Profile

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MICHAEL LEWIS

FLASH BOYS

A WALL STREET REVOLT

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FOR JIM PASTORIZA

WHO HAS NEVER MISSED AN ADVENTURE

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A man got to have a code.

—Omar Little

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

WINDOWS ON THE WORLD

CHAPTER 1

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

CHAPTER 2

BRAD’S PROBLEM

CHAPTER 3

RONAN’S PROBLEM

CHAPTER 4

TRACKING THE PREDATOR

CHAPTER 5

PUTTING A FACE ON HFT

CHAPTER 6

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HOW TO TAKE BILLIONS FROM WALL STREET

CHAPTER 7

AN ARMY OF ONE

CHAPTER 8

THE SPIDER AND THE FLY

EPILOGUE

RIDING THE WALL STREET TRAIL

Acknowledgments

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INTRODUCTION

WINDOWS ON THE WORLD

I suppose this book started when I first heard the story of Sergey Aleynikov, the Russian

computer programmer who had worked for Goldman Sachs and then, in the summer of 2009, after

he’d quit his job, was arrested by the FBI and charged by the United States government with stealing

Goldman Sachs’s computer code. I’d thought it strange, after the financial crisis, in which Goldman

had played such an important role, that the only Goldman Sachs employee who had been charged

with any sort of crime was the employee who had taken something from Goldman Sachs. I’d thought

it even stranger that government prosecutors had argued that the Russian shouldn’t be freed on bail

because the Goldman Sachs computer code, in the wrong hands, could be used to “manipulate

markets in unfair ways.” (Goldman’s were the right hands? If Goldman Sachs was able to manipulate

markets, could other banks do it, too?) But maybe the strangest aspect of the case was how difficult

it appeared to be—for the few who attempted—to explain what the Russian had done. I don’t mean

only what he had done wrong: I mean what he had done. His job. He was usually described as a

“high-frequency trading programmer,” but that wasn’t an explanation. That was a term of art that,

in the summer of 2009, most people, even on Wall Street, had never before heard. What was...