency trading.' All terms used to obscure rather than to clarify, and to put minds to early rest."(203). Lewis lets in his editorial voice come in to show that even though he has written a whole book there is an inexactness to defining what HFT is - you have to get to the nitty-gritty to really know (He recommends a couple of books in the text but I didn't highlight them). Because in the end, this book is only tangentially about HFT. It is really about Brad Katsuyama. All I wonder is who is going to play him in the movie

This is a classic Michael Lewis book. It reads quickly. The topic is fascinating. The content is extremely insightful as the true technicalities of High Frequency Trading are either not covered or not understood even by the investment related media. Michael Lewis book follows three intertwined narratives. First, he opens the black box on what is high frequency trading (HFT). How it works, how it extracts rent profits from investors in the stock markets. There are currently over 50 stock market exchanges: 13 are public, and the rest are dark pools. The more market exchanges there are, the more arbitrage and front running opportunities there are for high frequency traders (HFTs) to exploit. Second, it narrates the history of the Investors Exchange (IEX) founded by a righteous quant type bunch who decided to start a stock market exchange that would eliminate all the HFT rent seeking strategies so to deliver a fairer market price to institutional investors trading on their platform. And, third it follows the strange life and career of the Russian computer programmer Sergey Aleynikov. He worked for two years for Goldman Sachs from 2007 to 2009 to render their computer trading systems faster and more competitive within the high speed world of HFT. He left Goldman Sachs with his computer codes that Goldman Sachs deemed proprietary. Goldman Sachs had him arrested by the FBI in 2009, and ever since he has been either engaged in trials prosecuted by Goldman Sachs or in jail. This third narrative also covers the ambiguous and evolving engagement of Goldman Sachs in HFT. At first, it attempts to become an engaged competitive high frequency trader itself. And, that is when it hired Aleynikov to improve its trading computers’ speed. Later, it will realize that chasing the HFTs in a speed competition is a losing proposition. And, it will become the only major Wall Street investment bank to fully support the Investors Exchange (IEX) to counter and neutralize the nefarious impact of HFTs. Going back to the first narrative, High Frequency Trading extracts rent profits from institutional investors (and their retail investors) in three ways. The first way is by beating the investor to the stock market gateway and quickly buying and reselling the stock to the investor at a small profit. They call it “electronic front-running.” To do that, you need to be fast. That is where the nano second trading speed comes in. The “co-location” of the HFTs servers next to the ones of the exchanges plays a major role by reducing the electronic distance travelled and maximizing trading speed. The second way is by exploiting a complex system of kickback and rebates on trades implemented by the various exchanges themselves. They call it “rebate arbitrage.” The third way appears similar to electronic front-running, except that the HFTs exploit minute price discrepancies between the various exchanges before the exchanges themselves have had a chance of correcting those. They call it “slow market arbitrage”. Apparently, of the three rent seeking strategies this is the most lucrative one for the HFTs. The above strategies are implemented within a market universe that is alien to individual investors and most institutional investors. This market universe has interesting characteristics. Its foundational one is an unfathomable stock trading speed measured in the 1/10000 of a second. Such speed relies on extra fast fiber optic networks and computer servers located extremely closely to the servers of the stock exchange themselves. Another characteristic is the HFTs purchasing customer order flows from the Wall Street brokerage houses. The latter now make more money from selling those customer order flows to HFTs than from trading itself. In essence, Wall Street sells proprietary customer order information to the HFTs, so the HFTs can front run these same customers (their stock orders). And, somehow SEC laws have still not caught up to this apparent infraction of the integrity of the stock markets. That’s even though the mentioned HFTs rent seeking strategies are at least a decade old. So, next time when you think your brokerage house is acting in your best interest, think again. It is acting in the best interest of the HFTs and itself by making money on selling your order information to the HFTs. And, we are talking millions if not billions of dollars in total annual revenues for the Wall Street brokerage houses. Going back to the second narrative, to correct for all those markets flaws exploited by the HFTs, Brad Katsuyama, a former trader at Royal Bank of Canada, will create a “fair” exchange: the Investors Exchange (IEX) in 2012. This exchange takes specific infrastructure measures to entirely eliminate all the exploitative advantages of HFTs including: 1) ensuring market pricing data arrives at external points of presence simultaneously; 2) slightly delaying market pricing data to all customers (no co-location, HFTs servers are not allowed proximate to the IEX servers); and 3) IEX refuses to pay for order flow and does not offer related trade rebates of any kind. The majority of Wall Street banks and HFTs will do everything possible to kill this emerging “clean” exchange in its infancy. This is because they collectively extract yearly rent-profit in the $billions on the back of retail and institutional investors. However, as mentioned one of the main player will break rank as Goldman Sachs ultimately decides to support IEX by routing a good portion of its trades to IEX. Goldman Sachs understands that what IEX is doing to restoring integrity in the equity markets is critical. And, as a result IEX survives. Nevertheless, it