The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market

I read "Dark Pools" and
Flash Boys by Michael Lewis. I was going to buy only Flash boys, but bought this book also on the high recommendations. If you are going to read one book on the subject of the impact of HFT, I suggest you pass this one, and read Flash Boys. I really found "Dark Pools" to be much less readable for two reasons. Firstly, his writing style is atrocious, it is full of hyperbole and a type of purple prose more suited to a cheap detective novel than something which requires close intelligent reading. Secondly, I don't trust his specifics, due to the fact that when he discusses things I understand intimately (server and network technology) he often gets things wrong (distributed computing is based on many redundant systems, not many redundant disks). so I wondered what else was inaccurate in areas I did not understand. I much preferred Flash Boys. However, if you are interested in the subject, and planning on reading many books on the topic, I would say that this book gives a broader history of the evolution of modern markets, introduces you to many key players and gives some useful explanations. I just wondered if this book had been fact checked at all.

It's always hard for writers in a relatively arcane area to strike the right note in their work. I work in the financial industry, but felt the author struck a really nice balance in reaching readers from relatively unsophisticated to pretty knowledgeable. If you're a total beginner in today's equity arena or a high level programmer/latency expert, you might be confused or bored, but for anyone in-between it's the best overview of the subject. One last point: any political agenda implied by the title is subtext, at best. Even if you think high frequency trading is a plus for the economy or a sign that financial Armageddon is at hand, it's an enjoyable and informative read.

Dark Pools is an interesting anecdotal narrative about the rise of computerized trading, ECN's, and the evolution of the modern stock exchanges. Many news articles have focused on the so-called rise of the machines. However, the financial press coverage of algorithmic and high frequency trading strategies often lacks a contextual understanding of how the various elements interact together. Dark Pools goes even further than simply explaining these dynamics--by providing a history and understanding of the evolutionary forces at work, and in how these forces were unleashed, the stresses and opportunities are that much more understandable.

Scott Patterson has written an important history that will bring both the professional and personal investor up-to-speed on how this all came about. He does this through a sequence of stories about actual traders, programmers, quants, exchanges, and trading firms. The thread by which these all connect and intersect is both a fascinating story and a cautionary tale. Most valuable is that investors can now understand the developments of the last two decades with a much more complete understanding of what has been hidden in the plumbing while they went about their business as investors.

It was the first book on high-frequency trading and I have to admit that the way it is written makes it a page-turner for people, who are interested in this phenomenon. Most interesting is that this book gives historical perspective on how high-frequency trading started and how it evolved. I would say it is a good starting point for anybody, who want to research into this phenomenon.

This is probably the most informative book in history as to how the market really works today and the unfair advantage that the brokerage house exercise over the public. This system is rigged in favor of the brokerage houses.

Robert Tait

Even though this book is full of market specific lingo, it is a fascinating account of how 21st century equity trading has evolved into a practice that average traders cannot participate in the short term. I had to re-read a few passages since I'm not a professional trader but it was worth the effort.

This book provides a fascinating insight to both the history and the future of the financial markets. It does what so few books successfully do, lead you to more questions and learning. Anyone interested in the financial markets, or AI in general can get valuable insight from reading this book.

For anyone interested in the evolution of the electronic electronic market place and the names behind the change, this is the book. At the end, you are left with a fairly accurate understanding of the last ten years and a good idea on where things are headed.

Broken Market – choke full of cool HFT data
The Problem of HFT – Haim Bodek the dude! Short but deep, just what the SEC needs.
Dark Pools – this one has a great story feel to it, nice after all the heavy data. Great tales and characters.

Better than expected....title is misleading as this book is more about the evolution of electronic trading rather than dark pools...author has taken a leaf out of Michael Lewis writing style. Entertaining read although not much practical application for individual investors

This is probably the best and most frightening explanation of why the stock market "bounces" are now so dramatic on a daily basis. As small investors, we have no idea where our trades are going. The "stock market" is no longer in New York but in computers in NJ and elsewhere and it is the speed of transactions over long-term investing in businesses that counts. Great read.

This book does 2 things:
(1) goes through the historical events that led to our modern stock market and
(2) tries to explain what is going on in market microstructure.

