What Michael Lewis Gets Wrong About High-Frequency Trading

Michael Lewis spent the first half of Tuesday promoting his book about high-frequency trading on NBC. In the morning, he went on NBC’s Today show. By midday he was on CNBC, taking in part in a battle royal over the merits of HFT. Lewis’s TV publicity tour started on Sunday night with an appearance on 60 Minutes.

Lewis’s book, Flash Boys, is driving a huge amount of attention toward the topic of high frequency trading, and it has rekindled some of basic arguments over its impact on markets and investors. The new book is typical Lewis. It’s a page-turner that reads like a novel and succeeds in making complex topics accessible to non-experts. By taking seemingly disparate developments—the secretive race to build underground, super-fast fiber optic cables, the 2009 arrest of a Goldman Sachs computer programmer—Lewis stitches together a compelling, character-driven narrative to walk readers through the immense changes the financial markets have undergone over the past decade.