Flash Boys

Starred review from April 14, 2014
In his latest captivating expedition into the marketplace jungle, Lewis (Moneyball) explores how the rise of computerized stock exchanges and their attendant scams started a battle for the soul of Wall Street. He probes the subterfuges of high frequency traders who, assisted by banks and brokerages happy to sell out customers, use blindingly fast data links to gain inside information on investors' trades and then exploit them on today's entirely digital stock markets. At the center of his novelistic narrative is a New York mosaic: Brad Katsuyama, a Canadian-born trader with a conscience; Ronan, a hot-headed Irish telecom expert; and a Dostoevskian cast of Slavic programmers veering between existential angst and saintly resignation. This cast bands together to expose the market manipulations and then start their own honest stock exchange. Lewis does his usual superb job of explicating the inexplicable in his lucid, absorbing account of the crossroads of high-tech data transfer and byzantine market strategies, where milliseconds of signaling speed yield billions in profits. He also presents a rich sociology of Wall Street's assholes-vs.-geeks culture clash between greedy, blustering financial honchos and the flickers of rationalism and humanity in the tech people they need to run their markets. The result is an engrossing true-life morality play that unmasks the devil in the details of high finance. Agent: Al Zuckerman, Writer's House.

July 28, 2014
Veteran actor Baker brings his distinct patrician manner, with its smooth elocution and precise pronunciation, to the audio edition of Lewis’s investigation into the world of high-frequency stock trading. The book chronicles a new band of marketplace rebels who engaged in a David and Goliath battle with Wall Street to level the playing field for investors. Baker’s polished vocal mannerisms, though characteristic of the stodgy stereotypes of today’s business tycoons, provide an effective contrast with the diverse cast of outlaws in the book. Issues of ethnicity remain at the heart of this tension, as technically gifted Wall St. outsiders from around the globe fuel the movement with their discomfort of the mainstream American financial industry. Baker’s portrayal of Russian immigrant programmer Sergey Aleynikov is especially striking and evocative. Though not quite as dramatic, Baker’s voicing of Irish finance expert Ronan Ryan also leaves an impression upon the listener. A Norton hardcover.

Starred review from May 1, 2014
In trademark Lewis (Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, 2011, etc.) fashion, a data-rich but all-too-human tale of "heuristic data bullshit and other mumbo jumbo" in the service of gaming the financial system, courtesy of-yes, Goldman Sachs and company.That stuff you see on TV about dinging bells and ulcer-stricken traders pacing the floor of the New York Stock Exchange? It's theater. The real speculative economy lives invisibly in little wires that go to nodes in out-of-the-way places, monitored by computer, shares bought and sold by algorithm. If you send a sell order, it might get intercepted for a fraction of a second by an intermediary that can manipulate the order to squeeze off one one-hundredth of a penny in profit-small on the individual level but big when you consider the millions of trades made every day. Both the system and that process are considerably more complex than that, but this fact remains: It dawned on someone that a person could grow rich laying ever faster optic cables to selected clients, cutting deals with the governments of towns and counties "in order to be able to tunnel through them," all perfectly legal if not exactly in the spirit of the market. Lewis follows his tried-and-true methods of taking a big story of this sort and deconstructing it to key players, some on the inside, some on the outside, at least one an unlikely hero. In this case, that unlikely hero is an exceedingly mild-mannered Japanese-Canadian banker who assembled a team of techies and numbers nerds to track the nefarious ways of the HFT world-that is, the high-frequency traders and the firms that engaged in "dark pool arbitrage" as just another asset in their portfolios of corruption.If you've ever had the feeling that the system is out for itself at your expense, well, look no further. A riveting, maddening yarn that is causing quite a stir already, including calls for regulatory reform.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.