The book does very well on (1) -- it's really an enjoyable book to read. But on (2) there's almost no information, no analytic discussion about microstructure, and some of the comparisons and conclusions are simply wrong. For example, the Patterson compares the immediate liquidity with the days of the past comparing the top of the book orders and noticing that today you have fewer orders at the top of the book. But this is misleading. In the past when the spread was at least 25 cents (due to regulation, ie, in increments on 1/8ths, but also in part of the gentleman's agreement between specialists to keep the spreads large) and now the spread is mostly 1 cent for most stocks. To compare apples to apples you need to sum up the liquidity on 25 levels in the current market, because basically these 25 levels would have been aggregated into 1 level in the past. Once you do this comparison, it's clear that the order book today has much more immediate liquidity.

In spite of the title, another thing that's missing in the book is a discussion of dark pools. Obviously, there's a much bigger problem with dark pools today than with the lit market, mainly because the dark pools can legally do prop trading (and they do) on the flow they see, but in the same time they are marketing a hidden market. This is simply wrong and should have been discussed.

The author points out that the market is unfair, in the sense knowledge of market micro-structure gives some players an advantage. But the market was never fair. For example, players with knowledge about a stock have an advantage, even if that knowledge is public. The same with micro-structure. The rules of the micro-structure are published. Anybody can read the order types for the exchanges and the information is public. In the past it wasn't the case (specialists had privileges) In today's market the differentiation is more about technical competence and less about specialists born with entitlements. Moreover, the transaction costs for investors are 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than during the time of the specialists. (I've never seen a single study that claims otherwise) In other words, it'd be unfair to draw Kasparov in a chess tournament, but at least you start with the same pieces (which was not the case during the rule of the specialists)

The author also doesn't compare the state of the stock market with our other markets: futures (futures is much cleaner), FX (dirty business, where banks have a separate inter market with tighter spreads for themselves, plus the broken will do prop trades against you) and OTC contracts, say corporate bonds (huge 1% spreads, little liquidity, the bank will own you). In other words the stock market is the most fair, except maybe for futures (1 exchange, no fragmentation, no complicated rules, latency less of an issue), and way more fair than FX and OTC. The few big banks that own the OTC business have a lot to gain from HFT bashing, as they really don't want their business on a lit exchange.

I only give 5 stars because it's an enjoyable book to read and does a good job at (1). Patterson is an outsider, but he did a good job at (1) that it reads like a novel. There are a few competing books about HFT for the average reader and all of them are worse than Pattersen's book:

1. "All About High-Frequency" (Durbin) - written by an insider, does reveal a little about market microstructure, but a very introductory book. Readable by anybody.
2. "Speed Traders" (Perez) - a book which was quickly assembled as a series of interviews, and Mr Perez is using the book to make a name for himself as a consultant for HFT. (his name is constantly on PR wire and he organizes all sorts of events)
3. "Broken Markets" (Arnuk, Saluzzi) - full of factual lies, written by old school specialists that use smarts to trade, which are bitter for losing business with the modernization of the exchanges, and want the fat 25 cents spreads back.

For the technically inclined that want to learn about market microstructure, there are a few more quantitative book, but they are all dry and not much fun to read.

This book, although entertaining and a "page turner" to a certain degree, does not give the reader any kind of insight into the technical or mathematical tools that were used to implement automated trading. It is one thing to interview the "key players" behind this automation and write interesting stories about them, but quite another to describe the trading strategies, algorithms, and artificial intelligence used in it. Putting together a book on the latter will require a high amount of preparation from the author, and the reader will have to have the same degree of such in order to appreciate it.

It is no doubt for proprietary reasons that these strategies are not revealed in the book, but one can still insist on some measure of discussion of them while still staying within legal constraints. Instead, most of the emphasis of the book is on personalities behind the drive toward automation, and readers will probably be hearing their names for the first time. The author makes every effort to dramatize their contributions, and in some cases build some kind of sinister context in which they worked. Anyone who has worked in the financial industry has been familiar with scandals and has had to make contact with individuals that are to a large degree highly eccentric and difficult to communicate with. But on the average things are fairly mundane in the everyday practice of finance, both in trading circles and in areas that emphasis financial analysis and modeling. To make this book interesting though the author feels the need to accent the eccentricities of what he thinks are the key players behind automated trading. Whether they really are or were is still very much an open question after finishing the book.

