Flash Boys A Wall Street Revolt

Argues that post-crisis Wall Street continues to be controlled by large banks and explains how a small, diverse group of Wall Street men have banded together to reform the financial markets.

“Lewis shows again why he is the leading journalist of his generation.”—Kyle Smith, Forbes The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a pinata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. Michael Lewis's investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American reader to a comfortable complacency: oh, those foolish foreigners. But when he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.

The time was the 1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liar’s Poker. Michael Lewis was fresh out of Princeton and the London School of Economics when he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from callow trainee to bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush. Liar’s Poker is the culmination of those heady, frenzied years—a behind-the-scenes look at a unique and turbulent time in American business. From the frat-boy camaraderie of the forty-first-floor trading room to the killer instinct that made ambitious young men gamble everything on a high-stakes game of bluffing and deception, here is Michael Lewis’s knowing and hilarious insider’s account of an unprecedented era of greed, gluttony, and outrageous fortune.

Four years after his #1 bestseller The Big Short, Michael Lewis returns to Wall Street to report on a high-tech predator stalking the equity 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. Editorial ReviewsReview“Michael Lewis is a genius, and his book will give high-frequency trading a much-needed turn under the microscope.” (Kevin Roose - New York Magazine) “Dazzling… guaranteed to make blood boil… riveting.” (Janet Maslin - The New York Times) “If you read one business book this year, make it Flash Boys.” (David Sirota - Salon) “A beautiful narrative, so well-written. You’ve got to get this.” (Jon Stewart - The Daily Show) “Important to public debate about Wall Street… in exposing what one of his central characters calls the ‘Pandora’s box of ridiculousness’ that financial exchanges have become.” (Philip Delves Broughton - The Wall Street Journal) “Michael Lewis knows how to tell a story.” (Vanity Fair) “Remarkable… Michael Lewis has a spellbinding talent for finding emotional dramas in complex, highly technical subjects.” (Financial Times) “Who knew high-frequency trading was such a sexy subject?” (Bloomberg Business Week) “Michael Lewis is one of the premier chroniclers of our age.” (Huffington Post) “Score one for the humans! Critics of high speed, computer-driven trading have a new champion.” (CNN Money) “If you own stock, you need to read Flash Boys… and then call your broker.” (Entertainment Weekly) “In 24 hours, I plowed through Michael Lewis' new blockbuster Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, a book about the huge changes that have occurred in financial markets in the last three decades. It's compelling reading.” (John Aziz - The Week) “Flash Boys richly deserves to be the first chapter in a new discussion of market rules and abuses… Lewis raises troubling and necessary questions.” (The American Conservative) “When it comes to narrative skill, a reporter’s curiosity and an uncanny instinct for the pulse of the zeitgeist, Lewis is a triple threat.” (James B. Stewart - New York Times) “[Lewis] is a top-flight storyteller.” (Lev Grossman - Time) “A fast-paced tale backed by gutsy reporting.” (Tina Jordan - Entertainment Weekly) “A tour de force that will grab and hold your attention like the best of thrillers.” (Jon Talton - Seattle Times) “Lewis writes about the resilience of underdogs, even in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. He’s doing essential work, and anything that embarrasses fat cats and encourages reform is a flash in the right direction.” (Julie Hinds - Detroit Free Press) “Lewis simply tells the truth.” (Will Deener - Dallas News) “Michael Lewis has another hit on his hands.” (Zachary Warmbrodt and Dave Clarke - Politico) “[Lewis’s] ability to find compelling characters and tell a great story through their eyes is unparalleled. He can untangle complex subjects like few others. His prose sparkles.” (Joe Nocera - New York Times) “Fascinating.” (Steven Pearlstein - The Washington Post) “Lewis, as always, is exceedingly good at describing the complexities and absurdities of the subculture he portrays here… A deeply entertaining book, and one that illuminates how much our world has changed in less than a decade.” (Hector Tobar - Los Angeles Times) “As always, Lewis simplifies the complex—and makes it fascinating.” (People) “Recommended… Entertaining.” (San Francisco Chronicle) “Entirely engaging… Illuminates a part of Wall Street that has generally done business in the shadows.” (New York Review of Books)

In Flash Boys, Michael Lewis alleged that the entire U.S. stock market is rigged. This is an extraordinarily serious accusation. If it is true that a conspiracy of stock exchanges, banks, regulators and high-frequency traders has rigged the market, this has profound implications for every aspect of our financial system. It's rather surprising, then, that this book alleging a vast high-frequency trading conspiracy included no high-frequency traders. Flash Boys lacks a single insider's account, and it shows. Electronic trading is extremely complicated, and if you neglect to talk to any electronic traders, you're probably going to get it wrong. Flash Boys: Not So Fast, written by a former high-frequency trading executive and regulatory compliance expert, provides the missing insider's perspective on today's stock market and answers the question of whether or not Michael Lewis is right. Not So Fast reviews the alleged scams described by Lewis and applies the same rigorous analysis that real trading strategies are subjected to, methodically walking through them step by step and explaining what is actually possible in today's markets and what is not. Extensively researched and documented, Not So Fast provides a clear, accurate picture of how today's markets operate, including what works, what doesn't work, and what changes need to be made.

New York Times Bestseller. “A superb book. . . . [Lewis] makes Silicon Valley as thrilling and intelligible as he made Wall Street in his best-selling Liar’s Poker.”—Time In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis set out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world’s most important technology entrepreneur. He found this in Jim Clark, a man whose achievements include the founding of three separate billion-dollar companies. Lewis also found much more, and the result—the best-selling book The New New Thing—is an ingeniously conceived history of the Internet revolution.

The New York Times bestseller: “Hilarious. No mushy tribute to the joys of fatherhood, Lewis’ book addresses the good, the bad, and the merely baffling about having kids.”—Boston Globe When Michael Lewis became a father, he decided to keep a written record of what actually happened immediately after the birth of each of his three children. This book is that record. But it is also something else: maybe the funniest, most unsparing account of ordinary daily household life ever recorded, from the point of view of the man inside. The remarkable thing about this story isn’t that Lewis is so unusual. It’s that he is so typical. The only wonder is that his wife has allowed him to publish it.

“Brilliant. . . . Lewis has given us a spectacular account of two great men who faced up to uncertainty and the limits of human reason.” —William Easterly, Wall Street Journal Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original papers that invented the field of behavioral economics. One of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, Kahneman and Tversky’s extraordinary friendship incited a revolution in Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.