Thanks to their combined expertise, the answer to the mystery of the vanishing sell offers soon becomes clear: High-frequency traders are merely “pinging” the market with bids to tease out genuine buy orders. He teams up with Ronan Ryan, an awkward young Irish immigrant with a knack for high-speed telecommunications technology, who joins RBC as head of high-frequency trading strategies, even though he has no idea what he’s supposed to do. A mild-mannered Canadian Everyman with a capacity for moral judgment all too rare on Wall Street, Katsuyama seemed as befuddled as the rest of us by the explosion of the superfast, computer-driven trading that now accounts for an estimated 50 percent of all transactions in the stock market. In Katsuyama, Lewis has found a good guide into the esoteric and highly technical world of high-frequency trading.

When it comes to narrative skill, a reporter’s curiosity and an uncanny instinct for the pulse of the zeitgeist, Lewis is a triple threat, as he’s demonstrated in best-selling books like “The Big Short” and “Moneyball.” But those formidable talents are only intermittently on display in this ultimately unsatisfying probe of high-frequency traders, who may (or may not) be ripping off investors and destabilizing the global financial system. Katsuyama’s struggle to first understand why he couldn’t execute the trades showing up on his screen, and then to combat the problem by starting his own stock exchange, is the spine of “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,” Michael Lewis’s latest excursion onto the trading floors of Wall Street, a venue he portrayed so memorably in his now-classic “Liar’s Poker.” For Brad Katsuyama, then a young equities trader at Royal Bank of Canada, a life-changing revelation about the stock market began in June 2007 with a mystery: Why, when he tried to buy stocks at the offered prices on his computer screen, did the offers instantly vanish and the prices pop higher?

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis