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Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History
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63
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
74/100Critics
53/100Scholars
Author:
Liam Vaughan
Publisher:
Doubleday Books
Date:
May 12, 2020
A Bloomberg journalist unfolds the unlikely tale of the disappearance of trillions of dollars in what is now known as the Flash Crash of 2010 and the man who caused it: Navinder Singh Sarao, a working-class man from North London whose trading genius amassed him tens of millions of dollars in profits unbeknownst to even his parents, with whom he lived quietly, working out of his childhood bedroom.
What The Reviewers Say
Financial investigative journalist Liam Vaughan seems to have had the time of his life putting together Flash Crash. But then, the story is so rich with characters and so bizarre in its nature, that as he admits at the end—someone had to write a book on it. It is a case of truth stranger than fiction.
It is an extraordinary and rather pathetic story, most of which plays out on the seedy edges of the financial world. In Flash Crash, Liam Vaughan, a journalist with Bloomberg in London, tells it in vivid detail.
It is a cautionary tale of the fragilities baked into the financial system by layers of complexity and beggar-thy-neighbour profit hunting. It is an engaging history lesson on the evolution of modern trading, the conflicting demands it seeks to serve, and its dislocation from any social purpose. It is an alarming insight into the motivations of prosecutors who are, at times, desperate just to see someone, anyone, pay. And it is a pacy account that swings from humour to horror as it describes a vulnerable man who is out of his depth and failed by the people around him.
