Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt- Completed Reading

I finished Flash Boys and I have to say that it was an incredible learning experience. Although it was very confusing, the book was not just interesting but I learned a lot from it, not just from reading but the research that went along with it. As a teenager, I am barely ever exposed to investing because I do not have control of my finances until I am 18. This book seemed like a good learning experience and insight on investing because this is something I am interested in doing as a career. Hopefully I will continue learning about the stock market and a few years from now, my goal is to read this book again and understand every single thing that is mentioned/talked about, without having an educated guess. Although as I have mentioned several times before that this book was very challenging, I understand what High Frequency Trading is now and the other topics that this book is based on. Now I think I can finally explain what it is: (I am going to refer to High Frequency Traders as HFC’s so it is simpler) When x investor goes to buy a stock they submit and order, lets say for the limit they will spend of $30.01 (the price for the stock). When they buy the stock, their order appears in a certain stock exchange. What the HFC’s are doing is in microseconds, finding that stock being sold for $30.00 in a different exchange, buying it and then filling x investors order to buy in the different exchange. Although this does not seem like a big deal because it is only one cent. If x investor was buying 100,000 shares (this is a lot to buy but it is an example) the HFC’s are making $1,000 and x investor is losing it. There are billions of dollars being transferred a day in the stock market, so you can start to understand how much the HFC’s are “stealing” from us. Overall, I believe that this should be illegal, in Flash Boys it is following the story of a group of people that work different jobs in Wall Street coming together to create a stock exchange where this is not a problem. Overall for anyone interested in learning about the stock market, this is a great book to read. It does take a lot of research and re-reading pages to understand the concepts but once it starts to make sense the book is really good and interesting. Hopefully they will make a movie for this book just like they did for Moneyball and Blindside (both by Michael Lewis as well).

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Result- Middle Reading

So far, this book is very good, just like I thought it would be. The only problem with it is that it is very confusing. I have probably spent multiple hours doing research to understand the terms they use in the book. Many parts of the book can be very challenging if you don’t do the research. For example, this section is from the page I am own and I think that it is a pretty good sample of the book as a whole: “The pension fund was trying to buy 100,000 shares of Microsoft could, of course, specify that the Wall Street bank not take its orders to the public exchanges at all but simply rest it, hidden, inside the dark pool. But an order hidden inside of the dark pool wasn’t very well hidden. Any decent high-frequency trader who had paid for a special connection to the pool would ping the pool with tiny buy and sell orders in every listed stock, searching for activity. Once they’d discovered the buyer of Microsoft, they’d simply wait for the moment when Microsoft ticked lower on the public exchanges and sell it to the pension fund in the dark pool at the stale, higher “best” price (as Rich Gates’s tests had demonstrated). It was riskless, larcenous, and legal—made so by Reg NMS” (Lewis 93).  Now this may seem a little overwhelming and confusing, it was to me as well. I had to do a lot of research in order to understand what Michael Lewis was and still is saying during the book. This is probably the most difficult book I have read in a while, because the terms and the ideas being mentioned are very complex and hard to grasp right away. I am also always reading a section over twice or even three times to understand what he is saying. After me saying these things, you would expect me to not like this book because of its difficult, but I think it is great. I would try to explain what it is about but as you can see from the section above, its not the easiest thing to do and I will probably be even more confusing than the sample above because I am not an expert on this topic. Just to repeat my message, this book is great and very interesting, but it is also very challenging.

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt- Before Reading

While reading some news last night, I stumbled upon an article saying that Wall Street was rigged. I clicked on it thinking it would be a pointless confusing article but instead it talked about a book that happened to be released yesterday by Michael Lewis addressing this topic called Flash Boys. This topic seemed really interesting so I read a little bit about the book and I already have read a book by Michael Lewis so I decided to get it. First off, Michael Lewis is the author of several books-turned-movies such as Moneyball and The Blind Side. I read Moneyball  and enjoyed it so I figured this would be good too, even though they are different topics. Back to the news article, I looked into how it was rigged very briefly and my mind exploded. The things that are happening are just amazing and you really don't think about them. I would try to explain the things I read now, but I do not understand all of them (partially in disbelief and partially because its confusing) so I will try to explain them in the next two blogs post about this book. Overall I am really looking forward to reading this because it got great reviews and is already number one on the Amazon Best Sellers list.

