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4.03 AVERAGE
4.03 AVERAGE
A fascinating premise, and a great story but a little too "inside baseball"in its execution for me. Too many details, too many times that I thought "Who is he talking about?" "What's happening?" "What was that?"so I came close to finishing, but didn't.
Wow. I had no idea what the high-frequency trading types were actually up to. Craziness. Lewis, as always, makes an obscure story featuring mostly nerds incredibly fascinating.
I will read anything this guy produces, for sure. He makes any complex subject worth understanding, from Wall Street to football and baseball and back to Wall Street. I do think his "sky is falling" premise and proposal that a small band are here to save the day is unlikely, but this read affords anyone the opportunity to better understand what is going on and what is I. The news every day about Wall Street. Electronic trading is here to stay, for sure. Stories like this one, efforts to make it fair, are really cool. This book is worth reading.
Parts of this book I really liked, but the chapters about a Russian coder who stole code was just plain bad. As a software configuration engineer/consultant whose worked with many companies, worked in many languages and platforms, Lewis's ignorance about unix, open source, and coding in general really stood out, and I think some of the folks who he talked to snowed him on items like the bash shell, passwords, and open source. Had I been the author, I would have dropped that whole thread, it contributed nothing to the story, and honestly, made me kinda doubt how well he understood things because some of that is quite simple to verify, and to those mistakes and errors make it in, well, hmmm... I should really rate the book a 2 star, but I did like the other chapters that didn't involve the source code theft.
Loved this book so much that after listening to the audiobook I went and bought it in print.
Ordinary people can do extraordinary things and while I don't live in or visit the world of finance/trading, I found Michael Lewis's breakdown so compelling that I felt like I knew more than i did. His books are addicting.
Ordinary people can do extraordinary things and while I don't live in or visit the world of finance/trading, I found Michael Lewis's breakdown so compelling that I felt like I knew more than i did. His books are addicting.
I read this book because people at work were talking about it, and people who know me know how badly I suffer from FOMO... but I am glad I read this. Very well written and written simplistically about nuanced and complicated material.
I enjoyed this book a lot. I like how Michael Lewis can make a non-fiction book read like a Grisham thriller, though I did find it a bit repetitive in the middle. The one aspect of the story I was left wondering was who were the initial HFT who figured out how to game the system before the Wall Street banks got involved? Were they already obscenely wealthy Wall Street elites? Were they "new" guys? Or were they programmers who had been consistently taken advantage?
informative
reflective
fast-paced