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MICHAEL LEWIS
FLASH BOYS
A WALL STREET REVOLT
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION WINDOWS ON THE WORLD
CHAPTER 1 HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT
CHAPTER 2 BRAD’S PROBLEM
CHAPTER 3 RONAN’S PROBLEM
CHAPTER 4 TRACKING THE PREDATOR
CHAPTER 5 PUTTING A FACE ON HFT
CHAPTER 6 HOW TO TAKE BILLIONS FROM WALL STREET
CHAPTER 7 AN ARMY OF ONE
CHAPTER 8 THE SPIDER AND THE FLY
EPILOGUE RIDING THE WALL STREET TRAIL
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
WINDOWS ON THE WORLD
I suppose this book started when I first heard the story of Sergey Aleynikov, the
Russian computer programmer who had worked for Goldman Sachs and then, in the
summer of 2009, after he’d quit his job, was arrested by the FBI and charged by the
United States government with stealing Goldman Sachs’s computer code. I’d
thought it strange, after the financial crisis, in which Goldman had played such an
important role, that the only Goldman Sachs employee who had been charged with
any sort of crime was the employee who had taken something from Goldman Sachs.
I’d thought it even stranger that government prosecutors had argued that the Russian
shouldn’t be freed on bail because the Goldman Sachs computer code, in the wrong
hands, could be used to “manipulate markets in unfair ways.” (Goldman’s were the
right hands? If Goldman Sachs was able to manipulate markets, could other banks do
it, too?) But maybe the strangest aspect of the case was how difficult it appeared to
be—for the few who attempted—to explain what the Russian had done. I don’t mean
only what he had done wrong: I mean what he had done. His job. He was usually
described as a “high-frequency trading programmer,” but that wasn’t an explanation.
That was a term of art that, in the summer of 2009, most people, even on Wall
Street, had never before heard. What was high-frequency trading? Why was the code
that enabled Goldman Sachs to do it so important that, when it was discovered to
have been copied by some employee, Goldman Sachs needed to call the FBI? If this
code was at once so incredibly valuable and so dangerous to financial markets, how
did a Russian who had worked for Goldman Sachs for a mere two years get his hands
on it?
At some point I went looking for someone who might answer those questions. My
search ended in a room looking out at the World Trade Center site, at One Liberty
Plaza. In this room were gathered a small army of shockingly well-informed people
from every corner of Wall Street—big banks, the major stock exchanges, and high-
frequency trading firms. Many of them had left high-paying jobs to declare war on
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Wall Street, which meant, among other things, attacking the very problem that the
Russian computer programmer had been hired by Goldman Sachs to create. In the
bargain they’d become experts on the questions I sought answers to, along with a lot
of other questions I hadn’t thought to ask. These, it turned out, were far more
interesting than I expected them to be.
I didn’t start out with much interest in the stock market—though, like most
people, I enjoy watching it go boom and crash. When it crashed on October 19, 1987,
I happened to be hovering around the fortieth floor of One New York Plaza, the
stock market trading and sales department of my then employer, Salomon Brothers.
That was interesting. If you ever needed proof that even Wall Street insiders have no
idea what’s going to happen next on Wall Street, there it was. One moment all is
well; the next, the value of the entire U.S. stock market has fallen 22.61 percent, and
no one knows why. During the crash, some Wall Street brokers, to avoid the orders
their customers wanted to place to sell stocks, simply declined to pick up their
phones. It wasn’t the first time that Wall Street people had discredited themselves,
but this time the authorities responded by changing the rules—making it easier for
computers to do the jobs done by those imperfect people. The 1987 stock market
crash set in motion a process—weak at first, stronger over the years—that has ended
with computers entirely replacing the people.
Over the past decade, the financial markets have changed too rapidly for our
mental picture of them to remain true to life. The picture I’ll bet most people have
of the markets is still a picture a human being might have taken. In it, a ticker tape
runs across the bottom of some cable TV screen, and alpha males in color-coded
jackets stand in trading pits, hollering at each other. That picture is dated; the world
it depicts is dead. Since about 2007, there have been no thick-necked guys in color-
coded jackets standing in trading pits; or, if they are, they’re pointless. There are
still some human beings working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and
the various Chicago exchanges, but they no longer preside over any financial market
or have a privileged view inside those markets. The U.S. stock market now trades
inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago. What
goes on inside those black boxes is hard to say—the ticker tape that runs across the
bottom of cable TV screens captures only the tiniest fraction of what occurs in the
stock markets. The public reports of what happens inside the black boxes are fuzzy
and unreliable—even an expert cannot say what exactly happens inside them, or
when it happens, or why. The average investor has no hope of knowing, of course,
even the little he needs to know. He logs onto his TD Ameritrade or E*Trade or
Schwab account, enters a ticker symbol of some stock, and clicks an icon that says
“Buy”: Then what? He may think he knows what happens after he presses the key on
his computer keyboard, but, trust me, he does not. If he did, he’d think twice before
he pressed it.
The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s
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