The Outsiders- Completed Reading

After being sucked into The Outsiders I finally finished it. This book was really good, probably my favorite book I have read in a while. The only thing that could have made it better is if the book was longer, so I could have kept reading it. The book was very good since the beginning but after my last blog post it got really intense. The book got sad at some parts but the ending was great. I like how it showed the characters changing through the book. In the beginning the socs were thought to be these snobby rich people by Ponyboy (the narrator) but in the end after he talked to some of them, he realized they were like him in some ways and that they were not as bad. ***SPOILER. The book got sad after Johnny died because he seemed innocent. This reminds me of Catcher in the Rye in the sense that innocence was one of the main themes of this book as well. Also when Dallas (Dally) dies it was sad because it was really unexpected but the reason for it was justified (I don’t want to say he should have died or anything along those lines but since he had nothing to live for after Johnny dies you realize why he did what he did.)***SPOILER ENDS. Anyway, I felt that this book was definitely worth reading and it is too bad that it is a short book because I wanted to read but the ending came up really fast. I also just found out there was a movie made for this book, although it is really old, I am looking forward to watching it to see the similarities between how I pictured it and how the movie shows it. The characters were also described very well so hopefully the movie didn’t ruin that to much (I understand they can’t find the same exact person as the character was described.)

The Outsiders- Middle Reading

So far this book is great. It is about two gangs, the socs and the greasers. They are rival gangs and are constantly fighting. The story is narrated by Ponyboy, who is one of the members of the greasers. The greasers are the lower class group, with many of them having to work hard in order to survive and a few of them either don't have parents (Ponyboy) or their parents are abusive (Johnny). The socs are the upperclass and normally start the fights with the greasers. One of the things that is really interesting about the book is that the author; S.E. Hinton uses different objects to distinguish the two groups. For example he uses cars to describe the groups. He makes sure when he is first introducing the people to mention their car in order for you to know how they are. One example of this is on page 76, “Shepard and some of his outfit and us were hanging around there when she drives up in her little ol’ Stingray.” By him mentioning the car, you can tell what group she belongs too. Along with this, the book is great; the plot itself is very interesting. It is similar to Catcher in the Rye because it is about a teen that is learning the ways of life and learning about how society acts. He also mentions his opinions on other characters, like Holden does, very frequently in the book. If you had given me these two books to read without me knowing the authors, after reading each one once without doing a large amount of analysis on either, I would think it is the same author.

The Outsiders- Before Reading

I have not heard a lot about The Outsiders but my mom told me she read it as a kid and liked it.  I know that this book is classified a “coming of age” book, and there is gang violence as well as bad language and drug use. After doing a little bit of research I found that the author of this book was in high school when writing this book. This makes it interesting because the book is about teenagers and since a teenager is writing it, I think the perspective will be interesting. Overall, I do not really know what to expect of this book, although since it is considered a classic it means a lot of people enjoyed reading it so hopefully I will too.

David and Goliath- Completed Reading

It hurts me to say this, because I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell and have read all of his books but I did not enjoy David and Goliath. Normally, Gladwell presents these amazing ideas and that is what makes his books so enjoyable. In David and Goliath, he was lacking this "touch". In the beginning the book was great when he was talking about the story of David and Goliath and in this part it seemed like another one of his great ideas. After this he talked about a youth girl’s basketball team that were big underdogs and ended up going to the State Championships, this was also very interesting. From this point on, the book was not very interesting but I kept reading because I hoped that it would get better. At some points the book did get better but shortly after it became boring again. The points that he was making also did not seem to relate to his overall thesis, that underdogs are not always the underdog, it is just the way that society views them. For a good portion of the book, I was confused trying to figure out how what he was saying related to this point. Normally when he is writing, he makes a wide variety of events and ideas come together and relate to his thesis but in this book it was not there. The topic of underdogs seemed so interesting but the end result was a disappointment.