42 pages • 1 hour read
Michael LewisFlash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Michael Lewis (The Author)
Michael Lewis is an author who specializes in popular nonfiction about financial markets and catastrophes. Lewis received an economics degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He worked for the Salomon Brothers firm, a giant in the Wall Street of the 1980s and 1990s when Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (1987) popularized the image of investors and stock traders as the drivers of a new global economy. Lewis pivoted into a career of writing on financial markets, beginning with the 1989 book Liar’s Poker that describes his own life as a bond salesman through a scathing portrayal of Wall Street culture. After several years writing for magazines including The New Republic and Vanity Fair, he became a household name with the publication of his book Moneyball in 2003. The story of Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane’s attempt to build a baseball roster based on statistical analysis was a pop culture smash, later becoming an Oscar-nominated film with big name actors like Brad Pitt. Lewis then turned to football, with his 2006 book The Blind Side that charted the emerging culture of the left offensive tackle play through the life story of Mississippi player Michael Oher. The film adaptation won Sandra Bullock an Academy Award for Best Actress as Oher’s adoptive mother. Lewis returned to finance with his 2010 book The Big Short which followed a handful of investors who anticipated the bursting of the US housing market bubble of 2007 and 2008. This book also became a popular and Oscar-winning film.
Brad Katsuyama
Brad Katsuyama is a Canadian executive who currently serves as the Chief Executive officer of Investors’ Exchange (IEX). His grandparents had been imprisoned in concentration camps during the Second World War because they were Japanese. Katsuyama is the consummate Michael Lewis hero; a brilliant man (Lewis’s heroes are nearly always men) whose emotional intelligence and temperament seem incongruent with the aggressive nature of his line of work. Lewis frequently mentions Katsuyama’s Canadian origins to signify his modesty and integrity, and Katsuyama is portrayed as an idealistic outsider in the world of cut-throat stock trading. Katsuyama wishes to thwart the HFTs who are gaming the market, while believing that he must be pragmatic within the system itself. Katsuyama portrays IEX as a revolution through reform from within the system of stock exchanges.
He began his career with the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), which was traditionally a small player in stock trading compared to the big Wall Street firms. After moving to RBC’s office in New York, he noticed that the prices of stocks changed as a direct result of his attempt to buy them within fractions of a second. After learning more about high-frequency traders (HFTs) and how they scalped stock transactions by moving milliseconds faster than the public exchanges, Katsuyama and his team supervised the development of THOR (Tactical Hybrid Order Router) which instituted an artificial delay in the processing speed between exchanges to eliminate the speed advantage abused by high frequency traders. After the development of THOR, Katsuyama became convinced that he needed to mount a more direct challenge to HFTs by developing a new stock exchange that reduced the risk of scalping. The result was Investors’ Exchange (IEX) which launched in 2013 to immense controversy on Wall Street. As of 2023, Katsuyama remains the CEO of IEX, and is seeking to bring about greater transparency to fields other than stock trading, such as the trade of cryptocurrency.
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