Flash Boys

By Michael Lewis - Read: October 29, 2024 - Rating: 7/10

A terrifying story about the rise of high-frequency trading (HFT) during the 2000s. Michael Lewis goes beyond the common understanding of the stock exchange to explain its newly emerging practices.

There are quite a lot of technical jargon involved, but Lewis does a good job clarifying them. It's nonetheless repetitive and sometimes lacked a clear story line with multiple stories intersecting.

Perhaps the most astonishing part was about Spread Networks, a $300 million secret project that involved laying 827 miles of fiber-optic cable from Chicago to New Jersey. Its sole purpose was to reduce data transmission time from 17 to 13 milliseconds for traders to outpace others.