is not entirely encouraging when evaluating how much impact IEX has in restoring the integrity of the US equities markets since it captures less than 3% of its volume to this day. In other words, over 97% of such market trading volume still is done under the exploitative rent-seeking system abused by the HFTs (electronic front running, etc.) and the other Wall Street banks (making more money from selling their customer order flows than actual trading). The third narrative about Sergey Aleynikov and Goldman Sachs evolving position regarding HFT is very interesting because of its ambiguity. Aleynikov used mainly open source software to develop his codes to improve Goldman Sachs computer speed. When he accepts an offer to join Teza Technologies (who offered to triple his compensation from $400k to $1.2 million), he decides to copy and take his computer code on a USB drive. At such point, Goldman Sachs aggressively pursues him (gets him arrested by the FBI, tried, and jailed). At the time, Goldman Sachs considered the mentioned computer codes to be proprietary and critical to its competitive position within the HFT environment. Michael Lewis will engage with many industry insiders (HFTs, computer programmers, etc.) and solicit their opinion on whether Aleynikov was truly guilty of stealing proprietary company codes or not. Almost unanimously this crowd of insiders advance that Aleynikov was innocent. And, that his practice of copying his own open source based codes when he moved to another employer is absolutely standard within the computer programming community. Aleynikov also indicated that he had no use for Goldman’s proprietary codes as they were very cumbersome catered to Goldman’s antiquated legacy computer systems. When Michael Lewis talked to outsiders like institutional investors, they were far less lenient. And, they typically considered that Aleynikov was clearly guilty of stealing proprietary codes. As indicated, Goldman Sachs at first vigorously pursues Aleynikov in order to protect its position in terms of trading speed within the world of HFT. Much later, when it decides to give up on the speed competition and decides to do just the opposite by supporting IEX, Goldman Sachs does not pursue Aleynikov as adamantly anymore. But, by then the legal system takes a life of its own. As a result, some of the related lawsuits are still going on to this day. Aleynikov is nearly bankrupt and has an online legal defense fund to raise money to mount his defense and reclaim his innocence.

I retired from the hedge fund world and I can tell you that this book is mostly on target. For those who deny that HFT (high-frequency trading) is a rigged game, either they are un-informed or disingenuous. It wasn't always like this. There was a time, when a bid was a bid, and an ask was an ask. If you liked the ask, you could hit the buy button and have a buy order confirmed instantly. Likewise, if you liked the bid, you could hit it and have a sale order confirmed instantly. That instant used to be measured in seconds or less. Then came along the HFT algo. All of a sudden, a bid is no longer a firm bid, and an ask is no longer a firm ask. You can hit the bid, but instead of selling instantly, you now become the ask price, and the bid just got lowered by a penny or more, and the market is moving away from you. Most of the time, the price move is a head fake - an illusion, trying to get you to trade at a price with "scalping" built-in against you. If you are willing to stick around, the precise price you want will return and you can have your trade. But other times when execution really matters, it was all real, the price you were willing to trade at just got shifted permanently right before your eyes and somebody "front-run" you. I decided to retire, partly out of disgust, partly out of my lack of financial ambition. I learned a while ago, if the first million can't make you happy, that you have to accumulate more, you will never be content. If you have to play the rigged game to add more riches to your money pile that most human beings will never see in their lifetime, I feel sorry for you. Life is too short for me to play that game. Addendum: This book was written for the lay person, so was my review. Sorry for not bandying about the jargons as some would expect, my bad. As much as I tried, I seem to have failed to write in plain English and draw the analogy to a functioning market. That's where Michael Lewis' book excelled, hence my recommendation. Granted, true free market doesn't exist in the financial world (no matter where you look, New York/London/Chicago/Tokyo). Only the naive will expect any market to give all participants the same level of positioning to engage in any transaction. My favorite analogy is my local farmers' market. When I show up to buy strawberries, some farmers/dealers have way more information on the supply and demand, and have inventory to reflect their view. They will rightfully make a profit when I buy the basket of strawberries from any of them. What I don't want to see is some jerk get in the way and buy up all the strawberries just before I hand my money to the seller, then turn around and sell the strawberries to me as if he had been the seller all along. The price quoted at my farmer's stand should be the price I can buy strawberries at, not a new price some jerk just jacked up to after seeing my intention to transact. I hope the description above clears any doubt about what this book is really about. It's not about someone having some legitimate edge after doing extensive research, or illegitimate edge resulting from inside information. It is about the financial market must be well functioning and free of unnecessary intermediation. That said, still two thumbs up on the book! For those who deny the unfairness of HFT front-running, either you haven't seen it (which should disqualify you from commenting on this topic) or you are so jaded that you can't see its harm (which begs questions about your integrity). As for myself, still happily retired after a short stint in the world of finance, thank you very much! I never learned much and never enjoyed rattling off the jargons.