The use of artificial intelligence in finance is well known to those who follow the industry, but what is still really unknown is to what degree these techniques are responsible for the "flash crash" of 2010 and the "financial crisis" of 2008. The author presents no quantitative evidence for his assertions that they were, but instead is content with telling anecdotal stories and reporting snippets from headlines and politician's mouths in order to make his case. Readers will have to seek other books, research papers, and financial reports to gain a more realistic understanding of the effects of machine intelligence in financial trading. They will find out that trying to correlate events with innovations in technology is a highly nontrivial one, requiring huge amounts of time and data, and therefore not in the scope of the typical reader.

This is a very entertaining book on some serious issues.

Although the title may suggest that the material involved will be hard to follow for those not familiar with the finance industry, that is not the case.

As with all good story tellers, Patterson is able to relay the message in a way anyone can understand. That is not to say it is dumbed down in the slightest. I did my undergrad in finance, as well as a MBA at T10 school, and still had my eyes opened by this book.

By inserting personal details on some of the bigger players involved and weaving them into recent historical events, the plot is one that is both easy to read and provides some educational insight as well.

While "dark pools" is the title, not much of the book is on this exact topic. And that is actually a positive in this case. The topic is one that should be discussed amongst the other things the book brings up "high frequency trading, artificial intelligence, etc.

Overall, the book provides insight into topics universally entertaining and is one that will leave you thinking about the future of stocks markets everywhere.

A good read but not so enlightening. Lots of anecdotes but not a lot of insight into the behavior and motivation. Very little technical information. Well written and readable but didn't leave me with much other than this behavior exits.

This is a very entertaining book on some serious issues.

Although the title may suggest that the material involved will be hard to follow for those not familiar with the finance industry, that is not the case.

As with all good story tellers, Patterson is able to relay the message in a way anyone can understand. That is not to say it is dumbed down in the slightest. I did my undergrad in finance, as well as a MBA at T10 school, and still had my eyes opened by this book.

By inserting personal details on some of the bigger players involved and weaving them into recent historical events, the plot is one that is both easy to read and provides some educational insight as well.

While "dark pools" is the title, not much of the book is on this exact topic. And that is actually a positive in this case. The topic is one that should be discussed amongst the other things the book brings up "high frequency trading, artificial intelligence, etc.

Overall, the book provides insight into topics universally entertaining and is one that will leave you thinking about the future of stocks markets everywhere.

A good read but not so enlightening. Lots of anecdotes but not a lot of insight into the behavior and motivation. Very little technical information. Well written and readable but didn't leave me with much other than this behavior exits.

'Dark Pools' is a fun, intelligent, beach weekend read.

Apart from the obvious Wall Street / HFT focus, the book struck me as a cross between War Games, The Matrix, and Terminator: Rise of the Machines. You immediately enter a world of high tech mayhem, with super-algos, blaster bots, and hunter-sniper cloaking devices duking it out at the speed of light.

Re, War Games parallels, you get an iconoclastic, vaguely teenage anti-hero - Josh Levine, the misift-hacker-genius creator of Island - who pursues an idealistic vision of "making markets free," with no impure thoughts of capitalistic gain, until one day his mutated ECN creation all but comes alive and says: "Good morning, Professor Falken. Do you want to play a game?"

Re, Matrix parallels, by the end of the book we have fast-forwarded from the humble beginnings of electronic trading to the near birth of AI (artificial intelligence)... the "desert of the real" (in this case the real being markets)... and the grand vision of supervillainesque networked undersea substructures, monitoring global data flows from strategic ocean points all around the globe.

Re, Terminator, in the final stretch I kept waiting for Patterson to write: "As future tech historians will note, SkyNet showed signs of self-awareness on X-X date, 2012..."

It was all a bit much - but in a good way. As Keynes once said, "Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking." This book will definitely get you thinking about the impact of high frequency trading on markets.

My two cents: At the end of the day, high frequency traders are the new market makers... the superfast replacements for the hand-signaling floor traders and post-sitting NYSE specialists of old. Yours truly predicted as much would happen in a review of "The Predictors" by Thomas Bass, titled "The New Market Makers?" circa 2005 (still available via my the store review page).

As I wrote nearly seven years ago:

"These guys occupy a very specific niche in the market ecosystem. Before the onslaught of computers, human floor traders provided vital liquidity to the markets (and got paid plenty well to do so). As physical exchanges lumber towards extinction, `smart' algorithms are filling the shoes of floor traders, extracting profits tick by tick with high volume, high frequency strategies. These automated players are thus becoming the new liquidity providers and market makers of the 21st century. Daytraders and scalpers may find themselves swept up in a technological arms race, but longer term traders and investors have little to fear... it's a different game."

