[minimax]

That is large institutional investors who have the intention to remove all the liquidity from a group of exchanges.

One of the central themes of Flash Boys is that this (sweeping multiple market centers) is somehow a hard thing to do. I think to most practitioners it seems like Brad Katsuyama and RBC were just exceptionally bad at it. Yes you have to invest a little bit in technology and network connectivity, but the big sell-side banks have the money to make those sorts of investments. Given that they got paid to competently execute these big trades, it seems almost inexcusable that their excuse was like "We didn't actually understand what was going on."

[kasey_junk]

There are all manner of odd themes in the book. That Brad Katsuyama got paid exorbitant amounts of money to execute trades poorly for large institutions is presented as a virtue, even though his bonus came specifically from those large institutions profits we are so outraged that HFT is trading against.

My favourite one is a section where Lewis starts naming HFT algos and they invariably have names like Dagger, Viper, etc. yet he never seems to point out the HFT Brad Katsuyama created was named Thor.