This is a one sitting book. I started it at about 8:00pm one evening and found the sun coming up as I finished it. Most read a lot faster than I do, so you may not take as long. Obviously, it is well written and compelling. On reflection, however, I wonder why it seems like a big deal to have financial intermediaries slice milliseconds and then microseconds off stock market buy and sell transactions. To me the issue of artificial intelligence applications seems like a bigger deal than time slicing. Let me give perspective. I worked once with a man whose college roommate was given six million dollars by his (the roommate's) father to master the commodity market in cashew nuts. This was more than fifty years ago. His father did not believe that his son's education would teach him how to prosper in this market. So he underwrote a real world trial and error education. I don't know anything about cashew markets but I can appreciate that you must know who is producing and who is consuming this product. You must know all the factors connected with the producers and consumers. This would include but not be limited to: the countries where the fields are located, their microclimatology, their owner's ages and prospects, their labor relations, politics and economies, etc. There would seem to be several dozen factors associated with each producer and consumer and the mechanisms in the market that process and transport the product. And you would have to be alert to trends and any sudden impact of plant diseases, drought, floods, revolutions, etc. Well, to make it short, the roommate spent the six million and had nothing to show for it. But, now consider the artificial intelligence applications to such problems. In particular, consider adaptive artificial intelligence algorithms. Let the application scan the WEB for `cashew' or whatever its translation is in the dozen or more languages of the countries where it is grown and even more countries where it is consumed. This includes information from the respective departments of agriculture with alerts and forecasts along with reports from selected growers that you pay to make such reports, etc. It would also include reports from the producer of my favorite cashew candy bar, Rocky Road! With the computer power now available and the decreasing costs of Internet connection and bandwidth, would you not be able to find the important factors among the patterns of these data? Would the big banks not be able to fund such a development and even provide it with information from their transactions base? Can you see where this could go with access to NSA style surveillance of financial and personal transactions? It was one of the worries of many producer countries about the implications of EROS - earth resources observation satellites with their multispectral 24/7 monitoring of their lands. The country controlling the satellite data might know more about your cashews than you do? This was a big issue forty years ago and now you never hear of it. So, why did Michael Lewis concentrate on time slicing rather than the issue of Goldman Sachs being able to count the cashews on your ranch?

