FT Business Book of the Year

Best business books

All the books longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis

Flash Boys

Above all, Lewis has a gift for narrative. He is not the first to write about Spread Networks, a start-up that secretly laid an 827-mile, $300m fibre optic cable from Chicago to New Jersey to enable trades to make a round trip in 13 milliseconds. But he turns it into a great story. — Read the complete FT review

Synopsis

If you thought Wall Street was about alpha males standing in trading pits hollering at each other, think again. That world is dead.

Now, the world’s money is traded by computer code, inside black boxes in heavily guarded buildings. Even the experts entrusted with your cash don’t know what’s happening to it. And the very few who do aren’t about to tell - because they’re making a killing.

This is a market that’s rigged, out of control and out of sight; a market in which the chief need is for speed; and in which traders would sell their grandmothers for a microsecond. Blink, and you’ll miss it.

In Flash Boys, Michael Lewis tells the explosive story of how one group of ingenious oddballs and misfits set out to expose what was going on. It’s the story of what it’s like to declare war on some of the richest and most powerful people in the world. It’s about taking on an entire system. And it’s about the madness that has taken hold of the financial markets today.

You won’t believe it until you’ve read it.