Flash Boys Final Thoughts - Did Anything Actually Change on Wall Street?
So we made it. Thirteen posts covering every chapter of Flash Boys by Michael Lewis. And now the big question: did any of it matter?
Stock market
Flash Boys Epilogue - Riding the Wall Street Trail Through Pennsylvania
The book ends the way it started. With a cable buried under American soil and the people who live above it having no clue what it does.
Flash Boys Chapter 8 - The Real Trial of Sergey Aleynikov
This chapter hit me different than the rest of the book. Maybe because Sergey Aleynikov is from the former USSR, same as me. Maybe because I spent 20 years in IT and know what it feels like when non-technical people judge your work. Probably both.
Flash Boys Chapter 7 Part 2 - IEX Goes Live and Goldman Makes a Surprising Move
In Part 1 we talked about the misfits Brad recruited to build IEX. Now we get to the good stuff. They launched it. And then Goldman Sachs did something nobody expected.
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.
Flash Boys Chapter 6 - Building IEX and the 350 Microsecond Speed Bump
Chapter 6 is where everything gets real. Brad and his team stop talking about the problem and start building the solution. They quit their jobs, raise money, hire puzzle solvers, and design a stock exchange from scratch. And the centerpiece of the whole thing is a coil of fiber optic cable stuffed inside a box the size of a shoe.
Flash Boys Chapter 5 - Sergey Aleynikov and Goldman Sachs' Secret Code
This chapter hit me personally. I’m from the former USSR myself. I know people exactly like Sergey Aleynikov. Brilliant programmers who left because the system wouldn’t let them be what they were meant to be. Reading this felt less like a book and more like a story someone told me over tea.
Flash Boys Chapter 4 - How Brad's Team Tracked Wall Street's Hidden Predators
By the end of 2010, Brad’s team had built a weapon. Thor worked. It protected investors from getting front-run by high-frequency traders. But here’s the problem. They had built a defense against an enemy they barely understood.
Flash Boys Chapter 3 - Ronan Ryan and the Telecom Secret Behind HFT
Every person I know who works in IT started from the bottom. Fixing cables, carrying equipment, dealing with angry users. Nobody hands you a corner office in tech. You earn it by touching the actual hardware. And that’s exactly why Ronan Ryan understood something that every Wall Street trader missed.
Flash Boys Chapter 2 - Brad Katsuyama and the Phantom Stock Market Problem
Chapter 2 of Flash Boys is where we meet Brad Katsuyama. And honestly, this is where the book really starts cooking. Because Brad is not some Wall Street hotshot from Goldman Sachs. He’s a Canadian guy from Toronto who ended up in New York almost by accident.
Flash Boys Chapter 1 - The Secret Fiber Optic Cable That Changed Wall Street
Chapter 1 of Flash Boys opens like a heist movie. Two thousand workers are digging across America. They don’t know why. They don’t know what they are building. And they are told to keep their mouths shut.
Flash Boys Introduction - Windows on the World and How Wall Street Changed Forever
Michael Lewis starts “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt” with one of the best ironies I’ve seen in a finance book. After the 2008 financial crisis, after everything Goldman Sachs did, the only Goldman employee who got arrested was a guy who took something FROM Goldman. Not someone who helped crash the economy. A Russian programmer named Sergey Aleynikov who copied some code.
Flash Boys by Michael Lewis - A Wall Street Revolt Retelling
So I just finished re-reading Flash Boys by Michael Lewis, and honestly, it hits different every time. This book came out in 2014 and people are still arguing about it. That tells you something.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: Final Thoughts and Key Takeaways
This is the last post in the series, and I want to step back from the details. No more beta coefficients or efficient-market debates. Just the big picture.
Picking Your Own Stocks: Rules and Final Strategies
We left off with Malkiel’s stock-picking rules and the suggestion to index the core of your portfolio. Now comes the rest of Chapter 15, where he tackles what to do if you’d rather let someone else do the work. And then he wraps up the whole book.
Index Funds and Smart Stock Picking Rules
After fourteen chapters of theory, history, and bubbles, Malkiel finally gets to the practical stuff. Chapter 15 is called “Three Giant Steps Down Wall Street.” It’s his playbook. Three ways to actually invest your money.
How to Predict Stock and Bond Returns
Chapter 13 of A Random Walk Down Wall Street is where Malkiel teaches you to be a financial bookie. Not the kind who takes bets on horse races. The kind who can look at the market and make a reasonable guess about what stocks and bonds will return over the long run. You still won’t be able to predict what the market does next month. But you’ll have a framework for setting realistic expectations.
Is the Stock Market Really Efficient?
Chapter 11 is where Malkiel fights back. After spending the last chapter letting behavioral finance people take their best shots at the efficient market theory, he rolls up his sleeves and defends it. Researchers have been trying to kill this theory for decades. Malkiel says they keep missing.
