Wall Street controversial trading practices were disclosed by the Michael Lewis’s book Flash Boys that was published in 2014. However, these practices were made possible by advancements in technology and through favortisim by changing the regulations that was only made to improve the pricing fairness in the financial markets.
The book mainly focused on Brad Katsuyama, the Canadian banker who disclosed these practices. He had worked for the Royal Bank of Canada in running the New York trading desk. He started to ask questions as he observed some odd system responses to his trading requests in 2010.
The answers he found and disclosed, caused a firestorm regarding the ethics of financial market about high frequency trading. However, only few people were aware of the scenario in actuality, and fewer understood the cause by advancement in IT.
Questions that remain: what are the ways in which the IT creates impact on our concept of wealth? What are the reasons behind occurance of “flash crashes”? Are the markets rigged? Would the IT make disruptions to the financial markets in future?