Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis Page A

famous on a small scale. He learned that some of these firms were hedge funds, which meant that they took money from outside investors. But most of them were prop shops, trading only their own founders’ money. A huge number of the firms he dealt with—Hudson River Trading, Eagle Seven, Simplex Investments, Evolution Financial Technologies, Cooperfund, DRW—no one had ever heard of, and the firms obviously intended to keep it that way. The prop shops were especially strange, because they were both transient and prosperous. “They’d be just five guys in a room. All of them geeks. The leader of each five-man pack is just an arrogant version of that geek. A fucking arrogant version of that.” One day a prop shop was trading; the next, it had closed, and all the people in it had moved to work for some big Wall Street bank. One group of guys Ronan saw over and over: four Russian, one Chinese. The arrogant Russian guy who was clearly their leader was named Vladimir. Vladimir and his boys ping-ponged from prop shop to big bank and back to prop shop, writing the computer code that made the actual stock market trading decisions. Ronan watched them meet with one of the most senior guys at a big Wall Street bank that hoped to employ them—and the Wall Street big shot sucked up to them. “He walks into the meeting and says, ‘I’m always the most important man in the room, but in this case Vladimir is.’ ” Ronan knew that these roving bands of geeks felt nothing but condescension toward the less technical guys who ran the big Wall Street firms. “I was listening to them talk about some calculation they had been asked to make, and Vladimir goes, ‘Ho, ho, ho. That’s what Americans call math.’ He said it like moth . That’s what Americans call moth . I thought, I’m fucking Irish, but fuck you guys. This country gave you a shot.”
    By early 2008 Ronan was spending a lot of his time abroad, helping high-frequency traders exploit the Americanization of foreign stock markets. A pattern emerged: A country in which the stock market had always traded on a single exchange—Canada, Australia, the UK—would, in the name of free-market competition, permit the creation of a new exchange. The new exchange was always located at some surprising distance from the original exchange. In Toronto it was inside an old department store building across the city from the Toronto Stock Exchange. In Australia it was mysteriously located not in the Sydney financial district but across Sydney Harbor, in the middle of a residential district. The old London Stock Exchange was in central London. BATS created a British rival in the Docklands, NYSE created another, outside of London, in Basildon, and Chi-X created a third in Slough. Each new exchange gave rise to the need for high-speed routes between the exchanges. “It was almost like they picked places to set up exchanges so that the market would fragment,” said Ronan.
    He still didn’t have a job on Wall Street, but Ronan had every reason to be pleased with himself and with his career. In 2007, the first year of the speed boom, he’d made $486,000, nearly twice as much as he’d ever made. Yet he did not feel pleased with himself or with his career. He was obviously good at what he did, but he had no idea why he was doing it, and he wanted to. At the end of 2007, on New Year’s Eve, he found himself sitting in a pub in Liverpool with “Let It Be” playing dully on the radio. His wife had given him the trip as this lovely gift. Around a miniature soccer ball she’d wrapped a note that said she’d bought him a plane ticket to England and a ticket to see his favorite football team. “I’m doing something I always dreamed about doing, and it was about the most depressing moment I’ve ever had in my life,” said Ronan. “I’m thirty-four years old. I’m thinking it’s never going to get any better. I’m going to be fucking Willy Loman for the rest of my life.” He felt