I found Flash Boys to be riveting. I read it in two sittings in two days. Of course we know that Lewis is an excellent writer and has the gift of simplifying a complex story, but what made this book so inspiring for me was the heart and soul of Brad Kutsayama and his team to "do the right thing" in spite of the uphill climb they face and still face. How anyone can read this book -understanding what it articulates- and then turn around and say this story is "over-blown" seems unconscionable. I was actually moved to tears after finishing it because it's so obvious to me that the IEX Group has an intention and desire to take what has been severely less than a transparent platform and recreate a new one against the odds - and yes they will make a profit but an appropriate one - a platform that is built on transparency & integrity. No one is denying that there has always been and always will be a middle man - I have no problem with that or anyone making their cut. But to hold our sell or buy orders until it benefits them (hiding them in their own dark pools) so they can jack up their profit on our trade's back - is way above and beyond what is fair and it's certainly not in their client's best interest. This from IEX Group's website: "While IEX has no broker owners, we will have only broker subscribers of our trading platform. This unique separation of ownership and subscribers allows IEX to design a trading venue with the traditional investor's best interest in mind, while continuing to recognize the role of brokers in the investment process." I don't think you need to be a trader or investor or even for that matter a rocket scientist to see how clear the raping & pillaging has been. No one is dissing electronic trading - least of all Lewis or Katsuyama - it's the behavior of those electronic trading exchanges that have been skimming off our trades as well as the bank's behavior in their dark pools as well, which denies everyone the fairness of the market place. As investors we all have a right to transparency. That's what IEX Group is about - giving that back to all of Wall Street and beyond. I even found the small vignette re Goldman's Sergey Aleynikove and their over reaction to him - proof that on so many levels of high finance the tail is wagging the dog. Today I actually had the privileged of interviewing Brad Katsuyama for the book I'm writing called Transforming Wall Street. His story is truly extraordinary and one that I think has the power to move and inspire all of us on, in and beyond Wall Street to transform and speak out. Flash Boys reads like a David & Goliath story with David and all of us investors winning. It gave me great hope and affirmed me in my mission to uncover the good guys on Wall Street so that they can start to wrestle the reins back from the anti-capitalists. Reading about the two guys at Goldman and their courageous act - proves how powerful one man never mind two can be. That story still takes my breath away! The time has come for each of us to rally. It's time for each of us to demand better treatment from every division that represents us on Wall Street. Together we can take a stand for what Wall Street is here for. All of us. Katsuyama and his team are taking that stand - with no guarantee still (!) that they will succeed. I like books that give me hope and call me forth to play an even bigger and courageous game and Flash Boy's did just this! I highly recommend it!

Michael Lewis’ new book “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,” hit the top of The New York Times bestseller list a week after its release. As you would expect, the book is skilfully assembled and quite sensational. When I first started to read it, I too was convinced that Lewis was on to a big story, an important narrative about the seamy underside of Wall Street. But the more I read and, more important, the more I checked his story with my colleagues on the operations side of the financial markets, the more it becomes apparent that Lewis has missed the real story – and perhaps deliberately. The headline of “Flash Boys” is about Wall Street traders using fast technology and unfair tactics to trade ahead of retail investors – and they do – but Lewis misses the real issues, namely: 1) a lack of transparency and 2) deliberate complexity. It is important to distinguish between issues related to the “flash crash” of May 2010, when the deliberately fragmented ghetto that is the US equity markets almost melted down and the daily business of HFT. The former is discussed in an important 2011 paper by Ananth Madhavan of BlackRock, Inc. Unfortunately, as the title of his book confirms, Lewis combines the two issues together into an often confusing narrative that is almost impossible for laymen to understand. The abusive aspect of HFT which Lewis rightly identifies is not so much about the speed of the trading but rather always being first in line. If you think of the current market price of a stock, a couple of years ago, the trader using HFT used to sit just above and below the current market price, and sought to execute quickly when the market price either went up or down. The fact of computers and fast network connections enables this HFT activity, but it is not really the key part of the strategy. Instead the key is to always be first in line. The important part of the story that Lewis misstates is that there is no conspiracy, no illegal activities. All of the strategies used in HFT are not only legal, but they are the result of extensive rule making and public hearings by Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, FINRA and the major exchanges. So while Lewis is right to say that these strategies “screw” retail customers in a practical sense, the fact is that the activity has been entirely blessed by Congress, regulators and the major exchanges. In the first aptly named chapter, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” Lewis describes groups of traders attempting to conceal their activities, great stuff if your chief objective is to sell books. But the reality is that the top three HFT firms – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse – have been very visibly investing in trading technology for