Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

by Michael Lewis

He’d just been given a glimpse of the future—he felt certain of it. Goldman Sachs was insisting that the U.S. stock market needed to change, and that IEX was the place to change it. If Goldman Sachs was willing to acknowledge to investors that this new market was the best chance for fairness and stability, the other banks would be pressured to follow. The more orders that flowed onto IEX, the better the experience for investors, and the harder it would be for the banks to evade this new, fair market. At that moment, as Goldman’s orders flowed onto IEX, the stock market felt a bit like a river that wanted to jump its banks. All that had been needed was for one man with a shovel to dig a trench in an existing levee, and the pressure from the water would finish the job—which was why men caught digging into the banks on certain stretches of the Mississippi River were once shot on sight. Brad Katsuyama was the man with the shovel, positioned at the river’s most vulnerable bend. Goldman had arrived, with explosives, to help him.