Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

by Michael Lewis

Schwall hadn’t thought twice about the U.S. stock markets. After he met Brad, he was certain that the market at the heart of capitalism was rigged. “As soon as you realize this,” he said, “as soon as you realize that you are not able to execute your orders because someone else is able to identify what you are trying to do and race ahead of you to the other exchanges, it’s over,” he said. “It changes your mind.” He stewed on the situation; the longer he stewed, the angrier he became. “It really just pissed me off,” he said. “That people set out this way to make money from everyone else’s retirement account. I knew who was being screwed, people like my mom and pop, and I became hell-bent on figuring out who was doing the screwing.”

basically scalping. so at the smallest and largest ends of the capitalism we have predators using speed to steal value between producers and consumers; the dark side of a free market

kept his long silence even after he was sentenced, without the possibility of parole, to eight years in a federal prison.

the author is trying very hard to get us to sympathize with Sergey so that we'll forgive him. but despite the prosecution's ignorance, what Sergey did is still in the wrong.

He needed, especially, people with a deep understanding of high-frequency trading and stock exchanges. And the first person he found was Don Bollerman.

just realizing the formula of the sales pitch that this book is

He was fully aware that the high-frequency traders were preying on investors, and that the exchanges and brokers were being paid to help them to do it. He refused to feel morally outraged or self-righteous about any of it. “I would ask the question, ‘On the savannah, are the hyenas and the vultures the bad guys?’ ” he said. “We have a boom in carcasses on the savannah. So what? It’s not their fault. The opportunity is there.” To Don’s way of thinking, you were never going to change human nature—though you might alter the environment in which it expressed itself.

A good quote / analogy on how this (high-frequency trading / scalping) is just something that follows the law of nature

“it would be very difficult for me to understand why I did what I did.”

Still trying hard to paint Serge as innocent... he keeps telling us how dumb the trial was — and perhaps it was — but this is still just trying to divert us away from the wrong Serge actually committed.

That he had also taken some code that wasn’t open source, which happened to be in the same files as the open source code, surprised no one.

Laziness does not make it okay

“Why aren’t you angry?”

Because he was guilty

The New Jersey cops who picked him up didn’t know the charges, only that he should be held without bail, as he was deemed a flight risk.

That's how it's supposed to work.

“How does a private line get access to a public right-of-way?” asked one. “I’m really curious to know that.”

by trying. It happens all the time and it's necessary for private-driven progress in a public infrastructure world