Dark Pools
A news-breaking account of the global stock market's subterranean battles, Dark Pools portrays the rise of the "bots"--artificially intelligent systems that execute trades in milliseconds and use the cover of darkness to out-maneuver the humans who've created them. In the beginning was Josh Levine, an idealistic programming genius who dreamed of wresting control of the market from the big exchanges that, again and again, gave the giant institutions an advantage over the little guy. Levine created a computerized trading hub named Island where small traders swapped stocks, and over time his invention morphed into a global electronic stock market that sent trillions in capital through a vast jungle of fiber-optic cables. By then, the market that Levine had sought to fix had turned upside down, birthing secretive exchanges called dark pools and a new species of trading machines that could think, and that seemed, ominously, to be slipping the control of their human masters. Dark Pools is the fascinating story of how global markets have been hijacked by trading robots--many so self-directed that humans can't predict what they'll do next.
Stats for nerds
27recommend
67mentions
48people
2012–2024years
61% recommend33% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- There’s a very nice book about this subject called “Dark Pools”. I found it very enjoyable, you certainly seem to have the knowledge to enjoy it even more :-)
- While they are out of date and not too technical (and arguably, quite biased), the two books that I've enjoyed the most on this topic are:
1. Dark Pools, by Scott Patterson, and 2. Flash Boys, by Michael Lewis.
- Check out books Dark Pools and Flash Boys for some stories about HFT...
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Pools-Scott-Patterson-audiobook/...
https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michael-Lewis-audiobook/dp...
- I also read about it in the book Dark Pools which chronicled the story of a guy named Josh Levine who first implemented the decimal change in his pursuit of free, automated trading for average investors. He’s an absolute legend, someone I think the HN crowd would love.
- Flash Boys is written to entertain, though, not inform. It is littered with inaccuracies and dramatization to the point of lying.
Front-running, for the record, is illegal and nobody does it. Michael Lewis perverts the phrase to mean "using publicly available information and extremely expensive- though publicly available- radio technology to move stock information faster than competitors". Which you might still think is "unfair", though I would argue it's only unfair in the same sense that WalMart and Target make it hard for small shops to compete because they can't afford ultra-efficient trillion dollar supply chains. It's not illegal, it's objectively more efficient, and the only thing that prevents anyone from "just doing it too" is capital.
"Dark Pools" by Scott Patterson is a much more educated and in-the-know look at electronic trading.
- Off-topic but related to the source... I just finished reading Dark Pools, by Scott Patterson, and immediately recognized josh.com as being Josh Levine’s website. He’s portrayed in a very positive light by the book, and he seems like the kind of person who would rather avoid attention from it, but I do want to recommend the book as one of my absolute favorites.
It seems his old site about The Island ECN is archived at http://josh.com/oldindex.htm
Check it out if you have the slightest interest in electronic and high frequency trading!
