Quotes from 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, quote from Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

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

“A man got to have a code. - Omar Little”
― Michael Lewis, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

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

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

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

“The role had been spawned by the widespread belief that traders didn’t know how to talk to computer geeks and that computer geeks did not respond rationally to big, hairy traders hollering at them.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“After the markets closed Vinny would get into his Cadillac and drive out to his big house in Long Island. Now there is the guy called Vladimir who gets into his jet and flies to his estate in Aspen for the weekend. I used to worry a little about Vinny. Now I worry a lot about Vladimir.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from 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, quote from 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. I’d thought it even stranger that government prosecutors had argued that the Russian shouldn’t be freed on bail because the Goldman Sachs computer code, in the wrong hands, could be used to “manipulate markets in unfair ways.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“RBC invited Brad along with a bunch of other nonwhite people to a meeting to discuss the issue. Going around the table, people took turns responding to a request to “talk about your experience of being a minority at RBC.” When Brad’s turn came he said, “To be honest, the only time I’ve ever felt like a minority is this exact moment. If you really want to encourage diversity you shouldn’t make people feel like a minority.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“The first day after the merger, Brad got a call from a worried female employee, who whispered, “There is a guy in here with suspenders walking around with a baseball bat in his hands, taking swings.” That turned out to be Carlin’s CEO, Jeremy Frommer, who, whatever else he was, was not RBC nice. One of Frommer’s signature poses was feet up on his desk, baseball bat swinging wildly over his head while some poor shoeshine guy tried to polish his shoes.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“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, quote from Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“As they worked through the order types, they created a taxonomy of predatory behavior in the stock market. Broadly speaking, it appeared as if there were three activities that led to a vast amount of grotesquely unfair trading. The first they called “electronic front-running”—seeing an investor trying to do something in one place and racing him to the next. (What had happened to Brad, when he traded at RBC.) The second they called “rebate arbitrage”—using the new complexity to game the seizing of whatever kickbacks the exchange offered without actually providing the liquidity that the kickback was presumably meant to entice. The third, and probably by far the most widespread, they called “slow market arbitrage.” This occurred when a high-frequency trader was able to see the price of a stock change on one exchange, and pick off orders sitting on other exchanges, before the exchanges were able to react. Say, for instance, the market for P&G shares is 80–80.01, and buyers and sellers sit on both sides on all of the exchanges. A big seller comes in on the NYSE and knocks the price down to 79.98–79.99. High-frequency traders buy on NYSE at $79.99 and sell on all the other exchanges at $80, before the market officially changes. This happened all day, every day, and generated more billions of dollars a year than the other strategies combined.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from 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, quote from Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“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, quote from Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

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