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

ordinary.
    In the fall of 2009, out of the blue, the Royal Bank of Canada called him and invited him to interview for a job. He was more than a little wary. He’d barely heard of RBC, and when he checked out their website it told him next to nothing. He’d grown weary of self-important Wall Street traders who wanted him to do their manual labor for them. “I said, ‘I mean no disrespect, but if you’re calling to offer me some tech job, I have no fucking interest.’ ” The RBC guy who called him—Brad Katsuyama—insisted that it wasn’t a tech job but a job in finance, on a trading floor.
    Ronan met Brad at seven the next morning and wondered if that was a Wall Street thing, hauling people in for interviews at seven in the morning. Brad asked him a bunch of questions and then invited him back to meet his bosses. In what seemed to Ronan like “the quickest hiring in the history of Wall Street,” RBC offered him a job on the trading floor. It paid $125,000, or roughly a third of what Ronan was making peddling speed to high-frequency traders. It came with a fancy title: Head of High-Frequency Trading Strategies. For a chance to work on a Wall Street trading floor, Ronan was willing to take a big pay cut. “To be honest, I would have taken less,” he said. But the title disturbed him, because, as he put it, “I didn’t know any high-frequency trading strategies.” He was so excited to have finally landed a job on a Wall Street trading floor that he didn’t bother to ask the obvious question. His wife asked it for him. “She says to me, ‘What are you going to do for them?’ And I realized I didn’t really fucking know. I really, honest to God, have no idea what the job is. There was no job description ever discussed. He never told me what he wanted me for.”
    IN THE FALL of 2009, an article in a trade magazine caught Brad Katsuyama’s eye. He’d spent the better part of a year trying and failing to find anyone who actually worked in what was now regularly referred to as high-frequency trading who was willing to explain to him how he made his money. The article claimed that HFT technologists were unhappy with the widening gulf in pay between themselves and the senior trading strategists of their firms, some of whom were rumored to be taking home hundreds of millions of dollars a year. He went looking for one of these unhappy technologists. The very first call he made, to a guy at Deutsche Bank who dealt often with HFT, gave him two names. Ronan’s was the first.
    In his interview, Ronan described to Brad what he’d witnessed inside the exchanges: the frantic competition for nanoseconds, the Toys “R” Us cage, the wire gauze, the war for space within the exchanges, the tens of millions being spent by high-frequency traders for tiny increments of speed. As he spoke, he filled huge empty tracts on Brad’s mental map of the financial markets. “What he said told me that we needed to care about microseconds and nanoseconds,” said Brad. The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. What had once been the world’s most public, most democratic, financial market had become, in spirit, something more like a private viewing of a stolen work of art. “I learned more from talking to him in an hour than I learned from six months of reading about HFT,” said Brad. “The second I met him I wanted to hire him.”
    He wanted to hire him without being able to fully explain, to his bosses or even to Ronan, what he wanted to hire him for. He couldn’t very well call him Vice President in Charge of Explaining to My Clueless Superiors Why High-Frequency Trading Is a Travesty. So he called him Head of High-Frequency Trading Strategies. “I felt he needed a ‘Head of’ title,” said Brad, “to get