Reddit reviews Flash Boys
We found 22 Reddit comments about Flash Boys. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Four years after his #1 bestseller The Big Short, Michael Lewis returns to Wall Street to report on a high-tech predator stalking the equity markets.
I actually have already read the book that started this conversation. It is a very well written story.
Lewis does a nice job of explaining HFT in fairly simple terms. I am an accountant for banks so I already had a firm grasp, but my couldn't care less about business GF understood it too.
Front running is technically illegal. There is significant debate as to if HFTs can be classified in the eyes of the law as front running. Common sense would tell us it can, but we will see.
Hopefuly exchanges like IEX can become the norm. IEX puts in place methods to eliminate the effectiveness of HTF's front running.
A very real issue is that once you put in a buy order for shares, that information is technically the broker-dealer's information. They are legally required to get you the best price, but the broker-dealers often will go to "dark pools" which are private exchanges with limited information protection.
You cannot currently know what exchange your purchase actually went through.
The SEC has a ton of work to do on the topic.
Well, the system was rigged years ago.
Flash Boys goes over how it's rigged and how some people created a fair system.
There's a bit where a company basically constructed a shortest path route (for low latency) from Chicago to New York for high frequency traders: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_Networks
Quantitative Finance major here.
High Frequency Trading is insane. Everyone fights to shave off nanoseconds by putting their servers in the room as exchanges, orders are instantaneously cancelled in order to confuse other traders, companies have blasted through mountains in order to get perfectly straight fiber optic cables between point A and B. Order types complicated and predatory towards other traders. Goldman Sachs called the FBI on their own employee because he was suspected of stealing HFT code. On top of it all - the exchanges love HFT. More orders = more money. The exchange you trade on might pay you, or you might pay them but before your trade even gets there - a hedge fund or proprietary trading group might be paying to look at the order before anyone else.
If you're interested in the story, I highly recommend reading Flash Boys, When Genius Failed, and The Quants.
If you're interested in stopping whatever you're doing to learn how to develop machine learning algorithms and work on the street, PM me.
Actually, you should check out Flashboys by Michael Lewis. The algos are not picking winning stocks, they're buying stocks at one price, then turning around and immediately selling them at a higher price. Middle men, as it were.
Paying for order flow is a perverse incentive, read http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michael-Lewis/dp/0393244660
Spread is less important than the fully-loaded price, taking into consideration all fees, not just trading fees but deposit/withdrawal fees as well.
Coinbase is doing it right.
Probably a lot of readers of /r/water have read Cadillac Desert.
I own a copy of, and have made two false starts reading, The King Of California as recommend by the anonymous author of the blog On The Public Record.
I highly recommend A Great Aridness, a worthy heir to Cadillac Desert.
Also on my to-read list is Rising Tide. I would like to find a book that does for the Great Lakes what Marc Reisner did for water in the American West with his book Cadillac Desert.
A few things I've read this year that have little to do with water:
EDIT: Oh, and Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
If any of you want to read about this more, pick up Michael Lewis' Flash Boys. It explains Aleynikov in the context of high frequency trading, which is a really, really fucked up practice.
Same author. Guy also wrote The Flash Boys, a book on high frequency trading firms. The Big Short is what this movie is based on. Michael Lewis is really knowledgeable of the financial industry.
If you enjoyed The Big Short, check out Michael Lewis' latest book Flash Boys. It profiles "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." They then set out to create a fairer stock market. It's a really fast-paced, fascinating read.
No but I just read Micheal Lewis's new book "Flash Boys" about late 2000's Wall Street adoption into technology, and a significant chunk of it had to do with programmers and algorithms. Flash, as in milliseconds. Really crazy world that stock traders live in. Good luck and stay out of trouble around those guys!
Link to the book. 2000+ reviews, I guess I am not the only one that liked it!
http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michael-Lewis/dp/0393244660
The lower your ping rate and less hops to the exchange API's the faster you can trade. Someone quicker may be gaining the upper-hand on order fulfillment.
Check out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michael-Lewis/dp/0393244660
This book: Flash Boys provided a pretty incredible look at how things are setup and how we (the average, individual investor) is always going to be at a loss the way the system has been set-up.
I'm currently reading a great book, Flash Boys , that goes into this. It's actually what got me researching and coming across this video. People were/are making millions from having this competitive edge, paying tens of millions to save literal nanoseconds.
I too am an outsider, and have no formal education/experience in the stock-market but this stuff is just so interesting!
Wenn der Order Flow an HFT verkauft wird, heisst das nicht, dass der HFT ausführt, sondern auf die Information handeln kann. Legal ist es kein Frontrunning (das ja illegal ist, siehe wie Goldman Sachs in den 80ern und 90ern Geld verdient hat), sondern sie sind einfach faster to market als die Banken/normalen Trades.
Ich will jetzt nicht tiefer einsteigen und erklären wie HFT den Order Flow im Detail nutzen, aber ja, es ist Frontrunning :)
Dazu empfehle ich übrigens dieses Buch.
No tengo un libro sobre trading de alta frecuencia en México, pero sí en NYSE: http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michuael-Lewis/dp/0393244660
For investing and money management:
And for fun:
as /u/el_douche points out, a prestigious school and a great GPA helps a lot. I have a friend who's a programmer at a high-frequency firm and gets paid around 200k, and it requires very deep understanding of computer algorithms as well as computer architecture in order to create extremely fast running code for high frequency trading.
High frequency trading companies are very recent companies (and usually independent companies) that arose as the stock market went from man-powered to computer powered. Your typical big banks (like goldman sachs, morgan stanley, etc..) are still trying to play catch up with the high frequency trading companies by implementing their own version of HFT (high frequency trading). Unlike traditional banks which usually have more bankers than engineers, HFT companies are usually more engineering focused and thus have a larger percentage of engineers.
I recently read a [pretty good book] (http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michael-Lewis/dp/0393244660) on the rise of High Frequency Trading that was very fascinating... I just wish I remembered more about it (it contained too many complicated finance/investment terms for me :( ). Would recommend it if you are interested in some background knowledge
I just read the news and follow up on issues. NPR has covered a lot about food stamps and walmart. And the Daily Show is a great way to find out about random outrages that the media really isn't interested in covering, like this book that CNBC and others are attacking http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt/dp/0393244660
What is the popular opinion of this book: Flash Boys ?
It has been getting a lot of press.
I just heard an NPR piece about this. here
Michael Lewis (author of moneyball) 's book on it is called Flashboys
The "market " is a fixed ponzi scheme , ran by black boxes.
The best located black boxes can view and trade , or view and create a price and trade ,micro seconds before the competing black boxs. Seriously.
The human "investors" provide the food for the black boxes. The banks lick the icing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_trading
http://www.amazon.ca/Flash-Boys-Michael-Lewis/dp/0393244660
An initiated "flash crash" is the most immediate way to cause long-term economic chaos in the West. In one afternoon, they could eliminate 10%+ of our major companies' market capitalizations while injecting a very real fear into all stockholders going forward. Trillions in accumulated wealth would disappear; there goes your father's retirement.
Disclosure: I'm an investment manager and oversee a Large Cap Growth stock portfolio.
Want to learn more, read Michael Lewis. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, and Flash Boys, in that order.