Flash Boys: Cracking the Money Code

Michael Lewis returns to the financial world to lay bare the biggest new story since the crash.

The old image of Wall Street, of alpha males shouting at each other in trading pits, is no more. Now, the world’s money is traded by computer code, inside black boxes in heavily guarded buildings. This is the dark world of high-frequency trading, a landscape of cunning, secrecy, and barely measurable milliseconds of speed, in which the stock exchange itself has become complicit in its own corruption.

With unmatched clarity and wit, FLASH BOYS reveals how the same system that revelled in the complexity of “subprime mortgage collateralized debt obligations” has spawned something new, something nearly impossible to grasp, and impossible to monitor in real time. With their unimaginable advantages of speed, high-frequency traders have manipulated the market, with flash traps such as rebate arbitrage, electronic front-running and slow market arbitrage, in order to gobble up profits and rebates – often in conjunction with the big banks of Wall Street, and their private exchanges called “dark pools”.

Lewis unearths a group of ingenious oddballs and misfits who have uncovered a world built on injustice and decide to reform the market from the inside out. Setting out to expose the rigged heart of capitalism and create their own, fair stock exchange, FLASH BOYS is the explosive story of them declaring war on some of the richest and most powerful people and institutions in the world.

Michael Lewis is the author of several international bestsellers, including The Big Short, Moneyball, The Blind Side, and the cult classic Liar’s Poker, widely considered the book that defined Wall Street during the 1980s. Lewis is contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and writes for Portfolio and Vanity Fair magazine, for which he has interviewed Barack Obama. Malcolm Gladwell said of him “I read 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.”