Mr. Lewis has a great way of presenting complicated issues simply. I also like the way he presents the facts like a story with the main characters and "bad guys" etc. This book will make you angry and it should.
Mr. Lewis has a great way of presenting complicated issues simply. I also like the way he presents the facts like a story with the main characters and "bad guys" etc. This book will make you angry and it should.
A great read explaining a complex practice. I do not buy the criticism of the book, which basically boils down to "everyone has always tried to game the system on Wall Street, and investors are far more ripped off by brokerage fees than any HFTs." That doesn't make the practice any less unseemly to the outsider, it is just a very modern example of how financial types can make billions without adding a cent of value to the economy at large, just by exploiting informational access.
A great read explaining a complex practice. I do not buy the criticism of the book, which basically boils down to "everyone has always tried to game the system on Wall Street, and investors are far more ripped off by brokerage fees than any HFTs." That doesn't make the practice any less unseemly to the outsider, it is just a very modern example of how financial types can make billions without adding a cent of value to the economy at large, just by exploiting informational access.
This book is really the story of why and how IEX was created. Humans made bad decisions. So, to protect people from other people, we moved the operation of the stock market to being run by computers. The natural consequence was for people to game the system with computer code. Rather than stay vigilant against new exploitations, we just redefined fair. The team behind IEX created it to eliminate these problems and establish a fair place for trading to occur.
About halfway through the book, I watched a commercial where an investment company touted their guaranteed one second trades. To the average person, this probably sounds amazing. The thing is that companies like this operate in milliseconds (1/1,000) and nanoseconds (1/1,000,000). Plus, they operate Dark Pools where the trade is obfuscated from independent review. Your trade could get executed where it benefits them and not you.
The overarching theme is …
This book is really the story of why and how IEX was created. Humans made bad decisions. So, to protect people from other people, we moved the operation of the stock market to being run by computers. The natural consequence was for people to game the system with computer code. Rather than stay vigilant against new exploitations, we just redefined fair. The team behind IEX created it to eliminate these problems and establish a fair place for trading to occur.
About halfway through the book, I watched a commercial where an investment company touted their guaranteed one second trades. To the average person, this probably sounds amazing. The thing is that companies like this operate in milliseconds (1/1,000) and nanoseconds (1/1,000,000). Plus, they operate Dark Pools where the trade is obfuscated from independent review. Your trade could get executed where it benefits them and not you.
The overarching theme is that complexity and obfuscation created an environment where bad things can happen. As a technologist in education, I fight against this every day. We desire simplicity. Yet every change and especially those we execute without a good understanding of the business case creates complexity which will result in a failure. When no one fully understands how all the components work together, it exists to fail. Funnily enough, my team, the database administrators (really application administrators) sit at the intersection of the analysts, vendors, operating system admins, storage admins, network admins, and others. So this is familiar territory.
Zoran Perkov and Sergey Aleynikov are unsung heroes I am sure about whom I will spend more time reading.
