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).