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274 pages, Hardcover
First published March 31, 2014
- an intimate understanding of how richly compensated alpha males at a trading desk on Wall Street dominate the poor schlubs (Liar’s Poker)
- how a cash-constrained baseball executive can use statistics to cobble together a winning lineup (Moneyball)
- how the geniuses of modern day football came to realize the importance of a great left tackle in protecting the quarterback’s butt (Blind Side), or
- how a select few investors could foresee the folly of investing in subprime mortgages doomed to default (The Big Short)
"We're not anti-HFT...." To that end, Katsuyama and Ryan have been meeting with HFT firms and listening to their ideas.... "There's always talk that HFTs are gaming the system and how there is a need to filter them out," Katsuyama said. "But there are HFT strategies out there that are of benefit to the market. Some HFT firms have embraced us, while others have not."
“Wall Street is corrupt, I decided," said Schwall.... (page 92)
After [Schwall] met Brad, he was certain that the market at the heart of capitalism was rigged (95).
Schwall: "I knew who was being screwed, people like my mom and pop.... (95)
“There was quite a bit of vengeance on my mind,” [Schwall] said. A streak of anger ran through him, ... where it came from Schwall could not say, but he knew perfectly well what triggered it: injustice. “If I can fix something and fuck these people who are fucking the rest of this country, I’m going to do it,” [Schwall] said (p. 100).
[Schwall] learned ... there was nothing new about the behavior they were at war with: The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted. (101)
Schwall had started out looking for the villains who were committing crimes against the life savings of ordinary Americans.... He wound up finding, mainly, a bunch of people who had no idea of the meaning of their own lives. In his searches, Schwall noticed ... [a] surprisingly large number of the people pulled in by the big Wall Street banks to build the technology for high-frequency trading were Russians. “If you went to LinkedIn and looked at one of these Russian guys, you would see he was linked to all the other Russians,” said Schwall. (127)