Flash Boys Quotes

“When something becomes obvious to you,” he said, “you immediately think surely someone else is doing this.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“Shining a light creates shadows,”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“It was like a broken slot machine in the casino that pays off every time. It would keep paying off until someone said something about it; but no one who played the slot machine had any interest in pointing out that it was broken.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“Once very smart people are paid huge sums of money to exploit the flaws in the financial system, they have the spectacularly destructive incentive to screw the system up further, or to remain silent as they watch it being screwed up by others. The cost, in the end, is a tangled-up financial system. Untangling it requires acts of commercial heroism—and even then the fix might not work. There was simply too much more easy money to be made by elites if the system worked badly than if it worked well. The whole culture had to want to change. “We know how to cure this,” as Brad had put it. “It’s just a matter of whether the patient wants to be treated.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“A man got to have a code. - Omar Little”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys

“The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“Dark pools were another rogue spawn of the new financial marketplace. Private stock exchanges, run by the big brokers, they were not required to reveal to the public what happened inside them. They reported any trade they executed, but they did so with sufficient delay that it was impossible to know exactly what was happening in the broader market at the moment the trade occurred.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“Thus the only Goldman Sachs employee arrested by the FBI in the aftermath of a financial crisis Goldman had done so much to fuel was the employee Goldman asked the FBI to arrest.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“The old Soviet culture also left its former citizens oddly prepared for Wall Street in the early twenty-first century. The Soviet-controlled economy was horrible and complicated but riddled with loopholes. Everything was scarce; everything was also gettable, if you knew how to get it. “We had this system for seventy years,” said Constantine. “People learn to work around the system. The more you cultivate a class of people who know how to work around the system, the more people you will have who know how to do it well. All of the Soviet Union for seventy years were people who are skilled at working around the system.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys

“The markets were now run by technology, but the technologists were still treated like tools. Nobody bothered to explain the business to them, but they were forced to adapt to its demands and exposed to its failures—which was, perhaps, why there had been so many more conspicuous failures.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys

“The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: They had been forced to learn to program computers without the luxury of endless computer time. Many years later, when he had plenty of computer time, Serge still wrote out new programs on paper before typing them into the machine. “In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes,” he said. “When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys

“Talking to a programmer type about the trading business was a bit like talking to the house plumber at work in the basement about the card game the Mafia don was running upstairs.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“People no longer are responsible for what happens in the market, because computers make all the decisions.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“Someone out there was using the fact that stock market orders arrived at different times at different exchanges to front-run orders from one market to another.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“We tried to trademark proximity, but you can’t because it’s a word,”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“After the meeting, RBC conducted a study, never released publicly, in which they found that more than two hundred SEC staffers since 2007 had left their government jobs to work for high-frequency trading firms or the firms that lobbied Washington”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“Light fades as it travels; the fainter it becomes, the less capable it is of transmitting data.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“I’d thought it strange, after the financial crisis, in which Goldman had played such an important role, that the only Goldman Sachs employee who had been charged with any sort of crime was the employee who had taken something from Goldman Sachs.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became—though even to use words like “corrupt” and “sinister” made serious people uncomfortable, and so Brad avoided them.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“Shining a light creates shadows”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“Reg NMS was intended to create equality of opportunity in the U.S. stock market. Instead it institutionalized a more pernicious inequality. A small class of insiders with the resources to create speed were now allowed to preview the market and trade on what they had seen.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“Your biggest competitive advantage is that you don’t want to fuck me.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“The same system that once gave us subprime mortgage collateralized debt obligations no investor could possibly truly understand now gave us stock market trades that occurred at fractions of a penny at unsafe speeds using order types that no investor could possibly truly understand.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“Why do you always answer a question with another question?” “Clarity,” he said.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt