Running discussion on SP, page-5674

Thereis an interesting book that you should read called “Flash Boys” by MichaelLewis that is well worth a read,

When I sat down to write Flash Boys, in 2013, I didn’t intend to see just how angry I could make the richest people on Wall Street. I was far more interested in the characters and the situation in which they found themselves. Led by an obscure 35-year-old trader at the Royal Bank of Canada named Brad Katsuyama, they were all well-regarded professionals in the U.S. stock market. The situation was that they no longer understood that market. And their ignorance was forgivable. It would have been difficult to find anyone, circa 2009, able to give you an honest account of the inner workings of the American stock market—by then fully automated, spectacularly fragmented, and complicated beyond belief by possibly well-intentioned regulators and less well-intentioned insiders. That the American stock market had become a mystery struck me as interesting. How does that happen? And who benefits?

By the time I met my characters they’dalready spent several years trying to answer those questions. In the end theyfigured out that the complexity, though it may have arisen innocently enough,served the interest of financial intermediaries rather than the investors andcorporations the market is meant to serve. It had enabled a massive amount ofpredatory trading and had institutionalized a systemic and totally unnecessaryunfairness in the market and, in the bargain, rendered it less stable and moreprone to flash crashes and outages and other unhappy events. Having understoodthe problems, Katsuyama and his colleagues had set out not to exploit them butto repair them. That, too, I thought was interesting: some people on WallStreet wanted to fix something, even if it meant less money for Wall Street,and for them personally ~ Michael Lewis

Flash Boys