Such is why this review is titled, "Meet the New Market Makers (Same as the Old Market Makers)". In a lot of ways, despite all the technological advancement, the biggest things haven't changed.

Take the infamous "Flash Crash" of May 2010, for example. When you understand the role that high frequency traders play these days - in terms of facilitating the majority of volume and liquidity in markets - it makes sense to expect chaos when they all "pull their bids" at once.

From the perspective of a freak occurrence where a large portion of the HFT community "backed away," exposing ridiculously far-off placeholder bids that were never meant to be hit, the market makers of the 21st century acted just like the market makers of the last century amidst the crash of 1987. They left a void at a point of severe dislocation, just as the old school guys did so long ago.

Perhaps now that GETCO - which stands for Global Electronic Trading Co, the most supervillain-like shop of them all - has assumed official market maker duties in many household names, such bid pulling will not be a future problem.

The question remains: Are the new guys worse than the old guys? I'm skeptical.

Anyone nostalgic for the old days of physical pits and human specialists may not remember the day-to-day reality of such a system.

As an international commodity broker in the late 1990s, I had the privilege of phoning into the pits on behalf of hedge and commercial clients, to yell at some guy named Vinny or Frankie or Sol - inevitably the brother-in-law or cousin of the Refco floor trader who executed our order - to try and get restitution on a criminally bad fill. This kind of thing happened far too often.

And as for being an NYSE specialist? Talk about a license to print money. There is a reason such jobs were handed down from one generation to the next. In many cases, the opportunities provided were the legal equivalent of stealing.

Not to mention the commissions - good lord, the commissions! - that retail and institutional clients alike were forced to pay in the old days. Add it all up, and I don't think the pennies and nickels hoovered up by the HFT shops, mitigated by the incredibly low-cost commissions available via technology today, amount to such a bad deal.

A bit of wildness that made me laugh out loud was the notion that computers are going to take over the markets one day, as in, putting directional investors and traders out of a job. Seriously? Puhleeze. These bots may be great at nano-scalping, playing for blips on a mass scale, but true directional market involvement is another matter entirely.

If you're truly worried about thinking machines eating your lunch in a multi-day or multi-week time frame, don't be. Marvin Minsky, a noted forefather in the Artificial Intelligence field - a very confident AI optimist 15 to 20 years ago - recently admitted the following:

"The bottom line is that we really haven't progressed too far toward a truly intelligent machine. We have collections of dumb specialists in small domains; the true majesty of general intelligence still awaits our attack."

"Dumb specialists in small domains" well describes the proliferation of tick-hungry algos. They are good at what they do in a very tight timeframe, but the inputs required to parse incalculable variables across extended time horizons are another matter entirely. As I wrote some time ago, the most powerful supercomputer on the planet is not smart enough to figure out the turbulence in a glass of water - and yet we expect it to crack the self-referential human feedback loop that is markets?

The book closes with a glimpse of the supposed future in "Star," the self-learning, self-teaching virtual machine assigned to make investment decisions for a tiny hedge fund, Rebellion Research. To the extent that Star is supposed to be a threat to humans, color me skeptical. (Those who are just mediocre at their jobs - rather than very good - have much to feel threatened by, of course... but such has always been thus.)

Patterson makes brief allusion to computer-assisted chess, the powerful combination of hardware and wetware (software programs plus human guidance). For cream of the crop money managers, I think this is closer to the true way forward - using technology to enhance human capability, not replace it.

In terms of thinking games, the best metaphor / AI-intelligence test is perhaps not the fixed Western game, Chess, but the fluid Chinese game, Go, which contains far too many variables within the scope of possible movements for any computer, even Deep Blue, to brute-force calculate the optimal strategy path. (For this reason, no Go champion has ever fallen to a machine.)

At the end of the day, trading and investing strategies will continue to evolve. High frequency traders, and various forms of new technology, will continue to influence markets in unexpected and interesting ways.

But I believe the following words from "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator," which were true in 1923, will remain just as true a century hence: "There are men whose gait is far quicker than the mob's. They are bound to lead - no matter how much the mob changes."

