Flash Boys

Lavender Room
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Perhaps some of you saw the 60 Minutes piece last night on high speed trading and how such traders have been gaming the system (apparently quite legally) for years, skimming billions of dollars from trades. The book Flash Boys is by Michael Lewis, and the upcoming NYTimes Magazine has an extensive article in next week’s issue on the topic, written by Michael Lewis. It is a fascinating if disturbing view of the underbelly of trading, and an inside look at some of those wearing the white hats.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/magazine/flash-boys-michael-lewis.html?hp

How the high speed traders manage to front-run trades is amazing.

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Just ordered Flash Boys off Amazon last week. Looking forward to it.

Dark pool trading is also an interesting/disturbing phenomenon.

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I was driving last night and caught 60 minutes on the radio. I have it DVR’ed so I’ll probably watch it as well. Pretty shocking.

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This was actually discussed pretty heavily in Lewis’ other best-seller “Big Short.” I’m surprised people are shocked by this, several others including Nassim Taleb have already written books about their experience with this. It’s not exactly breaking news.

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I saw on the news this morning that they were hinting at some of the activities may not have been legal
.

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This issue has been around for a while, although I wasn’t aware that someone had come up with a solution. I’m looking forward to the book.

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This was actually discussed pretty heavily in Lewis’ other best-seller “Big Short.” I’m surprised people are shocked by this, several others including Nassim Taleb have already written books about their experience with this. It’s not exactly breaking news.

Considering that “Big Short” was published in 2010, and a lot of the events described herein happened well after that (like IEX opening in late 2013), it’s hard to see how it was discussed pretty heavily in that book.

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This was actually discussed pretty heavily in Lewis’ other best-seller “Big Short.” I’m surprised people are shocked by this, several others including Nassim Taleb have already written books about their experience with this. It’s not exactly breaking news.

Considering that “Big Short” was published in 2010, and a lot of the events described herein happened well after that (like IEX opening in late 2013), it’s hard to see how it was discussed pretty heavily in that book.

I don’t know what events are discussed in the new book (in fact, I was under the impression it was a hypothetical situation) and did not see the 60min expose, but how it is done was discussed at length in “The Big Short” with Nassim Taleb (among others) used as an example. In Taleb’s “Black Swan” (2007), it is also discussed. How high frequency trading is conducted at a huge advantage for those “in the game” has been discussed a lot previously; that was my point, didn’t say anything about the actual events in the new book.