Paperback, 304 pages
English language
Published March 23, 2015 by W. W. Norton & Company.
In Michael Lewis's game-changing bestseller, a small group of Wall Street iconoclasts realize that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders. They band together — some of them walking away from seven-figure salaries — to investigate, expose, and reform the insidious new ways that Wall Street generates profits. If you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you.
Fantastic story. Kind of uplifting and depressing at the same time. It's a nice underdog story, but it doesn't let you forget that the same old story repeats itself over and over.
A nice, albeit a bit drawn out, tour de force over the HFT (high-frequency trading) debacle. Probably the most successful overview of HFT fallacies for a layman I've seen so far. Personally, I think a lot of retrospectives and musings about motivations throughout the book didn't add a lot to the narrative making it more diluted (and yes, somewhat boring), but overall it was an enjoyable read. In any case, despite its [small] shortcomings, this is the book that put HFT on the map of public awareness and it should be lauded for that especially.
Verdict: recommended, especially if your job title has DA, SEC, or FINRA in it :-)
Yet another view into all pervasive, 360-degree surround sound American corruption. Detailed (enough) but easy going, interesting and informative. I especially enjoyed the aspects of the abstract technical becoming human: move my server to the east side of the room, the race for microseconds along fibre optic lines.
AND this was, I think, missed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial disaster.
Worth reading.
