The Markets on Speed

“‘This had been happening to me for almost two years. There’s no way I’m the first guy to have figured this out. So what happened to everyone else?’ The question seemed to answer itself: Anyone who understood the problem was making money off it.” Michael Lewis has a new book on the ways high frequency trading is enabling a lot of people (but not you) to make money from nothing. From the NYT Mag: The Wolf Hunters of Wall Street.

+ “They are able to identify your desire to buy shares in Microsoft and buy them in front of you and sell them back to you at a higher price. This speed advantage that the faster traders have is milliseconds, some of it is fractions of milliseconds.” In other words, the markets are rigged.