If you’re a small investor, the stock market is rigged against you. If that sounds like a conspiracy, that’s because it is one: the system was built for market insiders who know how to manipulate it. As the foremost chronicler of how regular Americans keep getting #!*&%ed by Wall Street, Michael Lewis tells the captivating story behind the grift in Flash Boys.
An 827-Mile Secret
In 2009, a trader named Dan Spivey commissioned a top-secret project. Two hundred men formed secret crews that worked together to build a fiber-optic line connecting a data center in Chicago with a stock exchange in New Jersey. Ultimately, the line cut the roundtrip time for data to 13 milliseconds, but only people who paid a premium (that is, big investors) received the advantage. Learn more about Spivey and Lewis’s rousing cast of characters in our Instaread on Flash Boys.
