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For those interested in a more detailed account, Lewis' Flash Boys is a really great book. http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michael-Lewis/dp/0393244660

⬐ tptacek

_Flash Boys_ is a terrible book. It's incoherent, very poorly ties the narrative about this case to HFT, gets a lot of trading details wrong, and makes an underdog story out of an attempt by a bunch of bigbank insiders to route bigbank brokerage trade through their new firm. If you're interested in the technical story behind HFT, a much better thing to read is that series of articles that's been running on HN for the last few months.

I'm a Michael Lewis fan --- I even liked _Next: The Future Just Happened_ --- but this book was so disappointing I've actually become disillusioned. What else was he wrong about that I wasn't clued in enough to notice? Do Greek people in reality try hard to pay their taxes? Was Chad Bradford a terrible deal for the A's? Was Marillion a terrible band?

The book "Flash Boys" by Michael Lewis chronicles the rise of HFT, and basically argues that it doesn't really provide that much of a benefit.

http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michael-Lewis/dp/0393244660...

⬐ lrm242

Suggest you read this rebuttal. Lewis' book is deeply flawed. http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Insiders-Perspective-High-F...

⬐ kasey_junk

Standard PSA about "Flash Boys". If you are interested in HFT you are better off quite literally not reading that book than reading it. It is very biased and largely inaccurate.

If you want to read narrative non-fiction about HFT, "Dark Pools" by Patterson, which also has its mistakes, is much better.

⬐ henrik_w

Are there any other resources you can recommend for learning more about HFT?

⬐ paperwork

There are several books which speak about HFT at a high level. If you are curious about the actual mechanics of stock exchanges and (a bit about) how various parties make their money, I wrote a bit about it at http://falconair.github.io/2015/01/05/financial-exchange.htm...

⬐ kasey_junk

For blog post style reading 'yummyfajitas' series on HFT is good:

https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology.html

For technical books:

- Trading & Exchanges by Harris (a little out of date)

- Algorithmic Trading & DMA by Johnson.

On the narrative non-fiction side Dark Pools is basically it.

⬐ henrik_w

Great, thanks!

⬐ Judson

I would also recommend reading "Flash Boys: Not so Fast" (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P0QI2M2).

⬐ CyberDildonics

Written by a high frequency trader. Are there any third parties that have deeply explored HFT and come out in defense of it?

⬐ kasey_junk

Sure. Vanguard has the widely publicized view that HFT helps to bring down the cost to retail investors for instance

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ff8c6486-cb37-11e3-ba95-00144feabd...

⬐ tptacek

This is a really fun read. Thanks for pointing it out!

http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michael-Lewis/dp/0393244660 is a great high level overview on this whole issue (including brad katsuyama).

The book Flash Boys provides a solid understanding of how HFT got started. http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michael-Lewis/dp/0393244660

⬐ kasey_junk

No it doesn't. Everyone I know with HFT industry experience that has read it (including myself) has panned it. It is possibly the worst thing you can read if you are interested in how HFT works. "Dark Pools" has it's own faults but for narrative non-fiction it is the only game in town.

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis: http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michael-Lewis/dp/0393244660

Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post–financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, and more controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, they come to this realization separately; but after they discover one another, the flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets. This they do by creating an exchange in which high-frequency trading—source of the most intractable problems—will have no advantage whatsoever.

Micheal Lewis explains dark pools and HFT's quite well in his new book Flash Boys [1].

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt/dp/03932...

⬐ kasey_junk

No he doesn't. Either through ignorance, incompetence, or malice he wrote a pretty terrible book about dark pools and HFTs. Dark Pools by Patterson is much better and even it misses on lots of details.