I've read a few books by Lewis at this point and find them to be consistently entertaining.

This book in particular has a bit of slow start—covering the laying of a fiber optic cable from Chicago to New Jersey—but picks up from there.

The book is essentially about front-running: financial arbitrage transactions that degrade rather than improve market function (as opposed to other kinds of arbitrage, which perform a useful function).

It is fascinating to read this book now, as the crypto space has been working hard to build mathematically-provable non-front-runnable exchange protocols—an aspirations that the protagonists of this book could only dream of.

Lewis paints a pretty damning picture of the Securities and Exchange Commission—an administration whose legislation exacerbated high-frequency trading exploits, and whose staff regularly were corrupted by the industry. I can't say recent SEC actions in crypto have improved this picture in any way. ( )

I've read several Michael Lewis financial books and loved them but I was disappointed by this one. The explanations were confusing, he kept repeating things, providing a lot of detail that was of no consequence, etc. He also dropped in terms like "subversion" without explanations leaving the wrong impression for what they mean. ("Subversion" is just a source code control package and has nothing to do with subverting anything.) It made me wonder how much of the material was really over the author's head.

I appreciated some of his explanations that the banks, brokerages, and exchanges were largely unaware of what was going on. But his explanations were often puzzling themselves and I suppose that he just didn't have all the explanations or he lacked a full understanding himself.

It all added up to a book that was not a good read. It was too confusing, had too much irrelevant material, and was too long. (Yes, I read the whole thing.) Perhaps this is not entirely the author's fault. Where was his editor? His editor should have done a better job helping trim and focus the material and distill difficult financial discussion into understandable explanations and a coherent whole. ( )

This novel does not have human interest/ character angle that some of Lewis's other books have had (specifically Money Ball and the Blind Side). It also struck me as a bit repetitive in parts. I liked learning about how HFT works and how some worked to combat it but it could have been covered as a magazine article or case study. ( )

Great

Not Lewis' best, but better than most others writing CNF. ( )