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.