Your Brain Is Bad at Investing: Behavioral Finance
Up to this point in the book, Malkiel has described theories built on a simple assumption: investors are rational. They weigh risks, calculate value, and make sensible decisions. Chapter 10 throws all of that out the window. Because here’s the thing. People are not rational. And two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, spent decades proving it.
Risk and Reward: Understanding Beta and CAPM
Chapter 9 of A Random Walk Down Wall Street opens with a quote from George Stigler: “Theories that are right only 50 percent of the time are less economical than coin-flipping.” That’s a warning shot. Malkiel is about to walk us through some fancy academic models. And then he’s going to tell us they don’t quite work the way everyone hoped.
Modern Portfolio Theory: Your New Best Friend
Chapter 8 opens Part Three of the book, titled “The New Investment Technology.” We’re leaving behind the debate over whether analysts can predict stock prices. Now we’re entering the world of academic theories that actually changed how professionals invest.
Can Stock Analysts Really Predict the Future?
Chapter 7 of A Random Walk Down Wall Street asks a question that should make every investor uncomfortable. All those analysts on Wall Street, the ones in suits flying first class and talking earnings forecasts all day, can they actually predict the future? Malkiel digs into the evidence. And it’s not pretty.
Does Technical Analysis Actually Work?
Chapter 6 of A Random Walk Down Wall Street is where Malkiel stops being polite about technical analysis. He opens with a Gilbert and Sullivan quote: “Things are seldom what they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream.”
Technical vs Fundamental Analysis: How the Pros Pick Stocks
Chapter 5 kicks off Part Two of the book: “How the Pros Play the Biggest Game in Town.” On a typical trading day, shares worth hundreds of billions change hands. Fresh Harvard Business School grads pull $200,000 salaries in good years. The top money managers handle over a trillion dollars in hedge fund assets.
The Dot-Com Crash and Housing Bubble Explained
The bubbles from the sixties through the nineties were bad. But compared to what happened in the early 2000s, they were rehearsals.
Wall Street Bubbles From the Sixties to the Nineties
After covering tulip mania and the South Sea Bubble, you might think Wall Street eventually learned its lesson. It didn’t. Chapter 3 of A Random Walk Down Wall Street is Malkiel’s tour through modern speculation, from the 1960s to the 1990s. And the twist? This time the “smart money” is doing the speculating.
Tulip Mania, South Sea Bubbles, and Other Market Madness
Chapter 2 of A Random Walk Down Wall Street is basically a horror movie. Except the monsters are regular people losing their minds over tulip bulbs, fake companies, and stocks they couldn’t afford. Malkiel walks us through three of history’s wildest financial bubbles, and the pattern is always the same. People get greedy, prices go insane, and then everything falls apart.
Two Ways to Value Stocks: Firm Foundations vs Castles in the Air
Chapter 1 of A Random Walk Down Wall Street opens with an Oscar Wilde quote: “What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” That sets the tone for the whole book. Malkiel is about to spend hundreds of pages arguing that most people on Wall Street know the price of stocks but not their actual value.
Stock Market Cash Flow by Andy Tanner: A Book Retelling Series
If you’ve ever heard “just put your money in the stock market and wait,” you’re not alone. That’s pretty much the default advice everyone gets. Your parents say it. Financial advisors say it. Random people on the internet say it.
Why I'm Reading a Random Walk Down Wall Street
I picked up this book because I kept hearing the same advice everywhere: just buy index funds. But nobody really explained why. They’d say things like “you can’t beat the market” and leave it at that.
Beating the Street: Final Thoughts and Key Takeaways
Book: Beating the Street by Peter Lynch with John Rothchild | ISBN: 978-0-671-75915-5
We’ve reached the end of Peter Lynch’s Beating the Street. Twenty-six posts later. And the honest answer to “is this book worth reading?” is a clear yes. But maybe not for the reasons you’d expect.
Stock Offerings and Investor Monitoring: IPOs, Exchanges, and Corporate Governance
Book: Financial Markets and Institutions, 11th Edition Author: Jeff Madura Publisher: Cengage Learning, 2015 ISBN: 978-1-133-94788-2
Chapter 10 moves from debt markets to equity markets. This is about how companies sell ownership to the public, how stock exchanges work, and how investors try to keep corporate managers honest. If the previous chapters were about lending money, this one is about buying a piece of a company.
Beating the Street by Peter Lynch: Why This Book Still Matters
Book: Beating the Street by Peter Lynch with John Rothchild | ISBN: 978-0-671-75915-5
Peter Lynch ran the Fidelity Magellan Fund for 13 years. During that time, he turned every $1,000 invested into roughly $28,000. He bought more than 15,000 stocks. He beat the market almost every single year. And then, at age 46, he quit.