Friday, March 29, 2024
 
Michael Lewis Book Roils Wall Street; Readers Delighted

WASHINGTON, D.C. APR. 1 (DPI)  – In a span of 24 hours – after a 60 Minutes segment and a weekend book excerpt in The NY Times — author Michael Lewis and WW Norton Publishing managed to do something the US Government has been unable to do for decades: Piss off Wall Street.

Lewis, in his latest book, chronicled the complex and poorly understood world of high-frequency trading, an activity that much of Wall Street insists is useful – increasing liquidity, lowering transaction costs, they claim – but by many other estimations is nothing but modern-day front-running, which is trading ahead of legitimate market orders and is patently  illegal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/magazine/flash-boys-michael-lewis.html?

Readers comments mostly hailed both Lewis and the subject of his latest book, Flash Boys, which tells about young traders who team up to develop a new stock exchange that neutralizes the advantages of high frequency traders, or HFTs.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/michael-lewis-views-market-as-rigged-in-favor-of-high-speed-traders/?

Highest rated comments on NYTimes.com:

1) Thank goodness for Mr. Katsuyama and his friends. It’s great when the good guys can stop the bad guys. Now that’s a movie I would like to see.

3)A fantastic, in depth, weighty article. Perhaps, as a society, we can begin to reward fair dealing, fairly, and to turn the market from a dark, rigged casino, understood by few, and trusted by none, into a board that is above board, to the ultimate profit of all. Those fine young men deserve our business, our trust, and our thanks.

5) For someone “in the industry” you more than anyone should know that what you say is nonsense. Do you really believe that trading on a technical glitch is anything more than a loophole? These HFTs don’t research anything, rather they wedge themselves into a faceless trade which will technically result in a market uptick in that stock and then they sell. This is EXACTLY the sort of thing that has converted Wall St. from a place designed to provide funding for corporate America and its shareholders into a playground for individuals to make billions in personal wealth without employing a single person.

11) Thank god for Brad Katsuyama and Michael Lewis, and for the New York Times for publishing this excellent piece. How depressing that securities fraud — because that’s what this is fundamentally about — continues unabated. Clearly, there is something in (male) DNA that drives these grotesque, win-at-all-costs behaviors. But at least there are a few people, like Brad Katsuyama, with a shred of morality left. Can’t say the same for our lawmakers . . .

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