Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

by Michael Lewis

The people at Goldman with whom he dealt understood the effects of what he did but not their deep causes.

He understood that Goldman’s quants were forever dreaming up new trading strategies, in the form of algorithms, for his robots to execute, and that these traders were meant to be extremely shrewd. He grasped further that “all their algorithms are premised on some sort of prediction—predicting something one second into the future.”