Flash Boys

In this book the author 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. A report on a high-tech predator stalking the equity markets, this book 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, they 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 are 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 author shines a light into the darkest corners of the financial world, where anyone in contact with the market, even a retirement account, is part of the story. But in the end, this is the story of 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.