Flash Boys

by Michael Lewis

When some machine malfunctioned and a stock market came under scrutiny, the head of that market usually had no clue either what had happened or how to fix it: He was at the mercy of his technologists. But he had to say something, and so he said that there had been a “technical glitch.” It was as if there was no way to explain how the financial market actually worked—or didn’t—without resorting to fuzzy metaphors and meaningless words.* If stock market computer– related problems were to be reduced to a single phrase, Zoran preferred it to be “normal accidents.”†