Flash Boys

When you hear about Wall Street, visions of frenzied traders and zooming share prices might come to mind. But beneath those flashing numbers lies a system where billionths of a second can dictate who wins and who loses. This page sets the stage for a group of people who discovered that the market wasn’t functioning as most believed. Instead of an orderly place where prices fairly reflected supply and demand, it had turned into a race for speed. The biggest takeaway is that a handful of insiders recognized how high-frequency traders were exploiting ordinary investors using ultrafast connections. Their solution was surprising: rather than beat them at their own game, they wanted to fix the rules of the game altogether.

We begin with a Canadian banker who spotted odd changes on his trading screen. Prices kept disappearing the moment he tried to complete a trade. This set him on a journey to uncover mysterious data routes, secret exchanges, and the relentless drive for microsecond advantages. The result of his curiosity reshaped the lives of many and threatened a lucrative scheme. At its heart, this is a story of how a market can veer away from its intended purpose and how a small team can steer it back.

Welcome to a book where Ethernet cables and fiber-optic lines matter more than you’d expect. Where a few bright minds noticed something off-kilter and refused to look the other way. Let’s see how it all begins.

Speed creeping into trading is nothing new: centuries ago, faster couriers meant timelier news about crop prices. But today, speed is defined in microseconds. Traders rent server space next to stock exchanges, coil miles of fiber-optic cables in shoe boxes, and obsess over shorter routes between cities. After the 2008 financial crisis, this race accelerated. Engineers became the new hotshots, and code replaced hand signals. The real power shifted to those who understood how to process data one heartbeat sooner than anyone else.

High-frequency trading firms weren’t just trying to be quick; they wanted a head start. Placing their servers literally a foot closer to an exchange’s main computers translated to precious extra nanoseconds. An entire industry sprang up, devoted to carving direct routes, drilling through mountains, and eliminating every imaginable delay. To everyday investors, the idea that a few milliseconds could build fortunes is perplexing. Yet in this environment, if you’re not first, you’re last. The motivations for this speed-obsessed crowd lay at the heart of the market’s distortions.

It wasn’t just independent traders pushing for faster connections. Big banks and established exchanges soon realized they could charge for privileged data and sell speed. Each new advantage for one group came at the expense of everyone else, as large stock orders were exposed and manipulated.