Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt Read Online Free Page B

milliseconds.” They’d set a goal of coming in at under 840 miles and beaten it; the line was 827 miles long. “It was the biggest what-the-fuck moment the industry had had in some time,” said Spivey.
    Even then, none of the line’s creators knew for sure how the line would be used. The biggest question about the line— Why?— remained imperfectly explored. All its creators knew was that the Wall Street people who wanted it wanted it very badly—and also wanted to find ways for others not to have it. In one of his first meetings with a big Wall Street firm, Spivey had told the firm’s boss the price of his line: $10.6 million plus costs if he paid up front, $20 million or so if he paid in installments. The boss said he’d like to go away and think about it. He returned with a single question: “Can you double the price?”
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    * The principal data center was later moved to Aurora, Illinois, outside Chicago.

CHAPTER TWO
    BRAD’S PROBLEM
    U p till the moment of the collapse of the U.S. financial system, Brad Katsuyama could tell himself that he bore no responsibility for that system. He worked for the Royal Bank of Canada, for a start. RBC might be the ninth biggest bank in the world, but it was on no one’s mental map of Wall Street. It was stable and relatively virtuous, and soon to be known for having resisted the temptation to make bad subprime loans to Americans or peddle them to ignorant investors. But its management didn’t understand just what an afterthought their bank was—on the rare occasions American financiers thought about them at all. Brad’s bosses had sent him from Toronto to New York back in 2002, when he was twenty-four years old, as part of a “big push” to become a player on Wall Street. The sad truth about the big push was that hardly anyone noticed it. As a trader who moved to RBC from Morgan Stanley put it, “When I got there, it was like, ‘Holy shit, welcome to the small time!’ ” Brad himself said, “The people in Canada are always saying, ‘We’re paying too much for people in the United States.’ What they don’t realize is that the reason you have to pay them too much is that no one wants to work for RBC. RBC is a nobody.” It was as if the Canadians had summoned the nerve to audition for a role in the school play, then turned up for it wearing a carrot costume.
    Before they sent him there to be part of the big push, Brad had never laid eyes on Wall Street or New York City. It was his first immersive course in the American way of life, and he was instantly struck by how different it was from the Canadian version. “Everything was to excess,” he said. “I met more offensive people in a year than I had in my entire life. People lived beyond their means, and the way they did it was by going into debt. That’s what shocked me the most. Debt was a foreign concept in Canada. Debt was evil. I’d never been in debt in my life, ever. I got here and a real estate broker said, ‘Based on what you make, you can afford a $2.5 million apartment.’ I was like, What the fuck are you talking about? ” In America, even the homeless were profligate. Back in Toronto, after a big bank dinner, Brad would gather the leftovers into covered tin trays and carry them out to a homeless guy he saw every day on his way to work. The guy was always appreciative. When the bank moved him to New York, he saw more homeless people in a day than he saw back home in a year. When no one was watching, he’d pack up the king’s banquet of untouched leftovers after the New York lunches and walk it down to the people on the streets. “They just looked at me like, ‘What the fuck is this guy doing?’ ” he said. “I stopped doing it because I didn’t feel like anyone gave a shit.”
    In the United States, Brad also noticed, he was expected to accept distinctions between himself and others that he’d simply ignored in Canada. Growing up, he’d been one of the very few Asian kids