16 quotes
He now suspected that every human being who knew how high-frequency traders made money was making too much money doing it to stop and explain what was going on.
Flash Boys (2014)
"Liquidity" was one of those words Wall Street people threw around when they wanted the conversation to end, and for brains to go dead, and for all questioning to cease.
Flash Boys (2014)
Someone out there was using the fact that stock market orders arrived at different times at different exchanges to front-run orders from one market to another.
Flash Boys (2014)
The role had been spawned by the widespread belief that traders didn’t know how to talk to computer geeks and that computer geeks did not respond rationally to big, hairy traders hollering at them.
Flash Boys (2014)
The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.
Flash Boys (2014)
The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.
Flash Boys (2014)
The more money to be made gaming the financial markets, the more people would decide they were put on earth to game the financial markets – and create romantic narratives to explain to themselves why a life spent gaming the financial markets is a purposeful life.
Flash Boys (2014)
Thus the only Goldman Sachs employee arrested by the FBI in the aftermath of a financial crisis Goldman had done so much to fuel was the employee Goldman asked the FBI to arrest.
Flash Boys (2014)
The entire history of Wall Street was the story of scandals, it now seemed to him, linked together tail to trunk like circus elephants. Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice.
Flash Boys (2014)
"You see, I’m the event. I am the news"
Flash Boys (2014)
They traded in the market the way card counters in a casino played blackjack: They played only when they had an edge. That’s why they were able to trade for five years without losing money on a single day.
Flash Boys (2014)
The SEC staffer argued that it was unfair that high-frequency traders couldn’t post phony bids and offers on the exchanges to extract information from actual investors without running the risk of having to stand by them.
Flash Boys (2014)
The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became
Flash Boys (2014)
Why, between the dark pools and the public exchanges, were there nearly sixty different places, most of them in New Jersey, where you could buy any listed stock? Why did the public exchanges fiddle with their own pricing so often—and why did you get paid by one exchange to do exactly the same thing for which another exchange might charge you?
Flash Boys (2014)
Reg NMS was intended to create equality of opportunity in the U.S. stock market. Instead it institutionalized a more pernicious inequality. A small class of insiders with the resources to create speed were now allowed to preview the market and trade on what they had seen.
Flash Boys (2014)
The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. What had once been the world’s most public, most democratic, financial market had become, in spirit, something like a private viewing of a stolen work of art.
Flash Boys (2014)