Michael Lewis 60 minutes on the agenda!
Michael Lewis appears tonight on 60 minutes in a widely anticipated interview (at least among certain circles!) regarding high frequency trading (HFT), which he discusses at length in his upcoming book on the topic, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt.
If you have not done so already, make sure to check out this great write up on the Michael Lewis book from last week. “Michael Lewis Exposes High-Frequency Trading: ‘You’re Enabling People To Screw Their Customers”
Michael Lewis 60 Minutes preview below and we will have Michael Lewis 60 minutes coverage and full video to follow
UPDATE 8:00PM EST: Michael Lewis 60 minutes entire video below followed by some earlier coverage
Michael Lewis 60 Minutes: He calls its simple you are either in or out. Even the richest hedge funds, mutual funds
, pension funds all get screwed by HFT. Michael Lewis says it is not only a scam “this is the market”, and HFT unnecessarily unlevels the playing field.
Some good tweets from 60 minutes
Now on #60Minutes: Steve Kroft talks with the best-selling author Michael Lewis about his new book on high-speed trading
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 30, 2014
“The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism is rigged.” — Michael Lewis
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 30, 2014
High-frequency traders can “identify your desire to buy shares,” buy them and sell them to you at a higher price, Michael Lewis says.
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 30, 2014
Brad Katsuyama says he wanted to tackle the problem w/ high-speed trading b/c “it didn’t feel right that ppl… are getting bait & switched.”
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 30, 2014
Michael Lewis says what high-speed trading predators are doing is “legalized front-running”
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 30, 2014
Katsuyama’s team developed software that allowed @RBC orders to reach all the exchanges simultaneously, cutting out high-frequency traders
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 30, 2014
Katsuyama says he felt “sense of obligation” to leave his job at @RBC and start @IEXTrading to address a problem affecting “millions of ppl”
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 30, 2014
Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn is an investor in IEX (more on that to follow tomorrow).
“We’re selling trust. We’re selling transparency.” — Brad Katsuyama on the mission of @IEXTrading
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 30, 2014
Michael Lewis 60 minutes nice clip on why firms will pay so much for access to super quick info
After, before (or both) watching Michael Lewis 60 minutes check out his book on the topic
Below is a summary of the book from Amazon.com
Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt. 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.
The characters in Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt are fabulous, each completely different from what you think of when you think “Wall Street guy.” Several have walked away from jobs in the financial sector that paid them millions of dollars a year. From their new vantage point they investigate the big banks, the world’s stock exchanges, and high-frequency trading firms as they have never been investigated, and expose the many strange new ways that Wall Street generates profits.
The light that Lewis shines into the darkest corners of the financial world may not be good for your blood pressure, because if you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you. But in the end, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt is an uplifting read. Here are people who have somehow preserved a moral sense in an environment where you don’t get paid for that; they have perceived an institutionalized injustice and are willing to go to war to fix it.