Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis Read Free Book Online

there’s this new firm that’s now ten percent of the U.S. market.’ ” The guy mentioned the firm’s name, but Brad didn’t fully catch it. It sounded like Gekko. (The name was Getco.) “I’d never even heard of Getco. I didn’t even know the name. I’m like, ‘WHAT??’ They were ten percent of the market. How can that be true? It’s insane that someone could be ten percent of the U.S. stock market and I’m running a Wall Street trading desk and I’ve never heard of the place.” And why, he wondered, would a guy from retail in Canada know about them first?
    He was now running a stock market trading department unable to trade properly in the U.S. stock market. He was forced to watch people he cared for harassed and upset by a bunch of 1980s Wall Street throwbacks. And then, in the fall of 2008, as he sat and wondered what else might go wrong, the entire U.S. financial system went into a freefall. The way Americans handled their money had led to market chaos, and the market chaos created life chaos: The jobs and careers of everyone around him were suddenly on the line. “Every day I’d walk home and feel as if I had just got hit by a car.”
    He wasn’t naïve. He knew that there were good guys and bad guys, and that sometimes the bad guys win; but he also believed that usually they did not. That view was now challenged. When he began to grasp, along with the rest of the world, what big American firms had done—rigged credit ratings to make bad loans seem like good loans, created subprime bonds designed to fail, sold them to their customers and then bet against them, and so on—his mind hit some kind of wall. For the first time in his career, he felt that he could only win if someone else lost, or, more likely, that someone else could only win if he lost. He was not by nature a zero-sum person, but he had somehow wound up in the middle of a zero-sum business.
    His body had always tended to register stress before his mind. It was as if his mind refused to accept the possibility of conflict even as his body was engaged in that conflict. Now he bounced from one illness to another. His sinuses became infected and required surgery. His blood pressure, chronically high, skyrocketed. His doctors had him seeing a kidney specialist.
    By early 2009 he’d decided to quit Wall Street. He’d just become engaged. After work every day he’d sit down with his fiancée, Ashley Hooper—a recent Ole Miss graduate who’d grown up in Jacksonville, Florida—to decide where to live. They’d whittled the list down to San Diego, Atlanta, Toronto, Orlando, and San Francisco. He had no idea what he was going to do; he just wanted out. “I thought I could just sell pharmaceuticals or whatever.” He’d never felt a need to be on Wall Street. “It was never a calling,” he said. “I didn’t think about money or the stock market when I was growing up. So the attachment was not strong.” Maybe more oddly, he hadn’t become all that wedded to money, even though RBC was now paying him almost $2 million a year. His heart had been in his job, but mainly because he really liked the people he worked for and the people who worked for him. What he liked about RBC was that it had never pressured him to be anyone but himself. The bank—or the markets, or perhaps both—was now pushing him to be someone else.
    Then the bank, on its own, changed its mind. In February 2009 RBC parted ways with Jeremy Frommer and asked Brad to help find someone to replace him. Even as he had one foot out the door, Brad found himself interviewing candidates from all over Wall Street—and he saw that basically none of the people who held themselves out as knowledgeable about electronic trading understood it. “The problem was that the electronic people facing clients were just front men,” he said. “They had no clue how the technology worked.”
    He withdrew his foot from the doorway and thought about it. Every day, the markets were driven less