Flash Boys Chapter 7 Part 1 - The Misfits Who Built a Fair Stock Exchange
Chapter 7 is called “An Army of One.” And it starts not with trading algorithms or secret cables. It starts with a guy on the subway on September 11, 2001.
Zoran Perkov and the Worst Morning Commute in History
Zoran Perkov was 26 years old. Croatian immigrant. Grew up in Queens. Worked on a tech help desk at a company called Wall Street Systems, right next door to the New York Stock Exchange at 30 Broad Street.
That morning, he was running late. He had headphones on as usual. But something was wrong. People on the subway were talking to each other. In New York. On the subway. “Nobody talks to each other,” Zoran said. “It was a weird feeling, when you feel something is off.”
He came up from the station near Trinity Church, looked up, and watched the second plane hit the South Tower. “You couldn’t see the plane. You just saw this explosion.”
People crying, screaming, running up Broadway. Zoran crossed the street and went to work. Not because he was a robot. Because his friends were there. He called guys who worked in and around the Towers, told them to meet at his office. When the friend from the Twin Towers arrived, he said on his way out he heard the bodies hitting the ground.
Escape Through Smoke
Five friends decided to leave together. They voted for the subway over Zoran’s objection. Bad call. The train stopped in the tunnel. Smoke filled it. Some guy tried to open a window. Zoran yelled at him to stop. “It’s smoke. Breathe it. Die. It’s that simple.”
They made it back to street level. Everything was black. Zoran helped an old man with a cane, found a pregnant woman in the American Express building, gave her his phone. Walked east against police orders to the Lower East Side housing projects. People coming outside with cups of water and cordless phones. To help strangers. “That’s when I started to cry.”
Here’s the thing. 9/11 was the moment Zoran discovered he does not fall apart under pressure. He helped people. He made good decisions fast. “What it tells me is that I wasn’t afraid of those situations.”
From Help Desk Guy to Exchange Operator
That experience launched Zoran on a different career. He wanted a job where crisis management mattered. By 2006 he was at Nasdaq, sitting in front of machines with buttons that could “destroy everything.”
Early on, he froze an entire market by accident. Twenty-two seconds of chaos. He found the cause and fixed it. His CTO saved his job: “How can you get rid of a guy who makes a mistake, stops it, and fixes it?”
That turned him into a student of complexity. His favorite insight: “A car key is simple. A car is complicated. A car in traffic is complex.” Stock markets are complex. Stuff will break.
The Problem With Running Someone Else’s Machine
By 2011 Zoran was Head of Global Operations at Nasdaq. But he hated it. Business people kept adding complexity to serve HFT firms. More order types, more code, more things that could break. And when things broke, the tech people got blamed. Always.
In March 2012, Zoran got fired in an office politics battle. Then Don Bollerman called.
Don Bollerman’s Pitch
Don Bollerman was the NYSE guy who understood what was happening to exchanges. He knew Zoran was maybe the best exchange operator around. His first pitch: “I’m not going to pitch you just now, mainly because we have no money and we don’t even know what we’re going to do. But I may pitch you later.”
When Don called again that summer, IEX had an idea and some funding hope. Zoran was skeptical. But he loved the idea of running a market he helped design from scratch.
He met the IEX team. Everyone liked him except Ronan. “What put me off is that he wouldn’t shut up,” Ronan said. Zoran sent fifteen emails in thirty days about complex system failures. Brad finally walked to his desk and shouted, “Stop sending these emails!” But even Ronan came around. “You need to be the most paranoid person in the world. And he’s the most paranoid person in the world.”
The Market Falls Apart (and Nobody Can Explain Why)
Lewis pauses here to lay out the state of the stock market around 2012-2013. It is a disaster list. BATS pulled its own IPO. Nasdaq bungled the Facebook IPO. Knight Capital’s computers lost $440 million in minutes. BATS admitted it had allowed illegal trades since 2008. The exchanges kept calling these “technical glitches.” Zoran hated that word. “It’s the worst word in the world.”
So here’s what happened after the flash crash of May 2010. The S&P went up 65 percent, but trading volume dropped 50 percent. Before the crash, 67 percent of American households owned stocks. By 2013, only 52 percent did. People were leaving because they did not trust it. And that’s why IEX mattered.
Opening Day and the War Mouse
October 25, 2013. Zoran had a stock market to open. A clean, simple market he helped design. He sat down, pulled out his “war mouse,” the battered old mouse he had used to open every market for ten years. Dead. Battery gone. His wife mocks him because he can’t work the microwave but he can run a stock exchange.
He switched to a backup. Brad walked over, looked at the keyboard. “What do I do?” Zoran: “Just hit Enter.”
The room counted down. Five, four, three, two, one.
Six and a half hours later, the market closed. Ten minutes after that, Zoran was alone outside the 9/11 memorial, smoking a cigarette. “This is like the first day of the battle against complacency,” he said.
Josh Blackburn: From Baghdad to Wall Street
Then Lewis introduces Josh Blackburn. Quiet guy. Intensely quiet. Air Force veteran who served in Qatar, Baghdad, and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, he built a system that turned battlefield data from every military branch into a single picture on a twenty-foot wall map. Real-time. Generals could see rocket attack origins, patterns, trends. “The attacks on Camp Victory would come after afternoon prayer.”
Josh re-enlisted twice because nothing at home gave him the same meaning. After the military, he tried an HFT firm. It failed in six weeks. Found IEX through LinkedIn. He just wanted his work to matter.
And that’s where this part stops. Brad was struggling to see patterns in IEX’s trading data. Lines scrolling at fifty per second. Strange 100-share orders from the banks that made no sense. Then Josh overheard the problem. And he knew how to solve it. With pictures. The same way he turned battlefield chaos into clarity for generals in Afghanistan.
Part 2 covers what those pictures revealed, and how Wall Street reacted when IEX started exposing their games.
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