[idohft]

Maybe he's not a sinister person, but he tells narratives in which his side is unambiguously good. What happened in this book was lazy research and poor journalism. There have been plenty of factual critiques, which should set off flags around a book that purports to be an expose. But he spends more of the book moralizing and appealing to pathos than actually explaining how things are. As an immigrant, I thought it was cheap how often race was brought up in the book (examples: at some point one of the protagonists had a "this is how we do it in America" moment, whereas several HFT programmers were noted to be Russian, and as I recall Lewis saying, Russia helped them because in addition to forcing them to write clever, efficient code, they had learned to take advantage of the corrupt system. I mean, come on. The one guy from the SEC who spoke up? An indian quant. I don't know how Michael Lewis surmised that he was a quant, rather than just someone else working for the SEC. But there you have it).