decades. These investments in computers and fast network connections not only give them an advantage over other firms, but afford these firms bragging rights on the Street. If you are an equity trader, you don’t want to work at a “flow shop” like Merrill Lynch. Part of the reason that the Big Media is making such a fuss over “Flash Traders” is that they have no idea how the equity markets actually work in the brave new world of Reg NMS – 600 pages of unintelligible rules and definitions. Lewis notes that as the size of equity trades after 2000 “had plummeted, the markets had fragmented and the gap in time between the public view of the markets and the view of high frequency traders had widened.” This passage and others give readers the false impression that the speed of the HFT is the key point, but this is incorrect. Going back to the point about being first in line, let’s take an example. The BATS order type known as “display-price sliding” allows an investor to essentially position themselves in the center of the equity market for a given stock. This means that when the market price changes, instead of the HFT “market order” being canceled as per the National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO) rule, it simply “slides” to follow the market. Most investors and advisors don’t even know that such an order type exists. For example, when Lewis talks about the fact that Virtu Financial had made money almost every day for five years, the reader is given the impression that the speed of the trading gave Virtu and other HFT shops the advantage. But the reality is that the high frequency trader not only executes before the retail customer, as Lewis describes, but is always first in line. This structural duplicity is programed into the system, but is perfectly kosher under Reg NMS. Indeed, the real scandal is that all of this has been entirely blessed by the SEC, FINRA and the major exchanges and is described in the voluminous public documentation for permitted order types. But suffice to say, virtually nobody in the Big Media or at most Wall Street firms understand any of this or knows, for example, that there are over 100 different order types allowed by the SEC and FINRA under current law and regulations. The crime of HFT is that Congress, the SEC and other regulators have allowed a handful of Wall Street firms to assemble a set of opaque market rules that few people understand. You could probably put all of the Wall Street operations people who really understand HFT in a large conference room. Outside of the small community of traders and operations people who make HFT work, almost nobody else on Wall Street really understand the nuances of the business. And virtually nobody at the SEC has a clue how this works in practice. We should thank Michael Lewis for using his celebrity and considerable writing skills to draw attention to this issue of HFT, but “Flash Boys” incorrectly demonizes individual traders and firms. Lewis “Puts a Face on HFT,” but in doing so misses the real point of the problem. Instead of drawing an accurate picture of HFT, namely corruption and stupidity in Washington, admittedly a banal and boring tale, Lewis chose instead to create a sensational and interesting fictional narrative that will obviously sell more books. “Flash Boys” is a book written for Hollywood instead of the history books or policy makers. Just as the hyper-popular “Wolf of Wall Street” was not an accurate portrayal of fraudster Tom Prousalis, as his daughter Christina testifies, the story line in “Flash Boys” is more fictional dramatization than fact. The true perpetrators in Michael Lewis’ tale of Wall Street greed and corruption are, in order of complicity, the US Congress, the SEC, FINRA and major exchanges, and last but not least the community of Buy and Sell Side Advisors, who genuinely do not understand how HFT really works. That covers just about everybody. As illustrator Walt Kelly’s Pogo said famously: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” This review was published in Zero Hedge in April 2014: [...]

I'm almost sorry to like this book as much as I do because it reveals an underside of the stock market that is created and leveraged by a focus on making money on the trading side by taking real capital from investors. It details how intermediaries are using rulings by the SEC, that were intended to eliminate human error, to siphon ten's of billions of dollars out of the market each year - money that comes from fees paid by you and me and by lower returns by the brokers we use. It makes it difficult to read since you can't help seeing just how wrong it is, yet a large number of people in back rooms that you never see are doing it. The genie is out of the bottle, so it isn't going to stop any time soon. That is the hard truth that this book uncovers. But, and more important, it also uncovers a bastion of people who have become aware of that ponzie scheme and have started to build an alternative market that equalizes the playing field. That story is fascinating and Lewis does a phenomenal job of explaining highly technical trading processes and why they can be leveraged by a few microseconds advantage. His writing style and informative, well researched approach to this complex situation makes for a very readable book. It has the pace of a good thriller but is even more enticing since it is real life. He characterizes the players in a balanced and neutral way. At the end of the book you are left with an understanding of what the issue is and the knowledge that some key people are trying to fix it. As painful as it is to read this book, it is a must read for anyone who is interested in how a simple analytic idea can bloom into something that seems subversive. One of the greatest learnings I gained was that more regulation that tries to put a cap on the genie's bottle is only going to fail because each attempt will only open up another gap to be leveraged. These people have too much to lose and they can move much faster than any legislative body. What has to happen is for people like us who invest in 401k programs and stocks of companies we want to help start to request that our brokers use alternate paths to make those investments.