Beyond ‘Flash Boys’: Matt Levine Interviews IEX’s Brad Katsuyama

Stock exchanges are part of the plumbing of Wall Street, and the details of how they’re run have never exactly captured the public imagination. That changed with Brad Katsuyama, 38, the co-founder and chief executive officer of IEX, who brought equity market structure to the mainstream as the hero of Michael Lewis’s book Flash Boys.

Katsuyama was working as a trader at the Royal Bank of Canada, helping big investors buy stock, when he noticed it was getting increasingly difficult to do so without moving the price. As he investigated, he came to the conclusion that stock exchanges weren’t always looking out for investors’ interests and the market favored high-frequency traders at the expense of long-term investors. (In Lewis’s words, the market was “rigged.”) This led Katsuyama to start IEX, an exchange with a “speed bump” designed to slow down high-frequency traders on behalf of longer-term investors.