This is really two separate books in one. The first is a bit hyperbollic, silly, and scare mongering account of the dangers of high frequency trading. The second book is a fantastic and engaging account of the evolution on the US equity trading marketplace.

Just some examples of #1:
At one point the author claims that HFT has lead to the lack of liquidity in smaller cap stocks including the slowdown of IPOs.
He quotes a consultant saying that a financial instituion will loose billions because of a loop in HFT code.
The reader is repeatedly scared of a looming and undefined "catastrophy" becase of HFT.
The improvements in spreads and liquidity is relatively ignored. Just go back and look at some old TAQ data to see how bad the markets used to be.
The author tries to paint a picture of one large order in the marketplace that is getting ripped off by HFT. The reality is much more complex with many orders of all sizes and time frames working throughout the day.

But, despite the silliness above, this is the best account of the evolution of the US market that I have seen. I'm sure many of the people considering buying this book have looked at ITCH and OUCH specs. But in the book I leared that it was all one guy, the original Island developer who developed them. And he named them ITCH and OUCH just to poke fun at NASDAQ's naming conventions.

There are so many more, great, stories that most readers will still enjoy the book. Take the history and the personalities and ignore the analysis.

Scott describes the history and evolution/devolution of electronic trading, and he does it in a way such that it reads like a novel. A factual this-can't-be-real-can-it novel. The read will go quickly. You will ask yourself how on earth could/can regulators in Washington DC allow themselves to get so hoodwinked, and fail to protect investors? You will see the connection between our HFT hostage-taking "liquidity providers" and the SOES bandits of the 1990s.

Scott is gifted as a story teller. He takes a wonky history filled with geeks and freaks, and weaves it into such an easy and informative read. I got the book yesterday and could not put it down.

This is a must read for any investor, but it should be required reading for any employee at FINRA, the SEC, and the CFTC.

By the way... the CSFB color and characters grab you right at the start of the book... Manny is legendary.

Dark Pools is an engaging history of the evolution of algorithmic trading. The book begins with the very first implementations in mid-late 80s, and then explains the evolution of the trading regulations, the birth and the consequent fall of the electronic day trader, and finally the culmination of it all: high-speed algorithmic wars and how the "plumbing" of the new multi-exchange system with exotic (and often secret) order types has fundamentally altered how the modern market operates.

As a bonus, all of the above is explained without getting lost in the jargon - you don't have to work on Wall Street to understand the evolution and the implications of this new system. You'll get to know the key players, like Josh Levine, Haim Bodek, and a dozen other characters who have laid the foundation for this system, and sadly, why many of them also believe that it is now completely broken -- what started as a vision towards a more efficient market has now evolved into multi-tier system of dark pools, exotic order types, and microsecond trading algorithms.

Once you're done with Dark Pools, and if you are curious to dive deeper, check out Haim Bodek's "The Problem of HFT" - it serves as a nice companion.

As a chronology of high frequency trading, this book succeeds. I quite liked getting all the history.

I'd say the astounding number of facts can make it a bit dry to read, but I quite liked not knowing who the bad guys actually are. It's a book pretty much devoid of protagonists making it hard to route for anyone.

Having read Flash Boys, it was interesting to see another perspective. However Dark Pools only touches on the "how" and spends most time with the "who." Some of the same characters show up, but come across very differently.

All in all I didn't feel that the book finished. Most books that start with an anecdote and then come back to it, but I never felt that the character at the outset every really got closure except in a short snippet.

I still liked the book and recommend it to anyone interested in what really happens on the stock market.

The book really reads like a Tolstoyan novel, with remarkable breadth of knowledge and unity in its story. And like Tolstoy in "War and Peace", Scott Patterson blurs the line between fiction and history to come closer to the truth. He tells the rise of the trading Bots as a story of people and events that lead to a technological revolution in the stock markets of the nineties. It would have been easy to ascribe the revolution to mere greed, but Patterson shines a light on the more noble pursuit of making the market more transparent and less of a "dark pool". In financial lingo this term means private exchange, but in the book it's also loosely used to refer to the whole market as a place of darkness and non-transparency.
The main message Patterson conveys is that the stock market went from one "dark pool" to an even more complex one ruled by the trading Bots. Finishing the book one sees that, as with most revolutions, out of the chaos comes a new order not any better than the previous one: corrupt and greedy market-makers were replaced by omnipresent lightning-fast trading algos that would bend the markets similarly to their advantage.

