Michael Lewis to 60 Minutes: “The Stock Market Is … – Vanity Fair

All that complexity is offset in Lewis’s telling by a collection of Hollywood-ready characters. There’s Brad Katsuyama, a kind of anti-Jordan Belfort, who first notices that something weird is happening with his trades and sets out to discover the problem—and, in a very un-Wall Street move—help others protect themselves from it. There’s Ronan Ryan, “the world’s expert at helping the world’s fastest stock-market traders be faster” who also seemed to be “doing a fair impression of a Dublin handyman.” There’s Constantine Sokoloff, a Russian math whiz who led a team of “Puzzle Masters” dedicated to testing a new system for foiling the high-speed traders. (Hollywood blog editors, start your fantasy-casting engines now.)

You can tell that Lewis—whose 1989 book, Liar’s Poker, more or less defines our understanding of Wall Street in the 80s—has struck a nerve from the rhetoric being produced by those he’s targeting.

“Critics of technological advancements in the market do not ground their arguments in data,” a high-frequency-trading advocate named Peter Nabicht recently wrote on the site modernmarketsinitiative.com. “Instead they base their appeals on opinion, seeking to generate animosity and skepticism towards high frequency technology, automation and electronic platforms.”

Memo to Mr. Nabicht. Get your data together, if you have any, because until you can express yourself like Michael Lewis, your appeals to opinion are destined to fall flat.

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Michael Lewis to 60 Minutes: “The Stock Market Is … – Vanity Fair

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