‘Flash Boys’: Michael Lewis does it again

[think]

If you are not familiar with High Speed Stock Trading on Wall Street the book Flash Boys is a good read. Here is a nice review:

‘Flash Boys’: Michael Lewis does it again

By Steven Pearlstein Columnist April 12, 2014

Fascinating. That’s how I’d describe everything about “Flash Boys,” Michael Lewis’s latest book about Wall Street and the rise of high-speed computerized stock trading.

Ever since the publication of “Liar’s Poker” in 1989, his hilarious take-down of bond traders at the old Salomon Brothers, Lewis has been the best business and financial journalist of his generation, with an uncanny knack for finding fascinating characters and crafting dramatic narratives that explain, in more entertaining and powerful ways than the rest of us, exactly what is going on in business, or finance, or professional baseball or wherever else his catholic curiosity leads him.

Lewis’s sense of timing is impeccable. In “Liar’s Poker,” he caught Solly Brothers just before the bond-trading scandal that led to its fall from grace, and just before its top bond trader launched a hedge fund named Long-Term Capital Management whose miscalculations nearly brought the entire financial system to its knees.

In “The New New Thing,” he captured the entrepreneurial energy, inflated optimism and excessive wealth of Silicon Valley just before the bursting of the tech and telecom bubble. And in “The Big Short,” he exposed the clever chicanery and herd behavior behind the giant mortgage bubble that nearly took down the global economy when it burst in 2008.

Now in “Flash Boys,” Lewis reveals how a new crop of investment firms has conspired with the big banks and the stock exchanges to use high-speed computers and complex software algorithms to skim pennies from the real investors who provide equity capital to the economy.

Full review:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/flash-boys-michael-lewis-does-it-again/2014/04/12/4a53daf8-bf5d-11e3-b195-dd0c1174052c_story.html

[think]

1. Here is a link to a summary for those that are interested in learning bit more:

http://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/exec-summaries/books/FlashBoys.pdf

[longship]

2. I've read it. It is a very good read.

It is a it more complex a topic than The Big Short (with all its credit default swaps and multi-tranched collateralized debt obligations), but Lewis remains a master of making the very complex within grasp of non-experts.

I highly recommend both books, as well as Liar's Poker. As the subtitle of The Big Short says, a look inside the doomsday machine. All three should be mandatory reads.