Dark Pools, by WSJ reporter Scott Patterson, tells the story of how computerized trading destroyed the corrupt market maker system of NASDAQ before morphing into an equally corrupt (and dangerously unstable) system that is now dominated by high frequency traders who use fast data feeds, sophisticated algorithms and expensive direct connections into stock exchange computers to "front-run" orders coming from pension funds, mutual funds and retail investors. The high frequency traders make small profits per share on each transaction but make it up in volume and place impossibly large numbers of orders to manipulate the market. Their profits come directly out of the pockets of other investors.

The book reminds me of my father's favorite market commentator, Richard Ney, whose Wall Street Jungle focused on how the markets were rigged in favor of the specialists and market makers. It also reminds me of two other great books on technology: Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine and Steven Levy's Hackers.

It's a great read, and I highly recommend it.

"Dark Pools" by Scott Patterson is a must read for every American investor and regulator. In it, the author makes a compelling case for the premise that the US stock market is "rigged" in favor of high frequency traders using powerful computers.

Patterson, a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, traces the emergence and growth of computerized trading. It's a scary story of how the global markets have been taken over by trading robots ("bots") using artificial intelligence (AI) systems to execute trades in milliseconds.

Threaded throughout the book is the story of Josh Levine, a brilliant, idealistic computer nerd, whose goal was to wrest control of the market from the big exchanges that give giant institutions the advantage over the little guy. In pursuit of his goal, Levine created a computerized trading hub, known as "Island", which allowed small traders to trade stocks directly. Eventually, Island grew into a multi-billion-dollar global electronic stock market linked to investors through a vast network of fiber-optic cables.

Levine's dream leads to serious unintended consequences - including the proliferation of secretive exchanges called dark pools and a new type of trading machines using sophisticated algorithms that can think and act on their own without human intervention. These are the machines that caused the freakish "Flash Crash" in May 2010 that revealed the true dangers of a computer-driven market.

In addition to Josh Levine's Island, the book chronicles the rise of other prominent trading firms including Instinet, Archipelago, Datek, Getco, Tradebot Systems, the people behind them and the software systems that gave them an edge in their trading. Among these innovative software systems were:
* "Watcher" which permitted users to simultaneously monitor literally hundreds of stocks or securities;
* "Monster Key" which permitted Datek traders to jump to the top of the trading queue; and
* "Tradebot" one of the first fully algorithmic trading programs.

To show how far things had gotten out of control, Patterson includes an excerpt from a speech by Thomas Peterffy (one of the prime proponents of high speed trading) that stunned attendees at a meeting of the World Federation of Exchanges in October 2010.

Peterffy's comments were both prescient and troubling: "It's not so much anymore that the public does not trust their brokers," he said. "They don't trust the markets, the exchanges, or the regulators either. Why should they, given our showing over the past few years? To the public the financial markets may increasingly seem like a casino - except that a casino is more transparent and easier to understand. The market structure and new products have evolved more quickly than our capacity to understand and control them. The result has been a series of crises over the past few years that have caused investors to lose confidence or to think that the whole system is a rigged game."

In the book's conclusion, Patterson says that the market has to change: "It has been spinning out of control, plagued by costly glitches, manipulative activity, and plunging investor confidence. If nothing is done to fix it,' he says, "next time the devastation could be irreversible."

Barry Francis

This book could have covered the materials well within two-thirds the time this one took. This is primarily because there is so much redundancy. Many things are repeated in different chapters.

Other than that, it was an interesting read. I learned quite a bit about the history of electronic trading, and I'm intrigued about the future.

Well...if you like drama and story telling, you'll probably find this somewhat interesting. Much like the Michael Lewis book, Flash Boys, this has colorful characters, lots of drama, too much fluff, and little in the way of technical explanation.

It is loaded with phrasing such as:
"Joshua Levine darted up Wall Street among throngs of bankers, traders, and specialists in their bespoke suits, patent-leather shoes, and licked-back hair. An impish figure of five-six with a wide-open boyish face...:"

Colorful? Sure. Engaging? Perhaps. Informative as the the supposed subject? No. Cut out all of this :"literary style:" and this book would be one third its size.

Look elsewhere to really understand the technical aspects of the changes in the market.